Slack announced a new update that will bring a more streamlined, organized approach to its popular collaboration tool.
Millions of at home and office-based workers use Slack to organize their teams and companies. New features to make it even better will affect us all.
What’s New: There’s a new navigation bar, a discovery feature at the top of the sidebar, a new compose-from-anywhere button, new shortcuts, and collapsible channels, apps, and messages.
Navigation & Organization: You’ll be able to search and toggle between conversations here, as well as find mentions, reactions, files, people, and apps all in the new navigation bar. Paid users will be able to organize channels, direct messages, and apps into custom sections in the sidebar, like moving important stuff up top and less-frequently-used things down lower. You can name these new sections with text and emoji, and nest things inside.
New Conversation: There’s a new compose message button, too. You can start typing a message without worrying about who you’re sending to or what channel you want to use. Better yet, if you get distracted and don’t finish, Slack will save your message as a draft.
Shortcuts: You’ll now be able to access your apps and other tools in Slack with a handy shortcut button, which will look like a lightning bolt icon next to your message input field. No more switching to app-specific channels in the sidebar.
By the Numbers
- Daily active users: 10 million
- Paid organization users: 85,000
- Daily average time spent in Slack: 9 hours
- Daily average active use: 90 mins
- Actions taken each week: More than 5 billion
When do we get this? Slack says it’s rolling out these new features over the next several weeks, so don’t plan on seeing much right away. You’ll see changes on the desktop and web version first, with mobile versions updating soon after.
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