Collaboration provider Slack has announced several new features aimed at helping make its Digital HQ vision a reality.
Thanks to COVID-19, a lot has changed in the past few years. Some organizations have adopted Slack as an integral part of their response to highly distributed working, and Slack has realized that the idea of a physical HQ is “overkill,” Slack’s senior vice president of product said. Ali Rayl iTWire.
As such, the company developed its Digital HQ concept – “where technology brings us together to get the job done” – and also developed new functionality for its eponymous software to support that idea.
According to Rayl, there are three pillars here.
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1. Improve what we have in the office
While Slack channels are at the core of Digital HQ, Slack has added workflows (to help automate processes), video clips (to better support asynchronous communication; available now), and Slack Connect (to save people from traveling to meetings).
2. Bring what we want from the office to Digital HQ
The huddles – or push-to-talk audio – act as a “virtual tap on the shoulder,” Rayl says. One effect of the pandemic is that people’s calendars are full, so they schedule meetings just to talk to coworkers. Huddles (now available to Slack customers) go beyond that behavior, enabling instant conversations that last an average of 10 minutes.
Newly announced features include the ability to turn on video with one click, screen sharing and multi-user drawing, automatic saving of content shared in a huddle to the source channel or direct message, and emoji, reactions and stickers.
“The new huddles features are a significant tool for incident management,” said Xero’s people systems team leader Grant Foster.
“Incidents move very quickly, where people are constantly moving in and out of channels. Conducting huddles in a channel, taking notes on the message thread, and then continuing to work asynchronously on incident in the same huddle thread will help us track progress and next steps while keeping the entire incident team aligned and informed.”
3. Create things that are unique to Digital HQ.
Canvas – based on technology acquired by Slack parent Salesforce through its 2016 acquisition of Quip – provides Digital HQ with documents, spreadsheets and integration with third-party applications. A canvas is more durable than a channel, according to Rayl, adding “anything you can paste into Slack you can post to a canvas.
Canvases are useful for things like onboarding, he said, giving new hires a place to see their teammates, checklists of things to do as part of the process, and more. . This use “meets the people.”
Workflows within canvases provide low-code/no-code business process automation. Content from all Salesforce products can be brought to a canvas and updated there as needed.
In general, canvases can include notes and embedded data from sources including Salesforce Customer 360, Tableau, and Google Workspace.
A canvas can be attached to a channel to make it a continuous layer.
Other uses include executive briefings, incident reports, and company newsletters.
Slack also announced that a new version of the Slack platform is available to developers in an open beta.
The new platform provides more ways to build custom objects, Rayl said. It is very modular, so different pieces of a process can be developed independently and then combined. For example, a holiday request workflow might involve an employee submitting a request on a Workday, a manager approving or denying the request, and then adding the approved vacation to the associated Google Calendars.
Workflows can be shared via Slack, and parts of them can be reused in other workflows.
Slack is working on a mechanism to make parts and workflows easier to discover.
The new platform includes an updated CLI and SDK.
It is possible to embed workflows in a canvas, but that feature is scheduled to be released in 2023.
There will be an additional charge for some of these new features when the new platform goes into general availability.