Migrating from Halp: a practical plan for orphaned Slack ticketing teams

Halp got one big thing right: tickets should start where the conversation is already happening. Teams that adopted it never had to be convinced to file tickets, because filing was an emoji away. Now that Halp has been discontinued, those teams face a specific risk — not losing data, but losing the habit. Move to a tool that pulls people out of Slack and ticket volume does not drop; it goes dark, back into DMs.

So the selection bar for a replacement is Slack-native intake as a first-class feature, not an integration checkbox. This guide covers the move itself: what to export, how the concepts map, and a cutover that does not interrupt the queue.

Export while you still can

Before anything else, get your data out — all of it, including what you think you will not need. Ticket history has a way of becoming important precisely once it is unreachable: it is the training ground for AI triage in the new tool, the evidence base for postmortems, and the answer to "have we seen this before."

• •Tickets with status, assignee, timestamps, and priority — the core record.
• •Conversation threads attached to each ticket, not just the ticket fields; the resolution is usually in the thread.
• •Forms and their fields — they encode what information each request type actually needs.
• •Recipe and automation definitions — not to rebuild them, but as a record of what your team automated and why.
• •The queue-to-team mapping — which channels fed which queues, who owned what.

What maps to what

The concepts transfer cleanly, which makes this an easy migration as these things go. Slack channel intake maps directly: requests filed by emoji or message become tickets in the connected channel. Halp queues map to teams or workspaces. Forms map to intake forms. Assignments, statuses, and priorities are universal.

The one deliberate non-mapping: recipes. Halp automation was keyword-triggered — if the subject contains "password," route to IT. Rebuilding those rules one-for-one imports 2019 into your new tool. Grounded AI triage replaces the entire rule layer: classification, routing, and priority come from reading the ticket against history and code, not from string matching. Migrate the intent (what you wanted automated), not the mechanism.

The two-week parallel run

Do not attempt a hard cutover on a Friday. Run both systems for two weeks: all new tickets go to the new tool from day one, while open Halp tickets drain to closure where they are. Nobody re-keys open tickets, nothing gets lost mid-flight, and the team learns the new tool on real work at natural volume.

Announce the switch in the channels where people file: one pinned message — "new requests here, same as before; your open tickets finish where they started." If intake stays in Slack, most requesters never notice the tool changed, which is the correct outcome. Import the historical archive in the background during this window, and verify counts against the export before declaring it done.

Where FlowTux fits

FlowTux is a natural landing spot for Halp teams because the intake model is the same — file from Slack, resolve in Slack — with the automation layer Halp never had: triage grounded in your codebase and history, semantic deduplication, and allow-listed auto-resolution with a visible audit trail. Flat pricing also ends the per-agent math. Start with the historical import, run triage in suggest mode through the parallel weeks, and the new tool arrives already knowing your queue.