The News: Last week at Dreamforce, Salesforce announced Slack Canvas, a new surface in Slack where teams can curate, organize and share information from multiple sources. The workspace is envisioned to be a digital headquarters where teams can connect conversations, apps, and automations in one place. Read the full announcement on Slack’s blog.
Taking Productivity to New Heights with Slack Canvas
Analyst Take: Dreamforce was full of announcements like this that will take Salesforce’s product suite to new heights, but the most compelling set of announcements, in my opinion, came from Slack and Salesforce. Since the acquisition last year, Salesforce has been hyping up integrations and new products that will maximize productivity in our new world of hybrid work. But until now, that hasn’t really been the case and Slack has taken a backseat to the powerful tools in Microsoft Teams.
But that could all change, thanks in large part to the advent of Huddles and Slack Canvas. With Canvases, employees can compile information and create automations in dashboards that can easily be found later.
Capitalizing on Valuable Employee Time
Employees spend so much of the workday searching for information or performing repetitive tasks. That is valuable time that can be spent on more important tasks. Canvas will allow users to collect and organize information from hundreds of sources, add multimedia, and connect it to systems of record for the ultimate productivity hack. Almost anything can be turned into a canvas, all seamlessly and without leaving Slack.
From the look of the preview, it turns pins and bookmarks into a document editor on steroids. The integration will make it easy for teams to collaborate, work smarter, and ultimately better serve customers.
A Smart Move for Salesforce
We all use various chat channels for work, but outside Microsoft Teams — which owns a large piece of the collaboration market — these tools have been document storage hubs and chat channels only. Slack Canvas will take pins and messages and turn them into a hub for activity that will save time in the long run.
It’s nice to finally see real advancement and growth come to Slack, especially as it looks to continue competing in the ever-growing collaboration marketplace. Coupled with Huddles, and other investments in workflow automation, Slack is looking more prepared to play the role in the Digital HQ that Marc Benioff and Stewart Butterfield have long been touting. Slack Canvas will be available to most users sometime next year and I am looking forward to seeing how this impacts the market.
Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.
Other insights from Futurum Research:
Salesforce Starts Slacking – The Six Five Webcast
Salesforce Flow Automation Suite Expands with Addition of Impressive New Features
Salesforce Rolls Out Its Slack-First Customer 360 Strategy
Image Credit: Salesforce
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
