The Ultimate Coda Handbook for IT Teams

Explore

The Ultimate Coda Handbook for IT Teams

Accelerate IT transformation

Put your tools to work for you to be a proactive, consultive business partner.

Where are you spending your time?

What percentage of your team’s weekly bandwidth is spent addressing your company’s highest priorities?

From the outside, it’s difficult to tell the difference between a good and great IT team. Each resolves tickets fast, updates user permissions, or sends out prompt and timely reminders to everyone about phishing attacks. But great teams spend the vast majority of their time and effort on their company’s most pressing issues. How does a great team satisfy the essentials while transforming their organization? The answer isn’t headcount or working longer hours, it’s relying on automations that free the team to do their most impactful work.

After consulting on a number of customer implementations, I’ve found that one of the most impactful assets IT can leverage is the ability to quickly turn standard operating procedures into a series of automations. To defend your time, put your tools to work for you by setting up automations that scale. Doing so will give you the space to collaborate more closely with other departments and become a true partner in helping your company improve its operations.

Automate anything in Coda.

My favorite way to use automations is pairing it with Packs. Together, Packs and automations are my secret sauce to scaling my lean IT team across dozens of departments and hundreds of Codans.

Packs are Coda’s versions of integrations, but we called them something different for a reason. Instead of just syncing data into Coda, Packs let you connect the tool’s data to Coda’s building blocks—like text, tables, and formulas.

Let me give you a few examples.

⁠

⁠

Connect Slack to a Coda button to send a message from a doc.

⁠

⁠

Use Coda formulas to get live data from a Github commit.

⁠

⁠

Turn a Coda table into a database of Jira tickets.

⁠

⁠

Hover on Salesforce card to see owner, deal size, open opportunities, and more.

Packs let me centralize my essential data, like information from Okta, into my Coda doc. And automations let me set up triggers based on a number of factors.

Changes to a table. For example, when my team updates a task’s status in our project tracker, the tracker will automatically notify the leader of the project and the project manager.

Time. For example, in my

_suLvG⁠

template, I’ve set up an automation that runs every morning at 12AM. If the condition is valid, the selected employee will be added/removed from the temporary group in Okta.

Form submissions. For example, when someone submits a support ticket through a form, whoever is on-call gets a Slack notification.

Webhooks. For example, like I mentioned earlier we only uses Slack and Coda for internal support tickets. So I’m not forced to constantly check multiple queues, I can use a webhook to check for tickets that are submitted directly to our Coda doc. When the webhook detects a new entry in the queue, it will send me an alert in Slack.

Packs and automations give me the flexibility I need to set up workflows in a way that works for my team and my processes. Which means I can ‘set it and forget it’ to avoid distractions and maintenance later on.

To learn more about Packs and connecting to Coda, see my overview in

Connecting to Coda⁠

And it works for other teams too.

Obviously, IT teams aren’t the only ones who make a greater impact by automating repetitive tasks. Here’s what two Design and Marketing leaders at a couple of our Enterprise customers had to say about using Coda automations.

Coda can do basically anything, and I’ve used it to optimize almost every part of my job. The ability to create databases and display and manipulate the data creates some incredibly powerful capabilities that can’t fully be captured by any of our existing tools.

— Head of Design, Enterprise customer

Before Coda, our case study process was very manual. With Coda, integrations essentially automate steps that were not previously automated. Now the process is more efficient, and everyone can easy get insight into stakeholders, how we work with different teams, etc.

— Director of Global Marketing, Enterprise customer

Need some inspiration?

Personally, these are a few of my favorites. Mostly because they save my team and me hours each week, which is time we can reinvest back into initiatives that push our company forward.

At Coda, we use Zoom for all of our meetings and Okta for SSO. I recreated a number of Coda IT’s template to give you a better idea of how you can use Coda to automate critical, yet repetitive, tasks using Packs and native automations.

I use a few other IT-specific apps, but other than that, I pretty much use Coda for everything else. Instead of buying more tools, I use these docs to automate reminders to my organization and manage access to other apps.

⁠

⁠

Template: Automate user access management with the Okta pack.

Managing user access should not be a labor intensive process. Coda can automate most or all of the steps. You can get started with the Okta pack with the Okta user access management template.

⁠

Try the Okta user management template

⁠

⁠

Template: Automatically share company recordings

Are you a Zoom admin who’s tired of finding and sharing links to the company? I certainly am.

Sharing out your company-wide meetings shouldn’t be a manual process. With Coda and the ZoomAdmin pack you can easily pull this data and share it out without having to lift a finger.

All meetings on the company calendar will be populated in a table that you can Cross-doc wherever you need.

⁠

Try the Zoom: share all recordings on company calendar' template

⁠

⁠

Template: Automate Okta Workflows

Ever wish you could do more in Okta? By connecting Coda and Okta, you can customize workflows and automations that save you time. This template is full of very real use cases we use internally to help save time, standardize our Okta environment and do the things we wish Okta could do out of the box.

⁠

Try the 'Automate Okta Workflows' template

⁠

⁠

Template: Bulk User Reminders

Following up with your coworkers to update their operating system or complete any other required tasks can be a job in and of itself. Using this template, you can easily send reminders to multiple coworkers at once, saving time and effort. Integration with Gmail and Slack make it a convenient way to ensure that everyone in your organization receives your memos.

⁠

Try the 'Automate Okta Workflows' template

⁠

Gallery

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.