Highlights from Frontiers 2019: Building the future of work together

Empowering more workers across every industry is what drives Slack’s mission. It’s also the thread woven through our user conference, Frontiers. The conference, the central gathering of Slack customers, partners, developers and more, ended today in San Francisco.

Here’s a look back at the products we previewed at Frontiers this week, along with a look at how one customer uses Slack and more on our vision and mission from the leadership team.

Shared Channels beta comes to Enterprise Grid

With Shared Channels, Slack isn’t only at the heart of your company—but at the heart of your relationships with other companies. Our goal is to enable work across companies to be more agile and efficient. Starting this summer, we’re expanding Shared Channels as a beta for our Enterprise Grid customers, empowering organizations of any size to take advantage of this new way of working.

Workflow Builder

Most people assume that automating routine tasks and processes requires heavy support from an engineer or developer. Not so. With Workflow Builder, it can take two minutes. Slack’s visually-driven Workflow Builder is a simple way to automate manual, repetitive processes without requiring any coding knowledge at all. Interested in automating your routine tasks? This feature will be available later this year, but in the meantime, sign up for your sneak preview right here.

Slack and Email work together

We’ve expanded interoperability with email so that no one gets left out of important conversations, from executives lovingly holding on to their inboxes, to new hires who haven’t joined their company’s Slack workspace yet. We’ve recently released add-ins for Microsoft Outlook and Gmail. These add-ins allow you to forward emails (along with attachments) directly into Slack.

Customer spotlight: EA and Enterprise Grid

At EA, the gaming giant, 10,000 employees use Slack across departments, disciplines and geographies to collaborate with each other in addition to 3,000 external partners and contractors. And the numbers don’t stop there. It operates in 27 countries in locations ranging from Sydney and Shanghai to Seattle and Seoul. Communication, collaboration and alignment are critical. Gopi Parampalli, vice president of IT at EA, shared his insights on the changing nature of work, the role of the IT department in supporting business success and how collaboration tools aren’t about technology, but the whole business.

On being human, humble—and ambitious

We believe there is a deeply human desire to do our best work. But we also know getting there takes common purpose and shared understanding. Our co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield sees it unfold this way: When everyone knows not just where they are going, but why, and how, it’s transformational. “And this is why Slack exists. Our mission is to make work simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. And we love our mission because it’s rooted in service,” Butterfield said. “Service to our customers, partners, users and champions. It’s humble, but, to be honest, it’s also ambitious. We want to do this for all types of work—everywhere we can. That’s an impact on the productivity of the entire world.”

Building the tools for modern work

Even at some of the biggest and most successful companies in the world, it’s a challenge to get people aligned. That’s been the experience of Slack’s Chief Product Officer Tamar Yehoshua, who has worked at some of the most recognizable companies in the world, including Google and Amazon. But it wasn’t until joining Slack that she saw the potential to change the way people work. “Slack connects individuals and teams in a new way. The shift from inboxes to channels is profound,” Yehoshua said. “It has changed how I process information and focus my work.”

It’s a different world

We see significant new trends in technology: There’s messaging, the way the next-generation workforce prefers to communicate, and the proliferation of business applications. “What’s important tomorrow is likely very different than what’s important today,” said Slack’s Senior Vice President of Sales & Customer Success Robert Frati. All of this is underscored by the rapid global adoption of Slack—to 10 million daily active users in over 150 countries around the world in short order. But numbers alone don’t tell the full story. “We’re seeing adoption across all industries, across all regions of the world and across companies of all sizes,” said Frati. What other company can bring together TD Ameritrade and E*Trade in financial services, MIT and Arizona State University in education, the UK Ministry of Justice and NASA in government, and IBM, Oracle and SAP, some of the largest and most strategic technology providers in the world? It’s Slack.

The full roster of Frontiers 2019 coverage

From new and upcoming product releases to awe-inspiring customer use cases and stellar leadership insights, this year’s Frontiers had it all. Here’s a list of recent announcements and event recaps for your reading pleasure.

• Coming soon: New tools to streamline work and boost productivity
• Security at scale: What’s new for enterprises
• Frontiers 2019: Trends, best practices and leading insights

If Frontiers 2019 could be summarized under a single theme, it would be this: Alignment is everything. And, as we’ve learned from our esteemed guests and speakers, achieving alignment is a matter of setting a strong vision, communicating clearly and consistently, and empowering teams with the tools, information and autonomy they need to act on new opportunities.

“With Slack, teams are more successful. Organizations are more efficient and productive. It inspires a sense of belonging and makes work more pleasant and more fun,” concluded Yehoshua. And, she added: “At Slack, I’ve learned just how much our employees love emojis.”

The following information is intended for INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, and not as a binding commitment. Please do not rely on this information in making your purchasing decisions. The development, release and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of Slack, and are subject to change.