Slack has announced a series of new integrations today with their service that users will be able to take advantage of, all thanks to the new partnership that they have with Google. Both Google and Slack are big proponents of productivity, and the partnership is one which seeks to nurture that love of productivity. As part of the new partnership, users will see better integration with services like Google Drive, and to help make this happen Google is creating a Drive bot for Slack. The bot will be able to help you reject or approve comments in Slack, but this can also still be done in Google Drive itself if users wish to take care of things there.
While there are a few more things that will be available with the new integrations, one of the more helpful for teams who use both Google’s Cloud services and Slack might be the ability to link up the Slack channels and Team Drives that are used. Team Drives is a relatively new feature that Google has been offering to G Suite for Work and Education customers, and now those shared drives will be able to connect with Slack Channels so users will be able to ensure that everything they need to be synced up between the two locations will be.
To help make things more convenient, Slack will also now check any permissions for files shared within a particular Slack Channel. For example, if a user that is in the Slack Channel where a Drive file or folder is shared, but they don’t have permissions to view that file or folder in Drive, then the user who shared it in Slack will be prompted to update the permissions so everyone in the Slack Channel has access. If everyone has permissions, of course, then the share will go through nice and smoothly. This takes a nice little bit of hassle out of sharing stuff between team members, especially if you tend to switch between the different services you use to stay productive and keep the work flow, well, flowing. Additionally Slack will begin to start offering previews of Docs files, so when a Google Doc is shared you’ll get a quick view of what the content in the Doc is. While you’ll still need to open up Google Docs to get the full picture, seeing things at a glance will surely come in handy when you might only have a quick few seconds to take a look at something. Most of these changes are user-facing, but Slack and Google are working on something for the admins, too, as one more integration will allow administrators to use G Suite’s admin console to configure provisions for Slack. Slack mentions that all of these integrations are the beginning of more from the partnership, and anyone looking forward to using them will be able to do so in the first half of next year. This partnership is also an interesting one as Google introduced a few Slack integrations for G Suite back in October.