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The end of email? Slack introduces its Enterprise Grid for large organizations

A person using Slack on a Macbook.
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Get ready for the biggest group text of your life.

Flying in the face of the notion that there can ever be too many cooks in the kitchen, messaging platform Slack has introduced a new enterprise solution for some of its biggest customers, allowing for companies with thousands of employees to use the chat tool. It’s called Slack Enterprise Grid, and behemoths like IBM, PayPal, and Capital One are already taking advantage of its functionality.

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“Slack should be where that work happens, regardless of a company’s size or shape, which is why we’ve carefully crafted a new enterprise-grade product to bring the power and utility of Slack to large, complex organizations,” the company explained in a blog post announcement. Enterprise Grid promises to be a flexible, adaptable solution that reflects how teams within large companies already collaborate.

But in order to keep things organized, it offers centralized controls, allowing administrators to keep an eye on just one point of visibility in managing the resource. And this latest solution also integrates with other applications commonly used at work, allowing for the messaging hub to be command central for employee communication and beyond.

“Whether physical or digital, our teams expect workspaces that empower them to communicate efficiently, connect easily, and build new products quickly  —  wherever they are  —  and Slack is a great example of how they want to work,” says Jennifer Manry, vice president of workforce technology at Capital One. “With Enterprise Grid, Slack has preserved the sense of community, interactivity, and humanity of the workspace that our teams love, with the administrative capabilities we need as a larger enterprise.”

 New features featured in Enterprise Grid include unlimited workspaces for users, which can be individually controlled by administrators; shared channels for collaboration; a unified infrastructure for the entirety of the organization, rather than multiple teams using separate Slack instances; and access to Slack’s App Directory, which now lists over 900 integrations.

Lulu Chang
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