Slack Integrates With Google Calendar To Add Events To Channels

Slack, the popular office communication tool, will now integrate with Google Calendar, letting events automatically post reminders inside slack channels.

After linking a Google account to Slack, you can choose any calendar and instruct it to post to certain Slack channels. For example, you could have events from your company’s development deadline calendar post reminders to the #dev channel two days before a product deadline.

Or, on a more lighthearted note, you could have your company’s birthday or holiday calendar automatically post to #general so your whole team can celebrate together.

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The integration will also allow daily or weekly calendar summaries to be sent out to everyone subscribed to a certain Slack channel.

Considering many already use Slack to share calendar events, this integration just lets Slack further automate users’ existing workflow. Benefits like these will make Slack even more useful to the enterprise and help Slack further push its revenue model (which is in part based on how often employees use the service).

Part of the reason Slack has been so successful at acquiring new users is that it provides dozens of different integrations with other enterprise services and apps. Considering Google Calendar is one of the more popular calendaring services used by businesses, this new integration could be a major selling point for companies considering Slack that are already using Google Apps.

And for those already on Slack, this integration could tie them into the platform even more. Slack was started with the premise of going head to head against email. By adding calendar notifications into Slack, the company will be able to keep more users inside its app and out of their inboxes.

The new feature goes live today, and can be turned on in your team’s integrations page.