What’s Slack Up To? No Code Builder, Traditional Email Messaging and More

The workspace today is characterized with utter complexity, more sophistication and super-demanding. The inboxes brimming with multiple messages and employees sorting to fish out the important ones aswell as the increasing amount of new software tools to learn can be outrightly intimidating.

Attention is now divided and the information in multiple channels aren’t helping at all. A combination of all these problems, difficulties and distractions makes it difficult to stay focused and productive.

Slack has done due diligence to acknowledge these issues by introducing a whole new set of features purposely put together to eliminate these barriers, making it easier for organizations to adjust and stay aligned while responding to their evolving workplace aswell as new business goals.

Slack shared channel communications between companies to ensure that its users will now be able to communicate with colleagues who use only email, with the launch of the new email bridge feature debuting on the company’s collaboration software.

That’s only one of the several updates unveiled by the San Francisco based company at the Slack 2019 frontiers conference few months ago.

Others include a simple workflow automation tool aswell as the extension of shared channels beta preview to users of its product.

What’s in store?

The chief product officer at Slack was quoted saying “With this open beta of Shared Channels to our largest customers this summer, you will no longer have to email contractors or phone vendors; you can just start a shared channel inside or outside your organization”.

This announcement was followed promptly by revealing that the non-enterprise beta version of Shared Channels was already being used by over 13000 clients.

Slack is also moving to provide better integration with legacy productivity tools. The announcement was made in April about Slack’s ability to preview Microsoft office files from within and to share those files without having to exit before launching the applications.

Here are the features to watch out from Slack’s latest announcement

A superb workflow builder

The new feature called the workflow builder is a direct attempt by Slack to automate routine tasks.

Imagine how easy and interactive your daily routines would be when you can create customized and secure automation without any knowledge of a single code.

Using a no-code approach, the workflow builder makes it easy for every user to build their own simple workflow apps. It can be used to create automated processes from within Slack to simplify tasks such as completing surveys or filling out forms aswell as automatically sending welcome messages to new recruits.

Bran Elliot, Vice president and General Manager of Slack has revealed that this new innovation was born out of the requests received from the platform’s users — an easy-to-use workflows.

Essentially, the no-code workflow builder is designed to streamline manual processes for you, your team and entire organization, saving you time and money in the process.

Shared Channels Beta

The Shared Channels is expanding to Enterprise Grid which implies that Slack users would be able to collaborate smoothly with vendors, customers, partners aswell as agencies that can help promote your business — all within your Slack workspace.

The Beta version of the app is already gaining popularity with over 13000 customers already signed up to test the service.

However, it has taken much longer to arrive for large customers using the Enterprise Grid due to its bigger complexity according to Slack. Their comment reads,

“There is a certain complexity when there are many workspaces for administering and determining how you manage those shared channels,” said Pflaum. “The largest customers are the ones who could potentially have their shared channels fan out to the largest number of end points and we wanted to be careful and deliberate in the way we did that [to make sure it is a] well-tested experience for them.”

Although it’s been admitted that bringing the shared communications to Enterprise Grid is a challenge based on the size of deployment and compliance regulations, Slack has assured the completion of the process in the summer.

Scheduling meetings made easier

In a further attempt to keep teams coordinated and functional, Slack is also working on a new calendaring capability with the sole purpose of eliminating the burden of setting up meetings.

Assuming you have scheduled a meeting with your new recruits on your Slack Workspace and you haven’t joined yet, each person will receive messages and mentions in their emails.

Also, a user might suggest coming together to take a unitary decision on a pending issue. With the aid of the natural language processing, the smart meetings suggesting feature of Slack recognizes that a meeting suggestion has been made. It checks the calendar of all participants and selects the best date and time the meeting can hold without leaving slack.

The system also has the ability to alert you in form of a suggestion, for instance, tomorrow at 4pm? Once you click ok, the meeting is confirmed in the calendar of the participants — whether Outlook or Google.

Slack considers the new innovation as an intelligent approach to recognizing the users’ needs and event.

Expanded Search

A tremendous new update to search in Slack makes it easier for you to view unread direct messages and channels aswell as documents and people.

As work gets more complex, the more people and messages that join the mix further complicates things. The search in Slack has been upgraded to make navigation between channels, documents and direct messages much easier.

Research Results

A popular Slack Competitor with its own platform — Symphony, recently revealed results of its confidential survey that portrays the development of new collaboration tools and platforms entering workplaces.

The results reveals some of the same trends aired at the Slack frontiers. It was discovered that 80% of employees prefer using a messaging or collaboration tool as opposed to email and phone because they make communication easier.

The survey also revealed that an easy way of scheduling meetings (already introduced by Slack) is a feature that employees want to see on their chat platform.

Over 10 million users depend on Slack for file management, communication across teams aswell as connecting their daily used software.

The array of new features are vital enhancements that brings the best out of every member of the team.

Originally published at nextplane.net on September 23, 2019.