Its a big day for Slack.
Lets start with the former first, as (speaking personally) its the most exciting.
Clicking on it will allow you to scroll through the document without having to download it to your gear.
Plus, Word is a bit of a dog, performance wise.
It often takes a while to open.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
Files preview has been gradually rolling out over the past few weeks.
Theres a good chance you might already have this functionality.
For everyone else, its not that far away.
Its not as outlandish as it sounds.
Why shouldnt users be able to perform basic editing tasks?
Brian Elliott, General Manager of Platform for Slack, isnt entirely convinced by that.
Iframing, particularly in mobile [applications], is not a good experience.
You always end up losing some degree of fidelity or capability.
Its obscenely easy to connect a workspace with, for example, a shared folder or calendar.
But now, Slack is all grown up.
Its looking to IPO later this year and is increasingly prevalent in the enterprise world.
Its also facing stiff competition from Microsoft Teams, which is growing at a breakneck pace.
Its therefore no surprise that Slacks decided to embrace Office 365.
Much of the attention this time round has been focused on Outlook.
Another handy feature is the ability to answer calendar invites within Slack.
If youre not sure what Im on about, all your friends use Gmail and you should probablyclick here.
(Im kidding, kinda.
Yes, I know Microsoft said it fixed the issue in 2017.
I still see random Js every morning when I check my inbox.
This could save users the effort of forwarding threads between colleagues or having to switch between Slack and Outlook.
Theres also the newfound ability to share, import and find OneDrive files from within Slack.
I asked Elliott why it took so long to add this functionality.
After all, Office 365 isnt a small-fry software.
Its used by millions of people.
He attributed it to managing user demand with Slacks limited development resources.
The good news is that there are more useful plugins on the way.
According to Elliott, theres thousands currently being developed both in-house and externally.
