Connecting your other tools

Your work does not live in Rally. Not yet, anyway. It lives in your inbox, your calendar, a Drive folder somebody named "Final FINAL", a Linear board, a Notion wiki and last Tuesday's meeting notes. Rally can be clever in a Channel all day long, but until it can see those places it is a sharp assistant locked in an empty room.

A connection opens the door. Once you connect a tool, Rally can read what is there and, where the tool allows it, act there for you: draft the email, file the issue, update the page, book the meeting. You ask in plain words in a Channel, the same way you ask for anything else, and Rally reaches for the right tool.

Yours, or everyone's#

Every connection is one of two kinds, and most of this chapter is easier once you know which you are looking at.

A personal connection acts as you. Rally signs in to the tool with your own account and sees what you can see there. Nobody else in your Organization can use it, and sharing a Channel with someone does not lend it to them. Your Gmail is a personal connection, and it should be.

An Organization connection is shared. An owner or administrator sets it up once, and every member can then ask Rally to use it. It acts for the Organization, not for whichever person asked. The team's GitHub repositories or the company Notion are good candidates.

Some tools offer both kinds, some offer only one, and each tool's page tells you which.

Rally does not ask before each action#

As How Rally works explained, Rally never stops to ask you to approve each thing it does. Through a connection, that means if the connection is allowed to send mail and you ask Rally to send an email, the email goes. An agent that asks "are you sure?" forty times an hour is an agent nobody uses.

So the moment of choice is when you connect. Connect the tools you are comfortable letting Rally use, at the level you are comfortable with, and word your requests to match. "Draft a reply" and "send a reply" are different requests, and Rally treats them differently. Several tools also have settings that keep Rally to reading only, and the pages that follow point them out.

How this chapter is laid out#

The first page is a tour of Settings → Connections, the one screen every connection shares: how to add one, how to tell if it is healthy, and how to fix or remove it. Read that one whatever you use.

After that, every connector gets its own page, one for each card in Settings, in this order: Google Mail and Calendar, Google Drive, GitHub, Linear, Notion, Slack, Granola, Fireflies, Ashby, Canva and X, and then two pages for tools with no ready-made connector, an inbound webhook and a custom MCP server. Those last two lean a little technical, and are for the person on your team who enjoys words like "endpoint".

You need the overview and the pages for the tools you use. Skip the rest.

The Slack page here is about connecting Slack. Using Rally inside Slack day to day, with direct messages, mentions and /rally, has its own pages in Rally outside the app.