Slack connects email to the discussion by improving calendar integration and search.

Slack arrived more than five years ago with the daring attempt to try to kill email at the workplace. We are all in 2019, we are still sending emails and Slack may have even reinforced the emails. Fortunately, Slack realized that our email and calendar solutions are useful and should work more closely with his chat software. We have seen this recently with the Office 365 integration, and the company goes even further by bridging the email and calendar directly in Slack.

Slack has built a new bridge between his service and his email. If you have someone in your organization who refuses to use Slack or it's a new employee who is still not connected to the service, you can always chat with them directly from Slack. In the coming months, you can @ -mention these people on channels or send them a direct message. These messages will then be routed to their inbox. The answers will come back directly in Slack, and the back-and-forth exchange will also turn into a complete story of Slack if the person decides to join Slack.

Unfortunately, this bridge is only enabled if administrators have made these Slack users available within an organization. You will not only be able to release people by email. This is however a first step towards the complete integration of email in Slack. You can imagine that Slack might allow you to send e-mails to contacts outside your organization later, and then connect directly through the e-mail service. This could really help to move the email from an alternative system to a real-time communication.

This messaging bridge is only one part of Slack's new enhancements, and the company is increasingly interested in how it handles calendar integration. You'll soon be able to sync your Slack status with your Outlook or Gmail calendar so your coworkers know you're in a meeting or on the road. Slack will also detect when you are talking about creating a meeting and highlight items such as "today" that you can click to create a meeting in Gmail or Outlook.

Calls are usually associated with meetings and Slack will allow partners such as Zoom, Hangouts and Webex to show who is communicating within Slack and the ability to quickly connect to it. All this is part of the further integration of Google Calendar and Outlook in Slack. If you missed a meeting, Slack could even display a repeat in a common view. This smarter calendar integration is expected to be available in Slack later this year.

Research is another important element of Slack, and it is fair to say that it has not always been easy to manage. Currently, you can search using the search box or run quick commands from Cmd + K or Ctrl + K to browse Slack. These two elements are now combined into a single universal search in which you can find unread strings or direct messages and navigate quickly. This new search interface should be available in the coming weeks.

The last big improvement brought by Slack is something that the company calls "workflow generator". This is basically a way to let any Slack user create a basic application for routine tasks without having to learn the code. We've seen Amazon do similar things with Alexa Blueprints and Slack's approach allows you to create forms such as HR forms, employee surveys, or even a welcome message for new employees. Slack users will probably find interesting ways to use this new feature, and I think most will find it useful for organizing lunches or dates where everyone is free for a meeting. This workflow generator will be available later this year and an overview will be available soon.