A great deal of Slack’s success has come from its ability to allow companies to communicate internally in a fluid and transparent manner. Now the enterprise messaging service is looking to enhance the experience of how larger organizations function through the introduction of User Groups.
The new feature allows notifications to be specifically sent to separate departments. Whether it’s getting the message out to a company’s engineers, customer service teams or marketing teams, user groups allows entire groups to be alerted about issues in a moments notice. Initiatives like this fit into Slack’s larger focus of allowing the platform to operate more effectively for larger organizations. In turn, this feature will only be enabled for Slack teams on paid plans.
In addition to reaching out to specific teams, this update adds the ability to automatically add users to a preset list of channels when they sign on with a team for the first time. This can be especially helpful for getting new employees onboarded in the least confusing way possible.
Thankfully, now admins will also be able to map all of the active Slack user groups to Active Directory with SSO providers, including Ping and OneLogin. This allows them to add huge groups of people into Slack in one fell swoop.
That’s critical when looking at all the people actually using the service now on a daily basis. Slack has 1.7 million people logging in and chatting it up every day.
More interesting user metrics coming from Slack this month include the fact that at a given time there are 1 million people connected through the service, and there are 470K paid users messaging through the client with their teams.
Overall, these features show Slack’s desire to expand their platform to serve the needs of the growing number of larger (paid) customers, including tech giants like eBay and Spotify.