“We’ve seen people do interesting things in customer support, where they have built integrations and created shared channels to answer customer support questions and communicate with partners,” Douglas said, adding that there are 20,000 organisations already using shared channels. “Typing ‘expense’, for example, will trigger an action that will allow you to approve an expense,” said Douglas.īesides facilitating employee communications and driving office productivity, Slack is also being used by enterprises to communicate with external parties such as partners and customers. In addition, the company talked up a concept called Actions From Anywhere at its recent developer conference that will enable users to initiate tasks using keywords. To help users discover applications that have integrations with Slack, Douglas said an app launcher is being developed to surface apps that a user has installed. “The integrations that we encourage our partners to build are around enabling people to coordinate work like shipping something or approving an expense report that doesn’t require the strength of third-party applications,” said Douglas. “Where Slack really shines is when you need to talk to people about what’s going on,” she said.Ĭiting an example of a worker who has created a Salesforce dashboard, Douglas said while the task would have been performed in Salesforce itself, co-workers can reference the dashboard in their Slack discussions. Submitting an expense report, however, will require the use of Concur’s mobile app or website.īear Douglas, Slack’s director of developer relations, told Computer Weekly that this is deliberate as the company believes there are tasks that are better done in third-party applications.
#SLACKSLACK FOR COMPUTER SOFTWARE#
Through application programming interfaces (APIs) and integration with enterprise applications such as SAP Concur, Slack provides a single workspace for workers to access key features of software they rely on every day.įor one thing, employees using the SAP Concur expense management tool can log their expenses through Slack. But Slack sees itself as more than a messaging platform.