Slack announced this Tuesday the launch of its corporate app version, called Enterprise Grid. The new platform has increased security and functionality for large workforces, and it provides administrators with greater control over channels and teams.
This business-oriented Slack has been long underway, and companies as big as IBM and PayPal have been trying out the new app with their teams using early builds.
Now, however, the Enterprise Grid will be available to organizations and corporations with up to 500,000 people in a single, centralized communications platform.
Slack Enterprise Grid: big teams, big solutions
Slack offers greater administrative privileges to team leaders and managers in large companies so they can be more efficient with the communication tools provided by the Enterprise Grid.
The Grid will work as a larger, overarching Slack team that contains as many teams as the enterprise has or needs to work together. It translates the organization’s structure to the chatting workspace.
Just as it often happens in real-life situations, there will be a collaborative space for group projects within the Enterprise Grid called shared channels. They will be distinguished from others by a chain link symbol next to them.
The top layer of the Grid will serve all workers to find company information, policies and guidelines, coworkers in other departments, and more with Slack’s search tool.
Administrators can create and manage channels, as well as documents of interest and other data to make it available to all employees on Slack. All team members will get 1 TB of storage within the platform with offline backup.
At a later time, the company may introduce new bot channel functions that give daily briefings to coworkers or highlight the most important conversations or threads of the day. Slack is currently testing these features.
Tact and SAP will back up the new Slack
Another critical development rolling out with the Enterprise Grid is Slack’s partnership with Tact and SAP to bring new AI capabilities to the popular work app.
SAP has already developed two bots for their proprietary software Concur and SuccessFactors. When prompted by someone in Slack, these indicator trackers will show relevant information and generate reports on diverse areas of interest.
Tact, on the other hand, will provide smart assistance to users who wish to connect to apps outside of Slack, acting sort of like a bridge between the two platforms.
The Tact agent bot can instantly look up a potential customer or associate on sites like LinkedIn and Salesforce, then also set up an email draft on Outlook to contact the person without ever leaving Slack.
While the Enterprise Grid is technically out now, Slack does not openly list any plans or pricing details on the site, asking companies to contact them directly instead if they want to purchase it.
Source: Slack