Salesforce today announced new features headed to Slack that the company says are designed to “build a digital HQ” at enterprises embracing hybrid work.
Slack on Tuesday announced a new tool, called Slack Clips, that helps colleagues communicate and collaborate asynchronously, reports The Verge. Users can easily create and share audio, video or screen recordings within any channel or DM in Slack. The recipients can view and respond to the messages on their own time.
Slack Clips, unveiled during Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, is part of Slack’s ongoing effort to build out tools to equip organizations’ “digital headquarters.” As part of that effort, the Salesforce-owned platform is also now more fully integrated across Salesforce tools.
“I’ve started two companies in my life, and I always started by picking out my office space,” Salesforce President and COO Bret Taylor told reporters this week. “In this new world, you don’t start with your physical HQ. You start with the digital infrastructure you need to connect your employees, your partners and your customers because that’s become more important than our physical HQ.”
Salesforce pitched the announcements as part of an effort to make Slack a central hub for corporate customers to chat about business deals, discuss marketing data stored in Salesforce, and more quickly meet to talk about customer complaints.
The announcements involve what’s known as “integrations” — the rewiring of corporate apps so that they better work with each other and thereby free customers from having to manually connect them. In one example, businesses that use Salesforce’s Quip workplace software will be able to more easily access Slack to discuss projects.
Clips is among several new features Slack has debuted to expand beyond its core messaging service. Earlier this summer it added Huddles, which lets users make audio calls to colleagues in a way that’s supposed to replicate spontaneous hallway conversations.
