It's become a document editor. At its developer conference, the company announced that it is building a new feature called Canvas that will allow users to create and edit full docs from within the chat interface. It is one of the biggest announcements in a while and may be the biggest departure from its email-killer roots to date.
The idea of bringing documents to slack was to match everything about slack that is productive and useful but pull it out of a fast moving chat window and into a more permanent and findable space. One of the biggest advantages of canvases is their ability to get important content from any link pasted into the app. If you put a link to a document, then it will automatically show up in your web browser. You can interact with third-party tools right from within a canvas. All the features of a website are included in the canvas.
The feature will be used to upgrade the pins and bookmarks on slack. Both were designed to make it easier to find important messages but too easy to turn into places where you can't find anything. There are 51 pinned items on the Verge Slack channel. That doesn't help anyone. Instead of pinning a bunch of messages with helpful links, you might just make a canvas with all the forms they need, information to know, and workflows to follow on their first day.
One-off documents can be created through Canvas, but each channel will have its own page. Those could be used as a hub for all the information users need for that channel. The way people are already using Slack is extended by that. A lot of the technology underlying Canvas is powered byQuip, a company that was acquired bySalesforce. It takes their channels, which have already been built out, and adds a space to organize information for that channel.
It definitely looks like it is, despite the fact that it is not competing with the other two.
According to Botwick, Slack Canvas is more of a way to find your Google and Notion stuff than it is a way to compete with them. It seems like Slack is trying to compete with other companies. He says that it's possible to do things like work on a newsletter and send it to many channels. There is no public link to a Canvas doc or a way to share it over email at the moment, but that will change over time.
Canvas documents are collaborative, so multiple people can work inside one at the same time, and all the comments in a document are treated as a separate thread on the chat service. When there is new activity on a canvas, it is more likely that someone will respond to it sooner because they are spending so much time there.
The last few years have seen the company shift from a messaging app to a productivity tool. Text chat isn't the right interface for everything. In order to bring video and audio into the process more easily, and in order to use Canvas to do the same with documents, it was necessary to invest in Huddles and Clips. It used to compete with Microsoft Teams, now it is competing with Office. It is difficult and expensive to steal market share from the productivity giants, as is the case with other companies.
Canvas is currently being tested but will not be available to most users until next year. Between now and then, there is still a lot of work to be done. It will probably take us a bit longer to make it really great on mobile, as he is thinking about how it all works on mobile. He says it's just a document editor. It was in slack. Next to the chat thread is where it is located.
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