Salesforce, the American CRM megagiant has released a new toolkit for its developers to create integrations and customize apps on Slack's collaboration platform.
The Company paid $27.7 billion for Slack last year and has begun to integrate the team messaging app into its software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools to create a "digital HQ." The Salesforce Platform for Slack, which was launched at the TrailblazerDX developer conference, is designed to make linking workflows between Customer360 apps and Slack easier for Salesforce's around 11 million developers.
"Salesforce's primary justification for buying Slack is to leverage Slack as the collaboration layer across Salesforce clouds," said Irwin Lazar, president and lead analyst at Metrigy. "This necessitates tight connectors to enable data flow into and out of Slack and the ability to collaborate on and complete tasks within Slack." As a result, Salesforce must allow developers to interface with Slack as soon as possible."
According to the Metrigy's Workplace Collaboration: 2021-22 report, nearly sixty percent of end-user organizations see apps like Slack as a work hub rather than just a messaging service for employees in an organization.
Salesforce developers may utilize the Apex SDK for Slack to customize Slack apps developed with the Block Kit UI framework using the familiar Apex programming language (created about four years ago to embed interactive components such as checkboxes and menus in Slack messages and communications). The Apex SDK eliminates the requirement for middleware to access Salesforce data, such as customer details.
In a pre-announcement briefing, Slack Chief Product Officer Tamar Yehoshua noted, "Let's say a developer already has a great application built-in Apex — they can now bring that super-easily to Slack".
Further Deep Integrations
Salesforce is also integrating Slack with its Flow low-code platform. Simple manual operations, such as starting a new Slack channel or sending an account status update, should be able to be automated with this.
"Let's say a deal status changes, and you want to collaborate on that deal in a deal room in Slack. All you do is connect it through Salesforce Flow to create a channel automatically," Yehoshua explained.
"Slack's deeper integrations to the Salesforce platform effectively streamlines communications and collaboration by eliminating the need to switch between applications," said Wayne Kurtzman, IDC research director. "This keeps the context needed to make judgments by bringing work-related conversations into the workplace."
Slack's Flow is slated to launch as a beta in June and a full release in October. In June this year, the Apex SDK for Slack will be available for testing, with a general release in February 2023.
Salesforce also revealed the public beta of numerous previously announced connections between Slack and Salesforce's Sales, Service, and Marketing Cloud products at TrailblazerDX.
