Slack, a popular team collaboration tool, has announced its strategic partnership with Google. The new development is aimed to offer enterprises and organisations “deep integrations” to enhance the existing cloud-integrated experience.
As a result of the partnership, Slack users will now get an intrinsic Google Drive integration. Google has been building a special bot for Slack that provides access to Google Docs, Sheets and Slides as well as enables comments and requests right from email notifications. Further, IT heads can connect specific spaces for teams to store files on Google Drive, called Team Drives, with Slack channels. These Team Drives will receive automatic backups when the connected Slack channels get new files from users.
In addition to the Google Drive integration, Google developers are closely working with the Slack team to bring Doc previews into the collaboration tool. This means your Slack account will provide you Google Docs access to let you collaboratively create documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
“Google and Slack share the same vision for the future of work: that smart software could bring teams together and make all of their work and conversations seamlessly available in one place. The result is that teams can move faster and more efficiently,” said Nan Boden, head of global technology partners, Google Cloud.
The Google team is in development to enable admins to provision Slack for their entire organisation directly from the G Suite admin console. This will help in reducing user errors and ensure that accounts are provisioned.
Apart from the latest additions for teams, Google is actively working on scaling up Slack. Open source Google Cloud technologies are expected to uplift the tool to take on Microsoft Teams and recently announced Facebook Workspace.
“As users of Google Cloud ourselves, we are thrilled about this partnership and how it will simplify our working lives,” the Slack team wrote in a blog post.
The changes through the Slack-Google partnership will be rolled out to end users in the first-half of 2017.
