Slack, is one of the most popular messaging platforms for companies. They’ve taken something that is now called “ancient”, that being email, and made it much better for teams to stay in contact with each other. They’ve been adding all kinds of features in the past few months, and already have a number of integrations available. One of our favorites here at Android Headlines is the Gyphy integration, however the boss doesn’t like it. Now they have added Google Calendar reminders. It’s a great integration for shared calendars. You can set up Slack and Google Calendar to send reminders to a specific channel in Slack 15 minutes before the event. As you can imagine, that’s going to be very helpful for many teams.
On Slack’s announcement page of this new integration, they give you tips on how to use the integration with Google Calendar as well as tips on how to set up the reminders to come through automatically. It’s quite simple to set up, and you can also choose from all the calendars that you have listed on your account. So you can add a birthdays & holidays calendar to Slack as well as a calendar that’s shared among different departments in your company.
Many of us probably despise calendars, but they keep us on task and keep us from missing out on meetings and such that we must be a part of. At least with this new integration from Slack, you can see what’s coming up straight in Slack, and it’ll notify everyone that there is a meeting in the next 15 minutes – or however long you decide to set the reminder for. This will work for both Gmail and Google Apps accounts, which is nice to have. Google Apps accounts would be necessary, seeing as many businesses use Google Apps for their email addresses on their own domain.
Slack is a free service, however there are paid upgrades. For most companies, you could probably stick with the free version for a while, as you get unlimited users and messages, but only 5 integrations. Otherwise, Slack starts out at $6.67 per month per user. And in a big company that can add up quickly.