- Slack has over 15 hundred
apps in our directory. From industry giants
like AtLast, CN, Google, SAP, and Work Day. To smaller tools from starting companies like Donut, Guru, Poly, and Troops. But all of these tools often sit in different silent repositories. Your customer service team
might be sitting inside of zendesk, your sales team in Salesforce and your engineering team inside of JIRA. The power of Slack is that we
bring all of those together making it easier for
people to share information across those siloed apps and
take action on notifications. That's why 94% of paid
Slack customers use apps and integrations every week. Today I'm gonna share some
of the dramatic improvements that we've been making in
one particular class of apps, productivity tools. Productivity tools are the essential tools that your team uses every day. Email, calendar, calls, and files. Most companies use a set
of tools from a variety of different vendors. You might be a Google Suite Shop but also using Dropbox and Zoom, or maybe you're a Microsoft Outlook Shop but you also use Box and WebEx. The benefit of Slack is that
we bring all of them together. We've had apps for many
of these for a while but we're super proud of the
fact that just two weeks ago, we launched an entire suite of apps for the Office 365 Suite. So, now I'm proud to say
that whatever tools Suite you're using, it will
integrate with Slack. (audience cheering and applauding) Each of these tools, independently, house important context and information but hunting and picking
across web browsers to find that email from a customer, or that file in Dropbox, or the calendar event, or the
call-in ID, is challenging. It's time-consuming and it's frustrating. Slack takes all this important information and brings it together in Slack channels making it much easier to
find, share, and discuss the information you need access to but it's not just to bringing
information into Slack. It's about the fact that the
information flows both ways, into Slack and back into
the tools you use everyday. No more cutting and pasting information across web browser tabs. We make it simple for you
to receive the information that you need, share it with your team, and act on it no matter where you are. We've made a lot of great
strides this year in the roadmap. We want to show you what we've been doing and give you a sneak peek
at what's coming next. Let's start with email. We want Slack and email
to work hand-in-hand. We always encourage companies to deploy Slack wall-to-wall
across their organizations because that's when you get the transformative power of Slack. But we know this doesn't happen overnight. It can be really painful
when part of your company is on slack and part isn't, figuring out how to message
somebody and where they are, that's where we're developing a bridge. A bridge that brings
email and slack together. We want to make it easier for
you to bring emails into Slack that you need. A proposal from a vendor,
a customer complaint, but we also want to reduce
the stress of messaging people at your company who aren't in Slack yet by sharing messages from them
right in their email inbox and a little bit more. Let's show you what we've been building. Please join me in welcoming
Lydia Han, a Product Manager on the team, out to the
stage to do a little demo. (audience cheering and applauding) - Thanks Brian. Hi everyone! I'm Lydia Han and I'm a
Product Manager at Slack, working on our platform team. Today, I'll be demoing some
of our recent announcements, as well as, share some
exciting new launches on how we can integrate
email better with Slack. To do this, I'll be playing
the role of a Sales Manager at a company called ACME Corp. So first, let's talk about
our recently launched Gmail and Outlook add-ons. These email add-ons will allow you to bring important information
from email into Slack. So, let's switch over to my desktop and show you what that looks like. I have my Office 365
Outlook mail client open and here I have a new email from Mark, a customer I've been chatting with. So Mark and I have been
going back and forth a couple of times and it's about time that I loop in my entire sales team to take this relationship
to the next level. To do this though, I would
either have to forward this email along, start
an unyielding number of email threads, or I would
have to take a screenshot and then share it into Slack where my sales leads teams are sitting. We recognize this happens
to our customers a lot. They have an external
partner that they're having a conversation with in
email but their entire team is sitting in Slack. So, let me show you how to
bring this email into Slack in a simple way. Here in Outlook I have the
Slack for Outlook add-in already installed, so I'm
gonna go ahead and click on that Slack icon. All I have to do is select the channel that I want to send this information to, in this case, the sales lead channel, add a note, who can pick this up and yeah I'm gonna include
all the attachments over. So, just like that, I'm able to send this
email directly into Slack. All right, so, let's go ahead
now and switch over to Slack, open up our sales lead channel
and see what this looks like. Here I'm in my sales lead
channel, and look at that, the email has come through. What's so great-- Yeah, woo! (laughing) - [Brian] Woo hoo! (audience applauding) What's so great about these email add-ons is that it's preserves the entire context of the conversation. That means any one of my
teammates can go ahead and click in here and see the
back and forth conversation to read up on it. They can also open up any attachments that was attached to that email. And look at that, already my teammates are already responding and
David is gonna be our hero today and take on the customer. All right, so, that is all live today and this is what's so powerful
about bringing information and working it into Slack,
versus the siloed email inbox. The moment I sent this
information into Slack it became visible to my entire team and so that everyone can have
all the context that they need to be helpful, or just follow along and see who took on the customer. This is all really great if
your entire team is in Slack. But what if you're
working with a colleague who's not in Slack yet? We recognize that for our customers not everyone is set up with
Slack and using it on day one. So, Brian, let's pretend
you're the Director of Finance at the company ACME Corp.
and you haven't signed on to Slack yet. - Sounds good. For the sake of a demo, I'll
do about just about anything. I'm Brian, Director of
Finance at ACME Corp. and I'm used to my email inbox, I've been there since 1999,
it seems to work for me. I skip the Slack training and I skip the second Slack training but I know I've got an invite and eventually I'll
probably get around to it. - All right. So my sales team has
been working diligently to plan out our Q2 budget
and we're preparing for a big budget review meeting that's happening later today. We want to make one small
change, it's so tiny, but as a Sales Manager,
it's my job to make sure that I get Brian's eyes on it, since he is a Director of Finance. So, because I can't find him in Slack, since he hasn't joined yet, I have to now, open up my email and send him an email or it's such a quick ask, maybe I should just find
his phone number at my desk and just give him a quick call. Well, that's no longer going
to be the case anymore. I'm really excited to share
that we're starting to roll out a new capability that will create a bridge between email and Slack. What this means is, the moment
that an admin invites Brian to join Slack, I can
now find him in Slack, I can message him and I can
@mention him in conversations. So, I want to show you
what this looks like. Going back into our Slack here, I'm gonna go and find Brian. Look at that! He's right here in Slack. That means that an ACME
Corp. admin has invited Brian and now I can start having
conversations with him. Here, you can see that
he's an invited member and he might be slow to respond
because he hasn't signed up for Slack yet and he's gonna be receiving my messages via email but that's okay. I'm gonna ask him, hey Brian,
we're gonna need an extra 20K for our budget, can you let
me know if this is okay? So, Slack also reminds me here
that it might take more time because he hasn't
finished registering yet. All right, let's switch
on over to Brian's email and see what this looks like. - So, look at that. There's a direct message
that came in from Lydia. Hi Brian, we're gonna need
an extra 20K for our budget. Can you let me know if
this increase is okay? With a view in Slack button
that I could see it right there. But what if I'm not really still ready to view it in Slack, Lydia? What else can we do with this? I'm really not there yet. - Well, Brian, we're
working on the capability that will allow you to respond
to these Slack messages, from directly from your email inbox. This feature, it's gonna roll
out in the next coming months but we're so excited that
we want to show y'all a quick preview today. So, Brian, why don't you go
ahead and respond to that email. - Okay, I'll give it a shot. Nothing like a live demo. (laughing) Approved. I almost typoed it. - Great. So Brian has just responded
to that Slack message from his email and look at
that, in the direct message, Brian has had a
conversation with me, yeah. (audience cheering and applauding) Awesome, Brian just approved my request and now I can move on with my day in a matter of seconds. So now I want to let my team
know that we're all good to go. My team has been using a
channel, the Q2 Budget channel, to prepare for our budget
meeting later today. So let's go ahead and enter
that channel right here. I'm going to let folks know, Brian approved our budget
request and ask Karen to update the latest PowerPoint presentation, so that we're all tidied and squared away. Notice here that, I
continue @mentioning Brian in the conversation. It's because I'm used to
mentioning my colleagues so that they're brought
along in this journey. And that's what's so
powerful about this bridge between email and Slack because now, I, as a Slack
user, can continue using Slack in the way that fits me best. So, I can get the best work done and as for Brian, well,
now he can be brought along on these conversations. No more getting day old news. So, let's switch back
over to Brian's email and see what this looks like. - So I've gotten another
message from Slack. This time it's talking
about a Q2 budget channel in the workspace and Lydia's mentioning me about the budget request getting approved but also Karen and asking
her to update a deck. Okay, you got me. Now I'm actually gonna pay
attention to this Slack thing and I'm gonna hop over and give it a shot. My admin is already pre
provisioned me with an account. So, I can actually add a
password, create the account, I can actually skip adding
additional teammates for now and it's gonna open up and
actually land me inside of Slack. One of the big benefits to this, is not only am I being
landed inside of Slack, but it's actually
landing me into a context that I'm familiar with. All of the archive of conversations
that I've had with Lydia are right there in the conversation pane and I'm already added to
the Q2 budget channel. So, right there I got
access to Karen's deck that she's already shared in. I'm in Slack and I'm super comfortable. Thanks, Lydia, that was great. (audience cheering and applauding) So, email is one of the core work tools but the other ones the teams use everyday are calendars, calls, and files. If you think about files, almost every company that
I actually talk with, uses more than one somewhere
in their organization. Your designers might
be using Dropbox Paper, while most of your
organization's in Google Drive, or you might be in Microsoft OneDrive shop that also has Box attached. Finding files across multiple repositories is really hard and sharing
them can also be a challenge. Slack makes it easy. We make it easy to share
and discover files on Slack. It doesn't matter if you have
one file provider or many. Slack flexes to meet your
needs of how your company works not the other way around. We're gonna take the same approach from a calendar and calls perspective. People use a variety of different options and if you think about
setting up a meeting, you might need to integrate
a calendar reminder, the files that you need to use, and a separate video
conferencing solution, Google, Microsoft,
Zoom, Cisco, Blue Jeans, you name it, you get the idea. So, Lydia, why don't you show us what we
can do with all that today? - Sure. So, in the previous demo, I told you that we were preparing for a big budget review meeting
that was coming up later. Well, that meeting now is
just a matter of minutes away. So, let's hop on over back to the Q2 Budget channel here in Slack. All right, so, in Slack,
it seems like Karen has already done her due
diligence and updated the PowerPoint presentation. What I want to do now is
actually preview this document really quickly and make
sure everything is good. See, in the past, I would
have had to download this file locally on my desktop and then open it up just to look at it. Well, thanks to a few recent launches, now I can preview Microsoft
Office files directly in Slack. This will work for
Microsoft Word Documents, PowerPoint Presentations, and Excel files. So, let's take a look
at what that looks like. Here, I'm gonna just simply click the file and look at that, all of the sudden, I'm able to see every single
slide of this presentation, confirm that everything looks good, and give Karen a check mark. This looks great, awesome. So, I just showed you
how you can preview files to prepare for a meeting, let's now talk about calls and calendar. If you didn't notice yet,
there's a little red light here on the side bar. This is from our Outlook calendar app that we launched recently. This is a new app for Slack
and it's been helping me get to my meetings on time. It was really easy to set up. All I had to do was
connect my Outlook calendar to Slack by going through a
simple authentication flow and all of a sudden I was getting the most important event updates and reminders right in Slack. So, let's go ahead and click on it. Ah, it looks like that budget
review meeting is happening in one minute, so I should
probably get going soon. And where's the room? Ah, right here, conference room A. But what happens if I'm
not in the office today? As a Sales Manager, I'm
often traveling and meeting with customers, so today I'm off site. Well, that's no problem
I can join remotely by clicking on the Join Zoom
Meeting button right here. This little button is small but mighty. Think about all the times
you were going through a calendar invitation and
scrolling through that wall of text just to find that one
URL or that one meeting ID to memorize and then punch in. Well, now you just need
to click the button and the great part is, this works on both desktop and on mobile. So, as you're walking
from meeting to meeting or as you're commuting into work, you can receive these
event reminders directly on your phone, click on the button, and land straight into
the calling provider of your choice, whether
that be Zoom, WebEx, Skype, and a growing list of others. And if that wasn't enough for you, now my Slack status will
update to in a meeting, so that my colleagues
know I'm in a meeting and that I'll be slow to respond. This is all live today in
the Outlook Calendar app and coming soon for the
Google Calendar app. No more updating your
status in multiple places. So, I-- Woo! (laughs) I hear woops and I'm
just gonna keep it going. All right, so I just showed
you how we can bring together files, calls, and calendar to help you be prepared for your meetings and that way you and your
teammates can always have the most important up-to-date information right at your fingertips. Well, that's all for me today. I gotta head off to a meeting. So, back to you Brian. - Thanks, Lydia. That was really wonderful, thank you. (audience cheering and applauding) You know, it's really a
lot of those small touches. It's the calendar syncing,
it's the fact that on mobile you can preview a file, it's
the fact that we give you a link to cut into your
video conferencing app that makes your life simpler. If you want to get started
with all that today you can, Slack.com/apps. Our app directory actually
has the email add-ins, it actually has the calendar,
calls, and files apps as well that you can install directly. But that's not all,
because that's never all, we continue to invest, we
continue to actually push more and new releases, more improvements to the functionality. Here's a first look at one thing. Sometimes all you need to
do is find time to chat. What if you could do
that right from Slack? In the future, you'll
be able to do just that with smart event creation. Here in a direct message
between Mara and Jessica, they're on the go talking back and forth and realize they need to meet later today to discuss things face-to-face. Using natural language processing, Slack actually figures this out. See what happens when we push today. It actually looks at
both of their calendars, Outlook or Google, and
to see when they might both be available, checks
on that, picks a time, and makes a suggestion. Once you actually accept that
suggestion and create it, it actually pushes that
information back into the direct message they're in as well. So not only have you actually
taken 15 steps out of that process, you made
them both aware of the fact that it's there and it's
set up and they're done and can get back to more productive work. (audience cheering and applauding) Beyond smart event creation,
we're gonna continue to make it easier for you
to find all the information you need, sticking with
the theme of meetings, think about the fact that
you need to start time, and the location, the agenda, the presentation you
were supposed to review, and the dial-in information. Typically strung out in a
bunch of different places or maybe from a couple of different apps. We want to make this all come
together seamlessly in Slack to make it much richer
and more available to you. A lot more to come. Our team is super proud
about the pace of innovation that we're bringing to you, to help all of you be more
productive and do your best work.
