Slack, which has already made its mark in the team communication sector, has now launched a new service named Enterprise Grid. With this new service, it is now aiming to cover the entire organisation and not only teams.
The platform will now go after bigger customers, where were not targeted by the company earlier. This announcement of the new service comes at a time when it is looking to differentiate itself and go ahead of Microsoft’s newly launched Teams.
Slack’s Enterprise Grid not only scales the core Slack experience, but it also gives IT administrators the regulatory and security controls across the entire company. Noah Weiss, head of Slack’s SLI group, said,
This is an evolution of Slack’s very beginnings to help teams do the best work together. Slack has always been a tool for large enterprise, but it grown from the bottom up (from sales, marketing, engineering, etc.) and it spreads. What we wanted to do is build a tool that not only teams loved, but also entire companies, deployed across the enterprise.
Enterprise Grid adapts to how a large business is organised and provides flexibility to create communication structures that mirror how teams already collaborate. It also offers centralised controls to ensure that a company’s data remains secure, giving administrators a single point of visibility to manage Slack. Further, it integrates with other applications teams use at work, delivering information and better workflows right within Slack.
You won’t see much difference when migrated to Enterprise Grid as it has the same workspaces, channels, reactions, and threaded replies. However, a major advantage of this product is the ability to better collaborate with different departments in shared workspaces. Enterprise Grid lets individual teams maintain their own workspaces and channels within it, but you can have a shared channel that bridges the two workspaces for multiple product teams.
At the same time, Slack has also revealed updated stats of its growth. As per the company, it has over 500 million daily active users, with 1.5 million paid users. Slack also says it now has over 800 employees working across 7 offices worldwide.
Slack has been talking about launching an enterprise product of this type since more than a couple of years. Now, it has launched this Enterprise Grid at a time when the market is heating up in a big way.
Microsoft is now coming after Slack with Microsoft Teams, a similar product that’s included in versions of the Office 365 cloud productivity suite for business. Microsoft says that even in its beta mode, over 30,000 companies have tried out Microsoft Teams.
