Slack and G Suite bring a bit more productivity to your everyday work

Sometimes it’s the simplest tasks that seem to take the most effort, like remembering to set your status to “away” before you dash off to a client meeting. But here’s some good news that will make things a little easier for you on that front: As of today, you can automatically sync your Slack status with your Google Calendar so everyone can see your availability.  

High-frequency, low-effort tasks, such as granting access to a file or replying to a comment, take little effort in Slack. That’s why more than 1.3 million users and 300,000 teams use the Google Drive app every month. 

With the newest Google Calendar app and Slack for Gmail add-on, you can keep tabs on your calendar and easily forward emails into Slack. Here’s a quick overview: 

Stay on top of your calendar in Slack

With the Google Calendar app, you can sync your status with your calendar and much more. View daily summaries of calendar events, respond to invites, and get updates when a calendar invite changes, right in Slack. You can even join a call directly from your calendar reminder.

Install

Use Google Calendar for Slack to:

• Receive a daily summary of your schedule
• Respond to invites directly in Slack
• Join Hangouts Meet or Zoom calls with a single click

Bring your email into Slack

The Slack for Gmail add-on sits alongside your email inbox, making it easy to bring an email thread into Slack, where you can quickly discuss as a team. Not sure how to answer a customer email? Forward it into a Slack channel and rally around a response with your teammates. You can include an attachment too.

Collaborate with Google Drive files in Slack

As you’re juggling deadlines and deliverables, it’s important to keep track of progress made as new collaborators get added to the mix. With the Google Drive app, you can get notifications on new comments, shared files and access requests in Slack. You can also create or import new Drive files for your team to view.

Install

Use Google Drive for Slack to:

• Create new Docs, Sheets and Slides in a few clicks
• Adjust viewing and editing permissions on files without leaving Slack
• Get alerts when people share, comment or edit your files
• Reply to comments from inside a Slack thread

Using G Suite apps with Slack improves collaboration and saves time  

The software company HubSpot recently told us how it uses Google Drive with Slack.

“Pretty much everything that we do lives in Google,” said Ellie Flanagan, a senior communications manager at HubSpot. “That’s a really helpful integration for us because we’re constantly collaborating on documents. Even today, my team had to give a presentation, and it was easy to just drop that presentation into Slack so we all had access to it.”

And they’re not the only ones: Teams at SurveyMonkey, HelloFresh and 21st Century Fox are a few of the Slack customers that have also weaved G Suite apps into their daily workflows. 

To make the most of your G Suite apps and Slack, head over to the Slack App Directory to get started.