Your digital HQ just got better with Slack canvas

Our uncertain global economy is forcing organisations of all sizes to become resourceful at every level. Hiring pauses and resource constraints mean teams are doing more with what they have to drive business, without disrupting the quality of the products and services that their customers expect. To address these pain points, leaders must find new ways to get the most value from their tech stacks.

Modern organisations are turning to solutions like Slack as their digital HQ. A digital HQ connects conversations, automation and apps in one space. And now that Slack is fully integrated with Salesforce Customer 360, your sales, service and marketing teams can quickly act on account info, swarm on customer issues and even work directly with customers, without leaving Slack.

Today we’re unveiling new product innovations at Dreamforce that make it even easier for teams to work together in Slack, and for organisations to get even more value from their digital HQ:

• Get ready for Slack canvas, a new surface in your digital HQ, where teams can curate, organise and share mission-critical resources. Paired with the Slack platform, anyone can customise a canvas with time-saving automations that move work forward. Slack canvas will be available next year.
• Start using Slack huddles, a feature that powers spontaneous discussions and live co-working sessions in your digital HQ through video, lightweight audio, multi-person screen sharing, message threads and more. Our enhanced version of huddles starts rolling out today and will be generally available to all users in the coming weeks.
• Develop on the new Slack platform’s open beta. Developers can now automate work for their teams and organisations using modular, reusable building blocks that are easy to customise and share across Slack. Developers can get started today.  

Transform how teams share information in Slack canvas

Within a large organisation, departments and even teams often struggle to find and gain access to the same tools. This creates bottlenecks and frustration for teammates having to hunt for quick status updates. According to Reworked, the median knowledge worker says they spend 4.5 hours per week on average looking for information, and 45% say they have too many disconnected systems to search.

With a canvas, it’s even easier to organise and share information in Slack, where teammates work every day. From onboarding new hires, to launching marketing campaigns, to sharing executive briefings and sales account updates, you can customise a canvas for almost anything.

Curate information the way that you want

Productive work happens in channels. Every week, Slack users take about 15 billion actions in channels, which include sharing files, replacing meetings with huddles and using reacji to notify colleagues on the status of projects. Canvases in Slack supplement real-time collaboration in channels with a permanent place to keep your most essential resources and information.

In addition, the same features that you experience in channels – such as rich previews of clips and profiles of teammates – are available in canvas. You can organise all your files, messages and multimedia in an existing template and modify them as needed. You can also pipe in data from your system of record to provide information for your team to reference, and you can embed workflows to complete tasks in the canvas – where you already are – without losing context.

Put your dashboards to work without using code

Systems-of-record software provides invaluable customer insights; but when all that data is stashed within multiple applications, it’s easy for information to slip through the cracks. Likewise, Slack apps are great at bringing your attention to notifications and messages – like when a Service Cloud ticket is ready for case swarming – but sometimes you need to view all the tickets that come in over the course of a project.

Slack canvas makes it easy to create a snapshot of all the data that teammates need, code-free. Upcoming improvements to the Slack platform will allow workers to pull data from systems of record, like Salesforce Customer 360, as an interactive dashboard into a canvas that’s easy to view, update and share across teams. Users can unfurl links into cards that display previews of data sourced from apps, refresh data and make updates directly in the canvas, all without switching apps.

When it comes to surfacing insights locked within your tools, Slack canvas helps teams to arrive at the answer without having to know what questions to ask.

Get context and take action, all from one place

Simple, everyday tasks can take a surprising amount of time. What should only take five minutes – like filing a PTO request – can easily turn into a long endeavour as you hunt across apps for the PTO policy before logging back in to another system to make the actual request. Slack canvas removes this pain point by providing a single place to keep both context (the PTO policy) and accessible workflows (a button to request time off) that automate business-critical tasks. By having a canvas that makes automations more discoverable and useful, employees will spend less time chasing down information and more time doing thoughtful and innovative work. 

Want to learn more? Tune in to Dreamforce 2022 on Salesforce+ 20-22 September to discover how Slack and Salesforce deliver solutions that drive efficiencies, solve business challenges and help teams deliver more for their customers – all powered by their digital HQ.