The Slack collaboration platform has unveiled a new set of features designed to significantly reduce businesses' reliance on email, which the company views as a barrier to both productivity and cybersecurity. . With the launch of Slack Connect, channels can now be shared between 20 separate companies, whereas previously only two companies could share space. The new functionality enhances the ability to communicate with customers, vendors, and vendors, and to do so simultaneously if the situation demands it. The company envisions Slack Connect becoming the new location where contracts are signed, invoices delivered, purchase orders accepted, service tickets entered and more, bringing emails to the edge of communication. corporate. Slack Connect is available with all paid plans, and existing customers will be able to use the new features immediately.
![]()
(Image credit: slack)
SlackConnect
The guiding principles behind the introduction of Slack Connect are the need to improve cross-sector collaboration and to do it securely. According to Larkin Ryder, Slack's chief security officer, moving away from email as the primary means of corporate communication will go a long way toward achieving both of these goals. "Email is an open door to security threats for an organization: €12 billion in losses are caused by corporate email scams and 90% of data breaches come from phishing," she stated. . "If you want a more secure collaboration solution for your organization, the first thing you can do is get your employees off messaging." Slack Connect users will benefit from the same cybersecurity facilities historically offered with Slack, including independent control over security and compliance measures such as message retention policies, data loss prevention, and eDiscovery. The relatively closed nature of Slack channels means that the risk of phishing is also very low, as employees can only receive communications and files from verified channel members. Slack has also partnered with AWS to give businesses tighter control over the data each user has access to through its enterprise key management service, though this feature is only coming to Slack Connect later this summer. . "The introduction of Slack Connect marks a major step forward in our mission to transform corporate communication and make people's work lives simpler, more enjoyable and more productive," said Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack. “When you take communication out of the inbox and into channels, you make it much easier for people to do their jobs. This creates a foundation for communication. With Slack Connect, we bring the same benefits to work that happens in organizations,” he added. Although email has been declared dead multiple times before, Slack thinks it might have driven the last nail in the coffin.