Slack introduces Slack Clips, more Salesforce integrations | ZDNet

Slack on Tuesday announced a new tool, called Slack Clips, that helps colleagues communicate and collaborate asynchronously. 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 Clips are also part of Slack’s aim to put an end to nonstop meetings and videoconferences. Now that “Zoom fatigue” is a widely accepted phenomenon, a number of other communications platforms — like Cisco Webex and Zoom itself — are similarly introducing asynchronous collaboration tools. 

“One thing we saw in the pandemic is that we’re not just tired from having that camera on our face, which we’re not used to, for however many hours a day,” Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said to reporters. “We’re also massively over-scheduled because the easiest means that people fall back to when they need to communicate is to schedule a meeting.”

Based on Slack’s own research, he said, flexibility is second only to compensation when people think about their job satisfaction and employment opportunities. For that reason, he said, “we’ve made a huge effort to try to find ways to take processes that today must be synchronous and make them asynchronous.”

With Slack Clips, a user records and shares a clip to a channel. A recipient can speed up or slow down the content, watch it with live captions or open up a transcript to jump to key parts of the conversation. Responses can be sent via text, audio or video. Users can also send Clips to external partners with Slack Connect. All Slack Clips messages are archived with searchable transcriptions. 

As part of the effort to make Slack central to a “digital headquarters,” Salesforce has been integrating the communications platform with every part of the Customer 360 platform, including sales, service, marketing and analytics applications.

“We want to integrate Slack across every Salesforce cloud and every industry solution,” Butterfield said this week. “So together we’re helping companies build their digital HQ by simplifying communication, breaking down silos, fueling collaboration between departments.”‘

On Tuesday, the company announced new integrations across Salesforce Commerce, Experience, Platform, Trailhead, MuleSoft and Quip. It also announced new integrations in industry cloud and products, including Sustainability, Corporate and Investment Banking, Healthcare and LifeSciences, Philanthropy, Nonprofit and Education. These integrations are branded as “Slack-First” tools. 

They include: 

• Slack-First Sales, creating digital deal rooms where sales reps can access, update, and share Salesforce records directly
• Slack First Service allows service teams to identify and bring the right experts into a case automatically
• Slack-First Marketing, allowing marketing teams and agency partners to collaborate in a shared digital workspace
• Slack-First Commerce to help teams gain a deeper understanding of their business, adapt to changing trends and connect with customers and colleagues  
• Slack-First Platform for building apps with low-code tools that can surface actions directly in Slack 
• Slack-First Trailhead for personalized learning directly in Slack
• Slack-First Quip allows sales teams to embed Quip documents directly into Slack
• Slack-First Sustainability enables companies to collaborate with suppliers on emission reduction targets
• Slack-First Corporate and Investment Banking lets bankers collaborate on details in a single Slack account channel
• Slack-First Healthcare and Life Sciences improves knowledge sharing with dedicated onboarding channels, bots and alerts
• Slack-First Philanthropy helps employees donate, volunteer, and share their activity 
• Slack-First Nonprofit gives nonprofit organizations a platform for communication on client cases
• Slack-First Education connects faculty staff, students, and constituents

Meanwhile, Slack on Tuesday also announced the extension of Slack Connect — a secure environment that lets businesses bring external organizations into a shared space for real-time collaboration. Later this fall, “Enterprise Grid” customers will be able to add sponsored connections, enabling them to host a company within Slack Connect even if they’re not Slack customers. 

Slack also announced another secure environment called GovSlack. It’s a version of Slack that runs in a government-certified cloud environment and complies with the federal government’s highest security and operational requirements, including FedRAMP High and DoD IL4 certifications.