Meet Slack canvas, a new way to power up your productivity platform

Organisations are looking to innovate, scale and unlock potential to meet economic demands while still driving productivity. Although we have more tools and ways of exchanging ideas than ever before, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for teams to manage, find and share knowledge and team resources.

Some of that information is already in Slack, like messages, apps and workflows. Additional data lives in the thousands of other tools and apps that companies use every day. Moreover, other pieces of information exist on the Internet, in the form of news articles, photos and videos.

For work to actually work, your tools have to help you connect business-critical knowledge with the people who need it.

Today we’re beginning the rollout of Slack canvas, a new surface where teams can create, organise and share essential information – all inside Slack, your productivity platform.

Capture and curate knowledge for anything and everything

If Slack is the place where work happens, canvas is where knowledge is created and shared across teams. Canvases enhance the real-time collaboration that you have in channels by offering an evergreen place to organise and share information of any kind. It’s a new way of working and will help teams spend less time searching for information, and more time moving work forwards.

Canvases can contain anything you like, from text and files to apps and rich media. They can include link unfurls, previewing your systems of record, like Salesforce Customer 360. No matter what your canvases contain, it’s all captured in a single view. And like channel content in Slack, canvases are searchable, enabling knowledge management across your organisation.

When paired with the new Slack platform, you can even embed no-code workflows* inside a canvas, increasing discoverability of these automations while providing more context around how it can be used. For example, you can embed a button to request a company phone or create an IT request, right within the canvas containing your company policy.

Organise and streamline team processes

Not only can canvases be created for anything that you’re working on, but they can also be paired with any channel or conversation to centralise information and drive alignment. Here teams can store relevant, evergreen content about the topic that can be referenced or updated at any time. It’s a great place to:

✅Track action items
📓Log meeting notes
🔗Share relevant links and resources
❓Create an overview for the channel with FAQs
🧑‍💻List out key stakeholders in the conversation and their responsibilities

Make the most of your team’s collective knowledge

Slack’s productivity platform is centred on collaboration, and canvas is no different. With native collaborative features built in, teams can ensure that their knowledge base is always up to date and reflects the collective thoughts of everyone.

When it’s time to collaborate, teams can bring a canvas right into a huddle, allowing people to look on together, discuss live work and make edits in real time. For example, during a weekly team huddle, a customer experience team can review incident reports and update progress on team priorities from a canvas, which brings in information from across data sources.

It’s just as simple when people want to collaborate on their own time. Commenting and reacting as well as revision history are all built right into canvas, allowing teams to seamlessly work together regardless of location and time zone.

When the canvas is ready to share, teams can choose who has view and edit access, and they can decide which channels and people it can be sent to.

We’re already seeing customers, such as Garner, an energy supply software company, lean on canvases to centralise information, map out business strategies and keep teams aligned.

Slack canvas is coming to you

Slack canvas is beginning to roll out today and will be available to all Slack users in the coming months. Customers on paid subscriptions will have access to both standalone canvases and canvases that exist as part of channels and DMs. Free teams can also enjoy access to canvases in channels and DMs. See here for more details.

For more information about how to get started with canvases, take a look at our Help Centre.

Ready to show off your canvas masterpiece? We’d love to hear about it. Tweet us at @SlackHQ.

*Note: The ability for end users to embed workflows into canvases will be available later this year, once the new Workflow Builder is available. At the time of the Slack canvas launch, only developers will be able to create a workflow link that a user could embed into a canvas.