Data Backup Digest

Salesforce acquired Slack in 2021, and they’re wasting no time when it comes to integrating and customizing the popular messaging app. In fact, they’ve announced a brand new toolkit that lets developers build their own Slack apps.

Introducing the Salesforce Platform for Slack

Known as the Salesforce Platform for Slack, it even gives developers access to critical app components like actions, automated functions, and business insights. By pulling these elements directly from Salesforce, the toolkit makes it easy to customize the platform as needed.

Rob Seaman, senior vice president of product with Slack, spoke about the toolkit by saying: “Salesforce Platform for Slack is a toolkit that empowers developers to quickly contribute to their digital HQs using the coding languages and tools they already know and love By making it easier than ever for Salesforce developers to bring their unique apps, data and automations built on Customer 360 to Slack, where collaboration is already happening, Salesforce Platform for Slack helps make every conversation more insightful, customer-centric, and action-oriented.”

Furthermore, the Apex SDK for Slack gives developers the ability to use Apex code when designing their custom Slack apps. Since most developers are already familiar with Apex, this makes it easy for them to begin building apps right away. It also makes it possible to port pre-existing apps over to Slack.

New Official Apps

The announcement of the Salesforce Platform Slack came alongside the unveiling of several official apps, too, such as:

• Sales Cloud for Slack: Designed to automated deal status updates throughout your entire sales team, maintain accurate and updated records, and strengthen collaboration across interdepartmental teams.
• Marketing Cloud for Slack: This app is focused on team-based collaboration, particularly between sales and marketing staff.
• Service Cloud for Slack: Finally, this app automated swarm invitations and helps to ease customer issues easily and effectively.

It’s important to note that these three services are currently in the beta testing phase. They are expected to be publicly available in February 2023.

Stuart Thomson, solutions architect with Kimble, explained how the new toolkit will help his team by saying: “Salesforce Platform for Slack will empower our developers to build apps that make Slack interactions more meaningful and actionable than ever before. This toolkit will not only save our developers valuable time, but make it possible to surface key product features within Slack to encourage collaboration, both internally and for our customers.”

The Future of Slack

While the future of Slack is anybody’s guess, this early support from Salesforce is definitely a good sign of things to come. It remains a popular messaging app, particularly in the tech space, so it makes sense that Salesforce would keep it as a part of their software-as-a-service (SaaS) product offerings.

That, coupled with the release of the Apex SDK for Slack, promises to keep Slack relevant for years to come. Whether or not this popularity will begin to wane over time is anybody’s guess, but the future is certainly looking bright for the fast-growing messaging app.