Google and Slack deepen partnership to help teams work better together

Google and Slack share the same vision for the future of work: that smart software can bring teams together and make all of their work and conversations seamlessly available in one place. The result is that teams can move faster and more efficiently. We’ve each been building towards this vision independently, and today we’re announcing a partnership that represents our intent to build towards this vision together.

We also share the same commitment with Slack to offer our customers choice through open platforms. We want our customers to use the tools they need to be successful and for many companies, including AOL, R/GA and Shopify, that's a combination of G Suite and Slack.

Through this partnership we’re increasing our joint product and engineering efforts to strengthen the link between the content in Google Drive and the communication in Slack.

“At R/GA, we’ve found that we create our best work when we can bring teams together in real time from different disciplines, and often different locations. Rolling out G Suite and Slack across the agency, we’ve been able to seamlessly collaborate, connect more easily with our clients, produce better work and reduce the time it takes to get the work done. We depend on smooth integrations to make the most of what both platforms can do for our teams and our clients,” says Nick Coronges, Chief Technology Officer at R/GA.

Google Docs and Drive were among the earliest Slack integrations and remain the most popular. In fact, a Drive file is imported in Slack approximately 60,000 times every weekday; that’s a file shared every 1.4 seconds.

Our partnership will focus on several new, richer features including:

• Instant permissions: We’re smoothing out permissions so that files shared in Slack are immediately available to the right teammates. When a file from Google Drive is shared in a Slack channel, the system will automatically confirm that everyone in the channel has access to that file. You can easily add or remove file collaborators with a single click.
• Previews and notifications: Files shared in Slack will preview the content you need at a glance. And you’ll never miss an update, since Google Drive and Docs notifications will be delivered to you in Slack.
• Slack channels + Team Drives: Team Drives keep teams in sync by creating a central place for shared content, enabled by a new group-level ownership model. Announced in September, Team Drives is currently available to early adopter customers and slated for broader release in 2017. Customers will be able to pair Team Drives and Slack channels to keep content and conversations in sync. New files uploaded to the connected Slack channel will be automatically stored in the Team Drive; relevant Team Drive updates will be shared in Slack, and the set of people with access will stay in sync between the two products.
• Provisioning Slack from G Suite: Companies that run on G Suite already run their organizations via the cloud, and soon with just a couple of clicks in the G Suite Admin console they can provision Slack for teams or the entire company.

Working with Slack, we’ll continue to explore how we can make our products work better together, but also ways Google products and technologies can help Slack scale and serve their customers. We look forward to the many ways we can work with Slack and to the enhanced experience we'll deliver together for our customers.