Google and Slack are taking their existing partnership a significant step further with a set of planned integrations. Here are the key details from the companies' joint announcement:
Google Drive is building a bot! For teams that use Slack and Google Drive together, including Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, comments and requests for access can sometimes languish in email notifications. Now those notifications will arrive where you’re already working — inside Slack, via the Google Drive bot. The bot will use message buttons to enable you to approve, reject and settle comments from Slack, or you can open up Google Docs to resolve them there.
To keep your content and conversations in sync, admins will be able to connect Team Drives (new shared spaces for teams to store files) with Slack channels. New files uploaded to the connected Slack channel will be automatically backed up to a Team Drive, and Team Drive updates will be shared in Slack. For customers who want advanced cloud storage controls, we’ll also be providing an option to use a Team Drive as the main data store for any files uploaded to Slack.
We’re also working with the Google Docs team to bring Doc previews into Slack, so that Docs shared in Slack will display the content you need at-a-glance.
There are also plans to give Google Docs administrators the ability to provision Slack's messaging and collaboration software for their entire company from the G Suite console:
This feature will work for new and existing Slack teams, and will be especially useful for large orgs, as it ensures accounts are provisioned and removes potential for user error.
The integrations are set for availability in the first half of next year.
Google Docs and Slack already have strongly overlapping customer bases, with the combination favored particularly by techy types, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky.
"Currently Slack does not have Office 365 integration, so this a big first step for enterprise usage," he adds. "They will soon be launching Slack Enterprise edition, so these two things will be helpful in expanding beyond departmental usage."
While there are third-party adapters available for tying Slack to Office 365, the native integrations being promised by Google and Slack go quite a bit further. Moreover, the announcement stated that the integrations are "just the start" and a "first phase."
It's not clear whether Slack and Microsoft may work together on native integration, particularly since Microsoft launched Teams, its direct competitor to Slack, in November. (Go here for Lepofsky's in-depth analysis of Teams.) In the meantime, Slack and Google's move should appeal to companies already using one or both services.
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