Dreamforce 2021: Salesforce strengthens Slack integration

Only two months after completing the acquisition of Slack, Salesforce announced a series of integrations at its Dreamforce customer conference this week that will make the team chat service the core of Salesforce.com. “We want to integrate Slack into all Salesforce clouds and all industry solutions,” Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield said at a press conference the day before the event. The company also formulated a roadmap to expand its Hyperforce public cloud to other countries and announced the upcoming launch of Slack’s video messaging feature, called Clips, which enables users across the enterprise to record and send video and audio to colleagues Message-Or share it to Slack users of other companies via Slack Connect.

There was a lot of discussion about Oracle’s acquisition of TikTok a year ago. This project was later shelved indefinitely, and Slack seemed to think it had commercial value. Employees share their opinions on various topics through short videos.

Clips and Connect, already seen in Salesforce

The editing function will automatically transcribe and subtitle audio, so you can search for content from Slack. Clips can be played back at variable speeds, and thanks to the search function, you can go directly to key scenes. According to Butterfield, these clips may be a way to avoid the rigidity of Monday morning meetings, for example, by giving employees the option to save their status updates in advance or watch contributions later. “The flexibility that this’asynchronous’ messaging brings is one of its main advantages,” he added. The company said that Clips will be launched to early customers during Dreamforce and will be available to all paying customers before the end of the year.

Slack Connect, which allows companies to share messaging channels with teams from other companies, is emerging. According to the company, one year after its launch, 91,000 of Slack’s 169,000 paying customers use Connect, and at the current growth rate, it may surpass the paying customer base in about a year. This has prompted Slack to turn its customers into disseminators of the service, allowing the highest-priced Enterprise Grid to connect with partners who are not yet Slack customers without having to pay extra for themselves or their partners.

Thanks to Slack Connect, the company hopes to develop and ensure external collaboration. (Credit: Slack)

Slack didn’t invent anything here, because Salesforce already had a similar feature called Chatter-allowing you to keep in touch with the entire team-quickly transformed into an app, but it was far from a huge success.

Deeper Slack integration

Salesforce Chief Operating Officer Bret Taylor said the company is also establishing more connections between Slack itself and other industry products — 16 in total — making Slack the default for Salesforce users in training, sales execution, coding, and banking. Collaboration interface, even healthcare. Trailhead for Slack will use Salesforce’s AI learning tools to provide training materials in Slack, and First Experience will provide content to employees in Slack directly from the company’s intranet. The First platform will support low-code creation of applications and workflows in Slack.

Slack-First Trailhead enables personalized learning in the Slack workflow. (Image source: Dreamforce)

Slack will also integrate with two other Salesforce acquisitions: MuleSoft (its data integration platform) and Quip, a cloud-based collaborative office productivity solution that competes with Microsoft Office365 or Google Workspace and is now closely related to the Salesforce data platform. This will make it easier to use Mulesoft to connect business workflows to Slack and to integrate Quip documents directly into Slack.

These integrations, and the future AI-driven automation tools for Mulesoft and Salesforce Flow announced by the company last week, aim to extend the functionality of the Salesforce workflow platform beyond its core CRM, and at this time SAP (and its enterprise technology platform) And ServiceNow (and its Now platform) are pushing (in a very different direction) as the foundation for building modern business processes.

Costly integration

Salesforce probably also wants to link the prices of Slack and its CRM platform. Adam Mansfield, project manager at UpperEdge, a consulting firm that advises the company on IT procurement, advises CIOs to be vigilant during annual contract negotiations. “Salesforce should introduce the’Slack-First’ solution before the contract renewal date,” he said. “They will work hard to make the products they currently use more useful. I recommend pushing Salesforce to focus on the real added value your organization will realize from their First solutions.”

The project manager also suggested asking Salesforce what would happen if the promised value was not realized. “Will they believe and let us go back to the previous Sales Cloud solution and abandon Slack without increasing the price?”. Another thing that CIOs should be wary of when using software-as-a-service products such as Salesforce It is the location where the data is hosted. Increasingly strict national and state data protection laws limit the locations where customer data can be processed, which means that SaaS applications and cloud platforms must provide strong controls to manage the location of the data.

Hyperforce expands to other countries

Salesforce meets these data residency requirements by making some improvements to its public cloud platform Hyperforce on which Customer360 services are deployed. Hyperforce is currently available in the United States, India, Australia, Canada and Japan, and will expand to Singapore, Brazil, Germany and France before the end of the year. The United Kingdom, South Korea, Italy, Sweden, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates and Switzerland will follow suit next year, said Mr. Taylor of Salesforce.

For EU operating regions (initially Germany and France), Salesforce is committed to hosting all operations in the EU, including support and technical operations, to help companies meet customer needs and EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements. “For multinational companies, meeting the local requirements of customers is becoming more and more complex; with Customer360, you can have a single customer experience and meet all these requirements locally,” Bret Taylor concluded.