In this article, we'll guide you through your very first visit to Tines. Once you've read it, why not join an upcoming Tines 101 webinar, or jump on a 1:1 call with a Tines product expert.
Actions
First, on the left, you have your actions. These are the building blocks of all automation in Tines. Using any combination of these eight action types, you can arrange the tasks or steps for any process you automate. The eight types are: webhook, HTTP request, receive email, send email, AI, trigger, event transform, and send to Story.
And, if you aren’t sure where to start, you can drag on one of these pre-configured actions from our action templates, here:
For example: if you wanted to automatically post a Slack message to your team every time a user makes a request, select Slack from templates list and drag the pre-formatted Action onto your storyboard. With the Slack action selected, search for Send a message in the properties panel on the right. Connect it to the preceding action, configure it, and that's it.
Tip: You can switch between light and dark modes by clicking on your name in the top right of the screen, and selecting your preferred option.
Storyboard
The area in the center is your storyboard. This is where you’ll build your story by dragging on actions and connecting them to other actions.
Simply put, stories are a series of connected actions.
And a story runs when an event passes data between actions. An event is the output of an executed action.
If you're looking for inspiration, consider building one of these stories:
request a list of users in a system
check to see if a URL is malicious
send some kind of notification (like email) when something specific happens
Build panel
Lastly, this right-hand side panel is called the build panel. As you drag an action onto the storyboard, it changes to reflect what configuration options we have available for that action. For every action, we can give it a name and description and then set the rules by which it makes decisions.
Story library
If you are looking for some inspiration to get your first story going, check out the Tines story library right here.
You’ll see how other stories have been built. And, you can easily import them into your tenant to get going... like this:
How to switch between tenants
If you have multiple tenants, you can switch between them using the tenant switcher in your menu in the top left.
Talk to a product expert
What to expect:
Zero-pressure, technical demo of the Tines platform
Walkthrough of a relevant use case
Overview of products and plans
Insight into API and integration capabilities