Image: Connor McKenna
Slack, the messaging service increasingly used by teams within companies to communicate, is getting a major office upgrade with a new platform aimed at linking thousands of employees in large firms.
In the space of a few short years, Slack has grown from a side project within a gaming company to one of the most popular productivity apps, helping company teams to organise projects, or just blow off some steam in chat groups.
The company is now looking to expand further with a new platform called Enterprise Grid, aimed squarely at large corporations with thousands of employees.
In previous versions of Slack, it became common for smaller teams to use the service to talk and organise schedules amongst themselves, all done independently from each other, resulting in problems for large-scale companies.
With Enterprise Grid, Slack will offer larger companies a centralised system to control how it is rolled out in an office, particularly when it comes to controlling company data.
Within this, Enterprise Grid allows the company to create unlimited ‘workspaces’ – or Slack groups – and the administrator can then dole out the necessary permissions and configurations of Slack, depending on what team it is.
Slack will appear largely the same
For the individual users, these workspaces will offer a similar Slack experience, including conversation channels, threaded messaging, voice and video calling, and support for platform integrations.
Search, one-to-one and group direct messaging, and discoverable workspaces all exist in this layer, which means that people can sign into Slack once and have access to all the tools, people and spaces that everyone else in the company would have.
Slack also announced that its bot capabilities are expanding, following a partnership with SAP that will allow users to bring real-time reporting and feedback on performance goals and travel arrangements.
Last month, the company officially opened its new Dublin office, where it has made space for an additional 100 employees.
