2017 Slack FRONTIERS Conference: A Roadmap for Success

With a tagline like, “Where work in progress meets progress in work,” it’s easy to understand the focus of this year’s Slack FRONTIERS conference.

Conference attendees, which included Slack customers, developers, and partners such as Smarsh, were given a roadmap for what’s in store to help teams become more efficient, and encourage the collaboration needed to complete business projects. Here are a few takeaways from Slack FRONTIERS:

• Shared channels: New functionality is being added to allow a company’s native Slack team to connect with an external Slack team, creating a channel that increases the collaboration needed to work on shared goals and projects.
• A new position: Although Slack is primarily known as a messaging platform, it is moving to become recognized as a full-service suite. With the proliferation of faster, newer communications types beyond email, Slack plans to provide users with channels that highlight the relevant information needed to perform work or project-related tasks. New “search and learn” features weed out the noise of non-essential communications, increasing efficiency, and reducing the time spent navigating multiple resources.
• Optimizing available tools: Slack will continue to draw from its huge partner and developer ecosystems. By encouraging collaboration, Slack allows customers to use a large number of already-created tools and integrations. Or, developers can use Slack’s API to build new or custom features to get work done. Rather than recreating the wheel, Slack is using the tools—and skills—of developers or creators within their ecosystem to help customers evolve and enhance their business efforts.

With this shift to enhanced collaboration and taking steps to be more than just a messaging tool, it could be said that Slack is gearing up for bigger portion of the Enterprise space. There also seems to be a growing interest in archiving digital messaging content in the high-tech community.

For those in regulated industries looking to use Slack to improve collaboration across the organization, Smarsh has partnered with Slack to help meet your archiving and compliance needs. With The Archiving Platform, Slack data is encrypted, indexed, and kept in a search-ready state which allows you to locate and reproduce content for eDiscovery or litigious events, or in response to a regulatory examination.