Slack launches new Slack Canvas device at Dreamforce 2022
The messaging platform launches new “persistent layer,” permitting customers to seize and retailer data immediately inside Slack channels and particular person workspaces
Slack / Mudassir Ali
Slack has introduced the launch of its new Slack Canvas device, a model new digital floor that enables groups to seize and retailer data immediately inside their workspace.
The announcement was made at this 12 months’s Dreamforce convention in San Francisco, 14 months after Salesforce introduced it had accomplished its $27.7 billion acquisition of the messaging platform.
Research undertaken by the corporate reveals that a number of its clients are break up between a number of totally different modes of labor, with about 34% of information employees spending at the very least a part of their week again within the workplace, in line with Olivia Grace, senior director of product at Slack.
Grace stated that because of this, Slack is more and more listening to clients ask how they will proceed to collaborate successfully whereas navigating all these other ways of working.
“At Slack, our answer is that we want to help customers by providing them with a digital HQ,” Grace stated. “We want to make what was hard in the office better. We want to bring things we love from the office, and we want to create new things which are unique to the digital headquarters.”
Introducing Slack canvas
Functioning as a floor inside a Slack workspace, Canvas types a persistent layer, permitting groups and particular person customers to seize any sort of data, discover solutions, and transfer work ahead from one centralised device.
Slack
The new Slack Canvas characteristic is designed to let groups seize and retailer data immediately inside their workspace.
Canvases may be created by clicking a button on the precise hand panel of a Slack workspace after which used as both a private data retailer or connected to a selected channel, offering customers with a simple strategy to entry pertinent data.
Only one Canvas may be connected to every channel, however it will possibly embrace textual content, pictures and information similar to Excel spreadsheets or PDFs; clips or movies from exterior websites; embedded internet pages and hyperlinks to different Slack channels, particular person Slack profiles; and embedded Slack messages.
Furthermore, customers can pull information and information from instruments similar to Salesforce, Tableau, Google Workspace, JIRA and Figma, and embed the related data right into a Canvas.
Slack Canvas additionally presents workflow automations, which permit individuals to automate business-critical duties proper within a Slack workspace and might now even be dealt with immediately inside a Canvas, whereas any edits made to a channel’s canvas will seem in the identical place as threads, which means customers are constantly notified when feedback or updates are made.
“There’s sometimes a real need for a persistent layer to capture pieces of information that are perpetual,” Grace stated. “In real time Slack conversations, sometimes you’ll write something that’s important, such as your schedule for the week or maybe a bigger document that you’re preparing a pitch, and it just disappears off the top of the messages, leaving you wishing it could be made more permanent. Canvas is offering exactly that.”
Slack is but to announce its timeline for making Slack Canvas usually accessible, or how will probably be priced.
Updates to Huddles; open beta testing for builders
Alongside the launch of Slack canvas, Slack made two different bulletins throughout its Dreamforce keynote.
At the tip of 2021, Slack introduced it was re-engineering its platform to make it simpler for customers to customise their digital HQs to satisfy their organizations’ wants. Today, Slack has introduced that the brand new Slack platform is now accessible to builders in open beta, together with a brand new set of developer instruments, offering customers with quicker and extra versatile methods to construct automations on high of Slack.
Secondly, Slack has introduced the final availability of its new Huddles functionalities. First launched at Slack Frontiers in June 2022, customers will be capable of make video calls to one another immediately inside Slack, have two individuals concurrently screen-sharing, and entry a persistent message thread on the right-hand facet of the huddle display that lets customers share information and hyperlinks throughout a huddle assembly.
For customers on a free Slack plan, Huddles will stay restricted to 2 individuals, whereas paid customers can kind a video or audio Huddle with as much as 50 individuals. Users that aren’t members of a selected channel can nonetheless be invited into that channel’s Huddles however received’t have entry to the brand new persistent message thread or be made a channel member.
Grace stated that analysis carried out by the Future Forum, a consortium launched by Slack in 2020 to drive office change by way of unique analysis, case research, place papers, and occasions, discovered that throughout the globe, extra then 94% of information employees indicated they care extra about schedule flexibility than location flexibility.
“That’s why it’s important that Huddles allows you to have a level of flexibility in your schedule by reducing that time spent talking to someone… and the benefits that people are seeing as far as you know, burnout and stress levels of employees are really powerful,” Grace stated.