All the new integrations that Salesforce and Slack announced at Dreamforce

At Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce event today, the company announced several new Slack tools and Slack/Salesforce integrations that it said “empower everyone to collaborate in channels that unite internal and external teams and streamline workflows.”

Salesforce purchased Slack in December 2020, cementing its role in the workspace collaboration space that exploded in growth thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, at Dreamforce 2021, we get a true look at the Digital HQ that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff described when the Slack/Salesforce acquisition was finalized. 

Rob Seaman, SVP of product for Slack at Salesforce, told TechRepublic’s Bill Detwiler that he sees a future in which Salesforce and Slack lead the way toward its Digital HQ model of work. “We want to be able to say we fundamentally changed retail, medicine, commerce, business … because we created the Digital HQ,” Seaman said. 

SEE: The future of work: Tools and strategies for the digital workplace (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

A number of Salesforce/Slack integrations were announced, and as is often the case with these types of integrations, most of the ones announced at Dreamforce center on providing information about various Salesforce products inside Slack. 

Here’s a quick rundown of all the new Slack/Salesforce integrations that were announced: 

• Slack-First Commerce gives teams a better understanding of their businesses by alerting Slack users to new trends, alerts and other messages that may not be spotted without someone being logged in to a separate product. 
• Slack-First Experience is designed to manage marketing campaigns, and feed data on newly published content and track metrics.
• Slack-First Platform is a new low-code development platform that lets users create workflows and actions for Salesforce inside of Slack. 
• Trailhead for Slack is a new personalized AI-based learning platform that funnels employees through necessary training and professional development courses inside of Slack.
• MuleSoft for Slack adds the ability to connect any outside app to Slack to help eliminate context switching.
• Quip for Slack gives sales teams the ability to embed Quip documents into Slack.

Along with the integrations, three new standalone Slack features are being added that Salesforce said are designed to “streamline communication with anyone,” both inside and out of an organization.

Slack Clips are short video recordings that users can take of themselves (and include a screen capture if needed) and publish to Slack as a way of collaborating asynchronously. Noah Weiss, SVP of product at Slack for digital HQ products, said that Clips are a lot like an asynchronous version of Huddles, informal quick video meetings that Slack introduced in June 2021. 

SEE: Research: Video conferencing tools and cloud-based solutions dominate digital workspaces; VPN and VDI less popular with SMBs (TechRepublic Premium)

Also announced was Slack Connect, a new way for Slack-using businesses to communicate with external partners or customers without them needing to have a Slack account, and GovSlack, a new version of Slack for government agencies and their contractors that are required to conform to government security regulations. 

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