Slack starts in-depth integration with Office 365

Slack gets a new Outlook calendar and mail app, an updated OneDrive app, and now users can view Office files directly within Slack. The new collaboration allows Slack to take a stand against Microsoft Office Integration Teams.

Companies today use a variety of chat applications to limit mail traffic. Slack has made the chat culture efficient and popular in the workplace, so Microsoft and Google wanted to be part of the cake. Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts Chat became the result with deep integration in Office 365 and G Suite respectively.

However, Slack has more than 10 million active users and today has to contend with Google and Microsoft, which process their chat clients for free in their total packages. Today, Slack is already countering Microsoft Teams with better Office 365 integration with new apps around Outlook (calendar and mail) and OneDrive and offers native support for Office files.

New apps

Thanks to the new Outlook app, Slack users now receive a message when an invitation rolls in. With one click they can send an answer from Slack. Reminders to attend Skype, Webex and Zoom meetings appear automatically in the feed, and depending on your calendar or out-of-office message, your Slack status is automatically adjusted. Outlook mails can now also be added directly to channels.

With the improved OneDrive app, you can now import files. The feature is similar to current Google Drive and Dropbox apps. You can browse through files and add them directly to a channel or direct chat message.

Office documents (Excel, Word and PowerPoint) are now displayed in Slack without having to open them. Editing in real time with multiple users such as in Teams is not possible today. Slack hopes that file previews will soon be possible for OneDrive files as well.

Public APIs

Slack needs this deeper integration with Office 365 to take a stand against Microsoft Teams. It seems surprising that Microsoft wants to help a competitor like Slack, but in this case Slack has built everything with public APIs without extra help. The new apps and Office Previews are available today.

Slack announced at the end of January that it had 85,000 paying customers, representing an increase of more than 50 percent in the past year. These are organizations with dozens of people besides those with tens of thousands and they include almost every kind of work, it sounds in a blog post. It’s not entirely clear how many users that translates into. During an earlier milestone last year, Slack spoke of 3 million users on the paid version of the platform.

In the meantime, Microsoft is stepping down with a free version of Teams that has been available since the middle of last year in order to gain market share.

Related: Slack gives regulated customers their own encryption keys