Slack Canvas Provides Key Elements to Drive Productivity and Growth for Slack

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.

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Image Credit: Salesforce