Slack, Google Drive Will Soon Play Nice
If you happen to use business collaboration tool Slack and Google Drive, the two are joining forces to make your life a little easier.
Slack is partnering with Google on a new "suite of deep integrations." People already share "millions" of Google Drive files on Slack each month, but starting in the first half of 2017, you'll be able to do much more.
For starters, the Google Drive team is building a Slack bot to ensure you never miss a notification.
"For teams that use Slack and Google Drive together, including Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, comments and requests for access can sometimes languish in email notifications," Slack wrote. "Now those notifications will arrive where you're already working — inside Slack, via the Google Drive bot." You'll also be able to approve or reject comments right from Slack.
Plus, Slack will also now remove some of the "peskier permission-checking" duties from your life by ensuring any Google Drive files you share are accessible to the right people. "This means that when a file is shared in a channel, Slack will check that it is accessible to the group you've shared it with. If not, you will be prompted to update your sharing settings," the company wrote.
Going forward, you'll also be able to preview Google Docs within Slack.
Meanwhile, admins will soon be able to connect Team Drives, or shared spaces for teams, with their Slack channels. That way, any files uploaded to the channel will be automatically backed up to the Team Drive, and vice versa. Admins will also be able to provision Slack for their entire company from the G Suite admin console, a feature that should be especially helpful for big companies.
"As users of Google Cloud ourselves, we're thrilled about this partnership and how it will simplify our working lives," Slack wrote. "So, a thank you to the team at Google for helping us bring this first phase to our many customers who rely on both of our products to power their teams."
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.