Google partners with Slack to provide better Google Cloud integration

Google‘s cloud services and Slack are among people’s favorite productivity tools, and thousands of professionals around the world use them every day. The two companies, well aware of this, have decided to team up to offer an even deeper integration of Google Cloud within Slack, so come along after the jump for a rundown of what’s coming…

First off, Google Drive is building a Slack bot. Connected directly to Docs, Sheets and Slides, the bot will promptly show dedicated message buttons whenever a comment or an access request is made right within Slack, preventing them from getting lost or piling in your email.

Speaking of permissions, Slack is also going to make sure that content shared from Drive is accessible to the people within the selected channel. If one or more members were not granted access to the Drive file, Slack will warn you, and then offer you to update your sharing settings.

Slack channels are also about to be synced with Team Drive.  Content shared in Slack will be backed up in Team Drive and vice versa. “For customers who want advanced cloud storage controls, we’ll also be providing an option to use a Team Drive as the main data store for any files uploaded to Slack,” the post reads.

Work is also being done on previews, so that anything shared from Google Drive will have a native preview window in Slack. Last but not least, admins will be able to provision Slack for their entire company from the G Suite admin console — something that large organizations in particular will likely appreciate.

There’s sill not an official date for when the changes will go live, but Slack did say that they’re targeting the “first half of 2017”, and that this is “just the start”, which will hopefully mean that more great updates are in store.