When Slack bought Astro last year, users, admins and analysts had been wondering what Slack’s interest was in the email provider. The app had been shut down but it seemed a strange move to buy them just to shut them down – though stranger business transactions have occurred.
Would Slack try to make email cool again? Had their strategy turned to buying and killing email providers so they could once and for all say they have killed email? No. Slack CTO, Cal Henderson, said himself that “email will never die” and this latest announcement from Slack backs his theory.
“Email is never going to die completely. Long-term, it is the cockroach of the internet; nobody likes it but it is impossible to eradicate. Email addresses will be around indefinitely. But I think what is going to happen is…more and more use cases, which email isn’t suited to, will move away. If you look at the standard inbox on email today, it is a mix between that internal and external communication, friends and family, spam, marketing messages.
It’s a product that has been in the workforce for 30 years and isn’t scaling to the level of communication people have in the workplace now. As more and more information work becomes teamwork, and collaboration is at the core of that, email is not the right tool for that kind of communication.”
Latest Slack updates
Recognising that most companies are yet to move away from the inbox and the calendar associated with popular email clients, Slack will now integrate with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft OneDrive.
Here’s what you can do via the integration:
- Connect Outlook Calendar: Respond to invites, join calls and sync your status with Slack
- Jump from Slack straight into a call using apps like Microsoft Skype for Business
- Automatic status sync from Outlook lets teammates know when you’re busy; no longer relying on manually updating your Slack status
- Send emails to Slack with a new add-in for your Outlook inbox
- Import and search files from OneDrive
- Preview entire Office files (PowerPoint, Excel and Word) inside Slack
Why is Slack adding these integrations now?
Other than the obvious bolstering of the platform in the lead up to their direct listing, Slack has a few reasons to have added these features.
The first is simply that people use Outlook, OneDrive and Slack together. There is no formal Slack research but the number of users with Microsoft Office 365 and Slack is large.
Slack included this snippet in a blog post suggesting the reason for integration:
“By using apps to connect Outlook and OneDrive with Slack, repetitive tasks such as checking your calendar or sharing email attachments with a group can be done right from your workspace. Each little improvement to these workflows adds up to a whole lot more time for you and your team to do your best work”.
So, we’re talking productivity. Small gains to make the journey shorter.
You may be guilty of thinking this is Slack backtracking on their “email is bad” mentality. Sure, some companies have got rid of email altogether – and I salute their efforts. However, reality is that whilst you could kill email culture with your own organisation, the rest of the world is not on your level and external communications persist in the form of whatever your client, contractor or supplier uses. The most likely and most common platform? Email. The biggest email platform in the world, still? Microsoft Outlook.
