NewsUC&C24 Jun 2020 · 3 min read

Slack Connect Could Replace Email, Are We Ready?

Slack Connect could replace email for partners and suppliers, with enterprise security, compliance, EKM and calendar scheduling. Published on UC Today.

Ian Taylor

Now four-years in the making, Slack Connect is here to challenge traditional email. In a live digital press and analyst briefing, Slack CEO and Co-Founder, Stewart Butterfield, said Slack Connect was here to make workplace collaboration more seamless. He added customers send 65 million messages per second, using Slack Connect.

Slack Connect is a secure communications environment, located within Slack Channels that enables up to 20 partners external and internal to collaborate, react to messages, share documents, and more. Butterfield said for the past four years, developers at Slack have worked with customers to get their feedback and make tweaks to the new platform.

"Think of 'Connect' as closed networks for direct messaging based on channels that will, in the future, give users the ability to form DM connections independent of channels"

Slack's workflow builder currently supports shared channels and soon those channels will become the place that contracts get signed, invoices delivered, buy orders accepted, service tickets entered, etc, according to Slack. Independent control over security and compliance functions such as message retention policies, eDiscovery, DLP, legal holds is maintained by IT managers and admins within organizations doing business together.

[caption id="attachment_27537" align="alignright" width="200"] official stewart headshot 1 Stewart Butterfield[/caption]

Slack Enterprise Key Management is set for release this summer, too, and it will lend complete control as well as visibility to data in Slack through self-generated encryption keys, which users can revoke at any time. Butterfield said Slack's even working on a verification system for organizations so they can protect against phishing along with fraud, and to ensure communications only come from verified companies.

"This is a fresh and proprietary technology that could push email to the fringes of business communication," a Spokesperson for Slack told me in an email statement, adding: "For customers, we’re offering a massive step forward in the way they collaborate with partners, suppliers, clients, the people in their ecosystem — extending all the enterprise-grade security benefits of Slack beyond the walls of their organization."

One of the coolest features I learned about was Slack's attempt at solving an annoying yet real challenge, finding a reasonable time to have a meeting with many attendees in a few different timezones. According to Butterfield, Slack Connect users can soon find the most optimal time for meetings, via an integration that will scan the calendar of all proposed meeting attendees and find the most optimal time for a meeting.

Since rolling out in beta for users four years ago, Butterfield said there's been a lot of heavy lifting done to ensure regulatory, security, and compliance concerns got addressed. Today, companies have sent over 400,000,000 messages using 'Connect' and there are over one million users so far. "Yes," Larkin Ryder, Chief Security Officer, Slack, admitted there were challenges during the entirety of the platform's rollout. "Each organization has its own set of policies on how long to house messages, so we had to address this."

[caption id="attachment_29702" align="alignleft" width="200"] Larkin Ryder[/caption]

Slack Connect is available for users on paid Slack plans - not on free accounts, although Butterfield said this is something the company's considering (and it did not sound promising). There is a free trial, though, which he noted was for a generous amount of time. I'm told there are several integrations on the way that could be available as early as this summer.

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