Dropbox releases open-source Slack bot
Dropbox is looking to tackle unauthorized access and other security incidents in the workplace with a chatbot. Called Securitybot, it that can automatically grab alerts from security monitoring tools and verify incidents with other employers.
The company says that through the use of the chatbot, which is open source, it will no longer be necessary to manually reach out to employees to verify access, every time someone enters a sensitive part of the system.
Slack sets its sights on large enterprises
The Slack team collaboration tool has proved popular with many businesses since it first launched in 2013.
Now Slack is aiming to carry its success into larger organizations with the launch of Slack Enterprise Grid, offering the adaptability to create communication structures which mirror how teams already collaborate.
Microsoft Teams has 30,000 business customers -- but is it a serious threat to Slack yet?
Microsoft Teams, Slack's latest high-profile rival, is slowly gaining traction. The software giant has announced that 30,000 organizations, spread across 145 markets, "actively used" the collaboration service in the past month. It launched in late-November.
Where are those 30,000 customers coming from? Well, since Microsoft Teams is part of Office 365 that means that the users the collaboration service has are first and foremost Office 365 subscribers -- and there are 85 million active users there. That gives it huge potential for growth.
Google cozies up with Slack for tighter integration
Faced with competition from the likes of Microsoft Teams, Slack is strengthening its partnership with Google to bring greater cloud integration to users.
The beloved communication tool is teaming up with Google Cloud to improve Google Drive support, but there's also support for bots in the form of Drive Bot. Security and sharing is also in line for improvements, and the recently-announced Team Drives from Google will also be supported.
Slack’s morning after
The rite of passage from youth to adulthood is filled with "morning after” moments -- those times when you realize that only 24 short hours ago (or less) you had bad judgment. Last Wednesday is Slack’s morning after... it thought it mattered as much as Microsoft.
Slack is a great product with deeply devoted fans, there’s no doubt about that. Its management has embraced the "accidental genius" narrative ("We don’t know why people use our product"), have talked about revolutions, and have driven one hell of a valuation. Good for them. Sadly, witty narratives, claims that your technology is disruptive and a lot of paper wealth doesn’t often translate into success as an enterprise software company.
Microsoft launches Teams -- and Slack is worried
It is no secret that Microsoft has been working on a Slack rival, but it is not until today that we get to take a proper look at the new collaboration tool. Called Microsoft Teams, it will officially launch in the first quarter of 2017, though the software giant is making it available as a public preview starting today. Should you give it a try?
The benefit to Microsoft Teams, as the software giant explains it, is the integration with some of its most important products and services, like Office 365 and Skype, to help users collaborate more easily on different projects. You also get support for services like GitHub and Twitter and different security features, but those are also available in other collaboration tools -- like Slack, for instance.
New solution helps enterprises guard against chat-based phishing
Slack is the largest enterprise chat platform in the world with more than 2.7 million daily active users who spend an average of 140 minutes per day using it.
Not surprising then that alert attackers see it as an opportunity to expand their social engineering campaigns. The fact than many people use Slack without the IT team's knowledge creates a further security issue.
Slack gets voice calling
Slack is one of the best communication tools for teams and it is fair to say that we are big fans of it. We use it every day to chat and share ideas for new stories but also to transfer files. And pretty soon we might start calling each other.
After beta testing the feature for the last couple of months in private, Slack is now officially rolling out voice calling. It is planned to reach users on both desktop and mobile apps, though its capabilities will be limited by their plan.
Enterprise data platform integrates with Slack
All too often business communication and data are separate. This means that if you need to refer to something while chatting with a colleague you have to break off and open another application to do so.
In order to make data more accessible and collaboration easier, business analytics specialist Looker is announcing a new data platform that integrates with the popular Slack communication tool.
Google's Single Sign On adds support for Microsoft Office 365, Facebook at Work, Slack and more
Besides being the super poplar search engine, email provider, work and collaboration services provider, Google is also used, by a number of different services, as an identity provider.
It allows people to register and log into different online services using their Google account. Now, the company announced it’s expanding the feature to add a number of new services, some of which are direct competitors.
DevOps in web hosting is like Hamsterdam from The Wire
If you’ve watched original must-see box-set The Wire, you might recall Hamsterdam. For those who haven’t seen the series, Hamsterdam was an area of Baltimore which a senior police officer allocated as an unofficial decriminalized area for drug dealing and use.
Bemused beat officers, under instructions only to take action if violent crimes were being committed, were left watching activities that would ordinarily have put them on red alert. That is a bit what it’s like being a web host getting to grips with DevOps practice for the first time.
Microsoft integrates Skype into Slack
Slack is the current communication darling for many small and medium businesses. The SMB-focused communication and collaboration solution is pretty simple -- it is similar to internet relay chat. Just like IRC, you join a channel and have text-based communications with other people. Where it differs, however, is its native ability to integrate with other tools. In other words, its potential is arguably greater than many competitors.
Today, Microsoft announces that it is enhancing Slack in a very special way. The Windows-maker releases a preview of Skype integration for the aforementioned communication solution. The team here at BetaNews uses Slack, so of course, I had to give it a go.
Slack announces App Directory store
The business communication tool Slack is trying to end the year on a high note, and looking at what the company announced yesterday, it seems to be on the right track.
The team-communication app, which now has two million daily users and 570,000 paying customers has announced three things -- an app store which will offer other productivity tools (like Trello, for example) to integrate with Slack, an $80 million fund to help developers create more apps for the store, and a new framework called Botkit which should simplify the process of creating apps.
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