Slack launches new media sharing options and authorities tier

Throughout its Dreamforce convention and a month after unveiling integrations with Gross sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Advertising and marketing Cloud, and Tableau, Salesforce right now introduced new options headed to Slack that the corporate says are designed to “construct a digital HQ” at enterprises embracing hybrid work. Amongst them are Slack Clips, which let prospects create and share media inside messages on Slack, in addition to GovSlack, a brand new model of Slack that runs in a government-certified cloud atmosphere.

“A digital-first method fosters larger flexibility, inclusivity and productiveness, encouraging individuals to work when and the place it’s best for them,” reads a Salesforce weblog submit. “It isn’t about translating our current work patterns to a digital house, however fairly essentially reshaping how work will get performed … We’re making it doable to work in a digital HQ the place work is less complicated, extra nice, and extra productive.”

Slack Clips and Join

Slack Clips, which is usually out there as of right now, lets customers embed audio, video, and display screen recordings inside any channel or direct message in Slack. Salesforce says that the playback expertise for Clips was designed to be “inclusive and accessible,” permitting customers to hurry up or decelerate the content material, watch with captions, and open up the transcript to leap to totally different components of the dialog. Recordings made in Slack are archived with searchable transcriptions for posterity.

On the Slack Join aspect, Slack unveiled the power for enterprise prospects — particularly Enterprise Grid subscribers — to message anybody in Slack no matter whether or not they’re already Slack prospects. Slack Join “sponsored connections” permit a consumer to host corporations with out asking them to improve to a paid plan. Because the weblog submit explains: “Now gross sales groups can spin up channels with every of their prospects … [and] customer support groups can present … help to all prospects by standardizing exterior collaboration.”

The expanded Slack Join comes after the corporate rolled again a function in March that allow anybody on this planet with a paid Slack account ship a direct message request to different Slack customers — even when they didn’t have a paid account. Whereas Join direct messages have been opt-in, customers making the invites might embrace a message of as much as 560 characters to recipients, which Slack emailed to the recipients. Customers who obtained abusive and threatening messages couldn’t simply block particular senders as a result of Slack despatched the notifications from a generalized inbox.

“Following the preliminary rollout of Slack Join DMs in March, we … have since added quite a few measures to additional proactively forestall abuse,” a Salesforce spokesperson advised VentureBeat by way of e-mail. “A few of [these] embrace [allowing users to] block different customers from sending them extra Slack Join invites, [limiting] the variety of whole excellent invitations allowed per consumer and per crew, [making visible in invitations] the test mark denoting a verified group (which means Slack has evaluated its authenticity), [allowing verified organizations to] disable Slack Join DMs from unverified organizations, [and auto-blocking] hyperlinks and recordsdata deemed unsafe by way of malware scanning detection.”

Salesforce says that Slack Join, which lets corporations create channels shared between a number of Slack servers, has grown greater than 200% year-over-year. Over 91,000 organizations have opted into the service because it launched in late 2020.

“The measures we’ve carried out are a part of our continued effort to make sure that Slack Join is protected and safe,” the spokesperson continued, “and to offer a superb expertise for individuals who want to speak with individuals exterior their group to get work performed.”

GovSlack

GovSlack, which was additionally introduced right now, is designed for public sector prospects with larger compliance necessities than Enterprise Grid offers. Operating within the cloud, Salesforce says that it complies with “the very best safety and operational necessities of the federal authorities,” together with FedRAMP Excessive and DoD IL4 certifications.

“Though the Covid-19 pandemic spurred many authorities businesses to adapt technologically, the delicate nature of public-sector work requires extremely safe, government-certified options that always restrict selections,” reads the weblog submit.

The launch of GovSlack comes roughly a yr after Salesforce launched Authorities Cloud Plus, a devoted cloud occasion of Salesforce’s Buyer 360 and different platforms remoted for U.S. federal, state, and native authorities prospects. GovSlack would seem like a complementary providing — and part of a bigger transfer on Salesforce’s half to safe an even bigger slice of the general public sector market.