Slack partners Google for new Google Drive integrations

In a bid to become the de facto communications portal in the enterprise workflow, Slack has entered into a strategic partnership with Google Cloud which will bring a number of new features, including deeper integrations with Google services, to its collaboration platform for teams.

With the new integrations, Slack is bringing the Google Drive permission process into Slack, adding in-channel preview displays, connecting the new Google Team Drives to channels and creating new bots to manage notifications and comments.

Notably, the partnership will be beneficial for both the companies. Slack becomes more useful for G Suite users, and Google gets to make its productivity suite a more attractive offering to those organisations that want to use Slack.

“Google and Slack share the same vision for the future of work: that smart software could bring teams together and make all of their work and conversations seamlessly available in one place,” writes Nan Boden, Head of Global Technology Partners, Google Cloud, in a blog post. “The result is that teams can move faster and more efficiently,” Boden said, adding that Google will also be helping Slack take advantage of Google’s technologies to scale its business.

With permissions, Slack is making it easier to share Drive files with people in a selected channel. So now if any channel members were not granted access to a particular Drive file, Slack will issue a warning and then a prompt to update sharing settings.

The other integration is a Google Drive Bot that will post comments and requests for access into Slack. Recipients can then approve or reject requests from Slack, or settle comments, or they can launch Google Docs to work with the files directly.

Also, the duo is working together to give users access to previews of Google Docs that they share in Slack, so it’s possible for people to see inside a file at a glance without having to open it.

As far as the new Team Drives integration, Slack says it's enabling channels to be synced with Team Drive, which will help admins keep content and conversations in sync. Content uploaded to Slack will be backed up to a Team Drive, and Team Drive updates will be shared in Slack.

Slack is facing increasing competition from the likes of Microsoft and Facebook, who have each launched their own rival products in recent weeks. Microsoft recently announced ‘Teams’, a similar service integrated into Office 365 that’s currently in beta.