Convo vs Slack

2022. Slack adds persistent information layer to channels called Canvas



Slack has succeeded in large part in the enterprise by allowing people to communicate in a number of ways while integrating with many common enterprise applications. But what Slack has lacked until now was a way to share information about a project in a persistent way. If you wanted to find the content related to a project, you might start a channel to narrow it down, and share some documents, links and other information, but to find them again requires searching or a lot of scrolling. Slack recognized this limitation and decided to combine Quip’s collaborative tooling with Slack’s communication capabilities in a new tool Slack is calling Canvas. It sits alongside a channel’s conversation stream and gives people access to information such as data and charts, text, tasks, internal and external links, training videos and so forth.


2022. Slack gains new automation features, including conditional logic for workflows



Slack has announced the launch of new automation features designed to make workflows more shareable and discoverable. An expansion of the Workflow Builder tool Slack launched in 2019, the new capabilities allow users to send workflows to other Slack users and leverage “if-then” statements to create more sophisticated flows. Slack’s increased investment in automation comes as no-code development tools, which let users build apps and pipelines without having to learn programming, grow in popularity. Nearly 60% of all custom apps — including automations — are now built outside the IT department, according to a survey by 451 Research and FileMaker. Of those, 30% are built by employees with either limited or no technical development skills, the survey found.


2022. Slack is increasing prices and changing the way its free plan works



Slack, the chat platform that serves as an online watercooler for oh-so-many teams, is bumping up its monthly price and changing the way its free plan works. If you pay for the “Pro” plan by the month, the price will increase from $8 per user per month to $8.75 per user per month. If you pay for the “Pro” plan by the year, the price will increase from $6.67 per user per month to $7.25 per user per month. If you’re on the free plan, they’re changing the way/duration messages are saved. Previously, free Slacks would show the last 10,000 messages and 5 GB worth of uploads. Moving forward it’ll be based on time rather than amount, with Slack showing the last 90 days of messages/uploads regardless of how much or how little is sent.


2021. Salesforce announces first integrations with Slack



When Salesforce acquired Slack at the end of last year for almost $28 billion, you had to figure they had some big plans for the company. Today the CRM giant announced some initial integrations that should prove useful for Salesforce customers. For starters, the Sales Cloud gets dedicated deal rooms, where all of the parties involved in a complex sale, whether internal departments like finance and product people or external partners, can come together in Slack throughout the sales cycle and stay on top of the ebb and flow of all the sales activity. The hope is that by taking advantage of Slack’s ability to integrate external enterprise apps inside the application, working together they can find ways to speed up and automate various Salesforce tasks, making it faster and easier to use without switching context to make it happen.


2021. Slack now lets you DM employees in other companies



Slack is starting to roll out a new feature that lets anyone using the service DM each other. Slack Connect DMs will let Slack users privately message employees outside of their company. It’s designed for companies working with partners or clients, but you could even use it to message friends at other companies. This new DM feature builds on Slack’s work with Connect, which started appearing last year. Slack Connect is primarily designed to let businesses collaborate together through shared channels, and cross-organizational DMs is the next big part of Connect. DMs work by sending a special link to start a conversation and may require Slack admin approval depending on how your organization has set up Slack.


2020. Salesforce buys Slack for $27.7B



Salesforce, the CRM giant, is acquiring Slack in a $27.7 billion megadeal. The new deal also puts Salesforce more on par — and in competition — with its arch rival and sometime friend Microsoft, whose Teams product has been directly challenging Slack in the market. Microsoft, which passed on buying Slack in the past for a fraction of what Salesforce is paying today, has made Teams a key priority in recent quarters, loathe to cede any portion of the enterprise software market to another company. What really has set Slack apart from the pack, at least initially, was its ability to integrate with other enterprise software. When you combined that with bots, those intelligent digital helpers, the company could potentially provide Salesforce customers with a central place to work without changing focus because everything they need to do can be done in Slack.


2020. Slack introduces simplified interface as usage moves deeper into companies



Slack introduced the biggest yet update aimed at easing the user experience, making it more of an accessible enterprise communications hub. The company has been trying to address the needs of the changing audience over the years by adding many new features, but admits that has resulted in some interface clutter. Today’s redesign is meant to address that. Among the new features, besides the overall cleaner look, many people will welcome the new ability to nest channels to organize them better in the Channel sidebar. As your channels proliferate, it becomes harder to navigate them all. Starting today, users can organize their channels into logical groupings with labels.


2019. Slack adds workflow automation feature


Slack released Workflow Builder - visual tool that allows any Slack user to automate routine functions by creating custom workflows. In just a few minutes, you can have a seamless way to standardize how you collect requests from your team, report any outage in real time, get new team members up to speed with welcome messages… and loads of additional applications. Before you jump in to build workflows from scratch for your team, the easiest way to get started is to download and import one of our pre-built workflow templates: welcome teammates to channels with automatic onboarding messages, request information with custom forms, collect incident reports in real time.


2019. Slack speeded up its group chat for Windows and Web


Slack is launching a major update to its web and desktop today that doesn’t introduce any new features or a new user interface. Instead, it’s almost a complete rebuild of the underlying technology.Slack promises that this new version will use up to 50 percent less memory than before and that Slack will load 33 percent faster. Joining an incoming call will also be ten times faster now. A lot of these changes will be especially apparent to users who are part of multiple workspaces. That’s because the developers designed the new architecture with the assumption that many users are now part of multiple workspaces. Those used to take up a lot of memory and CPU cycles when you switched between them, as each workspace used to get its own Electron process in the old app.


2019. Slack integrates with email



Slack's latest feature allows users to message coworkers via email. The feature, which will be rolling out over the next couple months, is meant to give people who don't use Slack a way to keep up with conversations their coworkers are having inside the messaging app. When they’re mentioned by username in channels or sent a direct message, Slack will route those messages into their email inbox so they don’t miss out on important information while they’re getting themselves set up. Initially, the Slack to email messages will only be one-way, meaning the recipient can view the conversation from their inbox but won't be able to respond directly. But Slack says it will eventually allow people to messages via email as well.