Audit a team chat tool by mapping each person's job to the channels, messages, files, applications, exports, and administrative actions they actually need. Review named users, guests, bots, service accounts, and external organizations, then test representative accounts with invented content. Do not treat a list of role names as proof of effective access.
Inventory identities, spaces, and powers
Export or record current owners, administrators, members, guests, system roles, inactive users, bots, app identities, and approved external collaborators. Inventory public, private, restricted, shared, and archived channels plus sensitive spaces for personnel, legal, security, finance, or customer cases. Include files, canvases, recordings, workflows, retention controls, exports, billing, and ownership transfer.
For every role, separate view, search, post, invite, share, export, delete, install, configure, manage members, manage roles, and manage billing. Slack's permissions-by-role reference shows that owner, administrator, member, guest, and system-role capabilities can differ across member management, applications, exports, audit logs, billing, deletion, and ownership. Record the tenant's actual plan and settings because availability varies.
Map access to current duties
Ask managers and data owners to state the channels and actions required for each job, then compare that requirement with assigned roles, groups, channel membership, and direct grants. NIST's least-privilege definition limits access to the minimum necessary for assigned tasks. Apply that principle separately to conversation visibility and administrative control.
Flag former workers, dormant accounts, generic shared logins, guests without end dates, emergency administrators used for daily work, and people who can approve their own access. Check whether external shared-channel membership still matches a current business relationship. Do not remove access during evidence gathering unless the change is authorized and the owner has a recovery plan.
Review apps, bots, and tokens
List each app, owner, business purpose, installer, requested scopes, channels, last use, data destination, support contact, and revocation route. Slack's app guidance explains that apps use permission scopes to describe accessible data and actions and that owners can restrict installation. Read the scope details and privacy information; a trusted app name does not justify broad channel access.
Identify incoming webhooks, workflow connections, OAuth grants, service accounts, and personal tokens. Record credential identifiers and owners without copying secret values into the ledger. Confirm that integrations cannot reach private or restricted spaces unless their approved purpose requires it.
Test effective permissions
Create harmless test channels and invented files representing ordinary, private, externally shared, and restricted work. With representative member, guest, admin, and app accounts, attempt discovery, viewing, posting, inviting, file access, export, app installation, and role changes. Confirm both allowed and denied cases. Retest on mobile and web if those clients expose materially different controls.
Use history to explain mismatches. Slack's audit-log documentation describes Enterprise audit-log access for eligible owners and audit-log administrators. Its access-log guidance describes sign-in time, IP, and device evidence on paid plans for authorized administrators and individual members. Note plan or retention gaps rather than interpreting missing logs as proof that nothing happened.
Remediate and recertify
For each mismatch, record identity, current privilege, required privilege, evidence, risk, approver, change ticket, due date, and retest. Prioritize orphaned ownership, former-worker access, unrestricted guests, broad exports, role-management power, and apps with unnecessary scopes. Keep emergency access named, protected, and reviewed rather than hidden in a shared administrator account.
The audit is complete when material identities and apps have owners, sensitive channels have accountable data owners, representative allow-and-deny tests match the role matrix, and approved changes have been retested. Repeat the audit after reorganizations, external-collaboration changes, new apps, plan changes, incidents, or ownership changes, and maintain a scheduled recertification even when no complaint has been reported.
Sources
- Permissions by role in Slack — Slack Help Center
- Least privilege — National Institute of Standards and Technology
- Guide to apps in Slack — Slack Help Center
- Audit logs in Slack — Slack Help Center
- View access logs for your workspace — Slack Help Center