Slack officially partners with Google

Slack has officially partnered with Google to integrate Slack’s popular corporate messaging product with Google drive cloud storage services. The decision has been taken viewing that millions of Google Drive files were being shared in Slack per month.

“We’re partnering with Google to bring our shared customers a suite of deep integrations. Turns out many of you love using Slack and Google together — so much so that millions of Google Drive files are shared in Slack each month. Moving forward, you’ll be able to do even more with our products,” a statement released by Slack said.

Slack is a messaging app for teams and an online platform where you can organize your team conversations in open channels. Make a channel for a project, a topic, a team, or anything—everyone has a transparent view of all that’s going on.

Here’s a look at what’s coming.

Get updates from the Drive Bot

Google Drive is building a bot! For teams that use Slack and Google Drive together, including Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, comments and requests for access can sometimes languish in email notifications. Now those notifications will arrive where you are already working — inside Slack, via the Google Drive bot. The bot will use message buttons to enable you to approve, reject and settle comments from Slack, or you can open up Google Docs to resolve them there.

Send a file to your team with assurance they have permission to view it

To make your lives simpler, we’re going to take some of the peskier permission-checking off your plate, and ensure that files shared in Slack are accessible to the right people. This means that when a file is shared in a channel, Slack will check that it is accessible to the group you’ve shared it with. If not, you will be prompted to update your sharing settings.

Connect Slack channels to Team Drives

To keep your content and conversations in sync, admins will be able to connect Team Drives (new shared spaces for teams to store files) with Slack channels. New files uploaded to the connected Slack channel will be automatically backed up to a Team Drive, and Team Drive updates will be shared in Slack. For customers who want advanced cloud storage controls, Slack will provide an option to use a Team Drive as the main data store for any files uploaded to Slack.

Preview Google Docs in Slack

Work with the Google Docs team is underway to bring Doc previews into Slack, so that Docs shared in Slack will display the content you need at-a-glance.

You’ll be able to provision Slack from G Suite

Admins will be able to provision Slack for their entire company from the G Suite admin console. This feature will work for new and existing Slack teams, and will be especially useful for large organisations, as it ensures accounts are provisioned and removes potential for user error.

These integrations will be available for your team to use in the first half of 2017, but they are just the start.