On Salesforce Buying Slack

Salesforce buying Slack.  Is this Deeper collaboration? Can see some interesting things coming out of this when combined with Salesforces' work in AI. 

Salesforce + Slack mashup signals the rise of Deep Collaboration in Venturebeat

Jake Saper, Emergence Capital  @jakesaper

News this week that Salesforce is acquiring Slack has a lot of people opining on the pros and cons of such a merger. But one thing is clear: combining the collaboration functionality of Slack with the sales productivity tooling of Salesforce represents a monumental step forward in the history of enterprise software.

My team at Emergence Capital have been students of the cloud since we invested in Salesforce in 2002. Ever since, we’ve exclusively focused on enterprise software, partnering with productivity leaders like Box and Veeva as well as collaboration leaders like Yammer and Zoom.

However, an unfortunate truth has emerged as the cloud has matured: Collaboration software is increasingly at odds with productivity. As the number of apps in both categories has exploded, there’s been a huge uptick in data loss (and frustration) as workers pivot across apps to get their work done. It’s tough to stay in flow when you’re constantly forced out of it by your tools.

The solution: Deep Collaboration

Collaboration and productivity tooling evolved separately. The move to remote or hybrid work is the catalyst we’ve needed to fuse them. We used to rely on collaboration tools for lighter weight tasks — updates, check-ins, gif sharing, etc. — and reserve deeper, more substantive collaboration for in-person meetings. The old stack (mostly) worked for that approach.

In a world where deeper collaboration is being done remotely, we need a new stack. Collaboration tooling can’t be a destination. It must be embedded in the work itself.

My team calls this stack Deep Collaboration. The term refers to software that combines productivity and collaboration functionality in one place to get a specific job done. In a Deep Collaboration future, a person doing a specific task doesn’t have to leave a single piece of software to get that job done. All the productivity and collaboration (both internal and external) features they need to accomplish a task live in the same place. .... ' 

Polinode and Microsoft Teams

Just informed of this and taking a closer look.   Polinode and its advances have been mentioned here many times.   For more about Polinode, see here.

Polinode Connects with MS Teams and Slack

Announcing Integrations with Microsoft Teams and Slack   By Andrew Pitts

Today is an exciting day at Polinode! We are thrilled to announce that we now have direct integrations with both Microsoft Teams and Slack. With so many organisations recently moving to a situation where most or a significantly increased proportion of work is now done remotely, we decided to accelerate these integrations a few months ago. For a number of years there has been a trend towards more internal communication taking place across Enterprise Social Networks such as Teams and Slack. And so, both in the current environment and because of this trend, we feel that the ability to tap into the natural network data that these tools produce will be particularly powerful and insightful for organisations. A handful of organisations who have been testing the integrations over the last couple of months have already proved this to be true! 

HOW DOES IT WORK?
The Teams and Slack integrations are available to any Enterprise and Partner customers who would like to take advantage of them. They sit alongside our existing integrations with Microsoft Active Directory, Office 365 Email, Office 365 Calendar and the Microsoft People API. All of these integrations are simple to setup - they just take a couple of minutes! All that is required is for an admin user of the tenant to provide authorisation to Polinode by clicking a button, i.e. oAuth approval.   .... " (Much more explanation at the link) 

Microsoft Moves to Teams, Drops Skype for Business Online

Have now been using Teams since its inception.  Works well for team operations, chats and goal focused collaboration.    Skype works but has always been shaky,  its advantage is its huge global enrollment.   How will either of these operate versus Slack?  Right now Teams is free.   But converting between any of these will be cumbersome for the enterprise.

Microsoft will drop Skype for Business Online on July 31, 2021
As part of its Skype for Business Online to Teams transition, Microsoft will enable Skype consumer users to communicate with Teams ones using chat and calling starting in Q1 2020.

By Mary Jo Foley for All About Microsoft  .... '

Microsoft Teams vs Slack

Now been using Teams since its release, and also Slack for projects and consulting.  And have been using things like Google Drive and OneNote for similar purposes of communication sharing, information and development.    Following article takes a comparative look:

Microsoft Teams: Its features, how it compares to Slack and other rivals

Microsoft's entry in the crowded group messaging market continues to evolve. Here's how Microsoft Teams fits into the boom collaboration software market and what you need to know to evaluate it against its rivals. .... 
           
By Matthew Finnegan By Matthew Finnegan in ComputerWorld ...

Introduction to TeamOps

Long ago west coast Wiki connect and innovator,  Ross Mayfield, talks TeamOps.   A more structured Slack?  It could use that.    Examining.

Ross Mayfield: CEO & Co-founder of Pingpad. Previously LinkedIn, SlideShare, Socialtext, RateXchange. Husband and Father. ... 

Introduction to TeamOps
TeamOps empowers teams to achieve higher velocity through the agile cycle of planning, acting and learning. TeamOps is the combination of practices, apps and cultural philosophies, prompted by the shift to group messaging like Slack beyond software developers. This speed allows business teams to continuously improve and more effectively deliver and compete. ... " 

How to Own the Customer experience

Attending this tomorrow, a favorite topic of mine ... join us at the link below: 

How to Own the Customer Experience:

" ... AI-driven interactions between customers and brands will soon be occurring more often. Messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger and Slack will combine with AI to make sense of text — both conversational and written — and offer services in real time. In this MIT Sloan Management Review article, speaker Bala Iyer along with coauthors Andrew Burgert and Gerald C. Kane discuss how companies can prepare for this shift by choosing a platform, running experiments, and begin introducing AI to their customers today. Read it for free in advance of the live webinar on March 29th:     " ....   Customer interactions with brands will soon become managed by AI via messaging platforms — and companies need to be ready.    ... " 

Microsoft Teams

An Overview.   Have now used Slack for a number of collaboration examples with projects, and like it.    Will MS Teams do as well?  I do note its not available for standard versions of Office, a mistake, its where people will learn to use it, and select it over options like Slack.  Also want to see assistant methods like Cortana well integrated in context.

Microsoft Teams cheat sheet
Microsoft's answer to Slack, Teams provides group messaging, voice and video calls, and useful integrations with other Office 365 apps. Here's how to get set up in Teams and find your way around.
By Jonathan Hassell in Computerworld.

Email is everywhere, and it has been around seemingly forever. But is it really the most effective way for groups of people to collaborate on work and advance business objectives? Several new products on the marketplace, most notably Slack, wager that the answer is indeed no.

Slack and similar team messaging products try to remove threaded email conversations as a common platform of communication in organizations and replace it with instant message-like short bursts organized into channels based on the context or subject of the conversation. Microsoft Teams is the Redmond behemoth’s suggested alternative to Slack. Teams, which is included with Office 365 business and enterprise subscriptions, is essentially group chat software with some interesting features thrown in around working with documents and spreadsheets, especially those stored in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business. .... " 

Google Does a Slack Alternative

Been using Slack for some time on a project by project basis.  Does I think promote focus.   Email can be very fragmented among the noise.  Are the new Hangouts better?

Google's Slack alternative is available starting today

Despite the name, Hangouts Chat isn't just a retread of what it has already tried.   By Nathan Ingraham, @nateingraham in Engadget

It's been almost a year since Google first mentioned Hangouts Chat -- a totally redesigned messaging service that's more like Slack than the Hangouts most consumers know today. As of now, Hangouts Chat is out of its "early adopter" program and will be available to all G Suite users over the next week, assuming their company enables it, of course.

To be clear, Hangouts Chat is a totally separate and distinct service from Hangouts proper, which still lives in your Google mail inbox. And while we'll forgive you for rolling your eyes at yet another chat service from Google (the number of different apps the company has built is legendary at the point), Hangouts Chat does offer something potentially valuable to companies using G Suite -- assuming they're not on Slack already. .... " 

Slack Using AI

So far have not been impressed with Slacks chatbot, but gives the impression that they are working on assisting the user.   Especially useful for new or infrequent users.   At first expected this to take the initiative more than it does.  I know that can be annoying, but perhaps another track/window to provide suggestions?  The article takes it further, how do they efficiently connect Slack conversations to specific work process?

Slack Hopes Its AI Will Keep You from Hating Slack
The fastest-growing business app is relying on machine-learning tricks to fend off a deluge of messages—as well as competition from Facebook and Microsoft.    by Elizabeth Woyke in TechnologyReview

Microsoft Teams vs Slack

Almost everyone I now talk to now is setting up a Slack channel.  Microsoft Teams is now happening, but still don't see it mentioned by clients.   Has to be a viable, free and easy to use option to compete.   Better links to Microsoft's Linkedin would also be appealing idea to recognize resources, internal and external.

Microsoft turns up heat on Slack with Teams group chat update
A Teams app directory is among the new features added to the company’s Office 365 group chat tool. Analysts say Microsoft is looking to match rivals like Slack in functionality.
               
 By Matthew Finnegan ... in Computerworld

Wal-Mart to Adopt Facebook's Workplace Edition

Quite an interesting and unexpected coup.   Is Facebook best for retail?  Consider how their Facebook M chatbot capability might be used for marketing.  Here at first this is internal use.  This could be a huge thing.  Search and image oriented.  Need to take a look at it.  See Workplace by Facebook.

Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise edition, snaps up Walmart as a customer   by Ingrid Lunden in TechCrunch

Workplace — Facebook’s bid to take on the Slack, Microsoft and the rest of the players in the market of business chat and collaboration — is getting a big push today by way of a significant customer win. The company has signed on Walmart, the retailing giant and the world’s biggest employer with 2.2 million employees on its books.

Walmart is rolling out Workplace to the whole of its business in stages, starting with associates and teams at Sam’s Club and other parts of the operation.

The move speaks to how Walmart — which last year acquired Jet.com for $3 billion — continues to step up its tech game as it feels the pinch of competition from Amazon, an e-commerce giant that is very quickly moving into Walmart’s brick-and-mortar territory.

“We believe the right technology can empower our people. Walmart’s vision of the future is centered around people — by serving the communities people live in and the people who work at Walmart,” said Clay Johnson, Walmart’s CIO and EVP. “Workplace shares this mission, and together we’re building the next generation workforce.”

Some of the uses so far for Walmart include to share pictures with other stores of a particular product display; to broadcast news via the Live video stream; and to manage communications between different geographies using Facebook’s automatic translation features (Walmart has operations across North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia). .... " 

A Chat Bot for Company Knowledge

I got a note recently that I should try Obie as a chat bot based on corporate knowledge provided in Slack.  I have now used Slack for several projects,  fine as a chat space for team projects,  somewhat quirky,  hard to integrate with typical and existing knowledge streams.    One of our AI goals had been to figure out how to link AI with corporate knowledge streams, old and new, static and dynamic, internal, supplier and public knowledge, structured and unstructured.    A remembrance engine we called it.  Perhaps a Knowledge Graph?   Is that what we are approaching here.?  Back to the wall we ran into:   How will it be maintained?   Just by updates in chats?   Back to the general problem of intelligent dialog.

Q&A With the Developers of Obie: A Chatbot for Company Knowledge  by Roland Meertens 

 Tasytt launched Obie: a Slack chatbot for company knowledge. Teams can ask "what, how, or where" questions such as "What is our computer policy". Obie either finds the answer in one of your documents or will ask you to provide him with the answer so he can give it next time someone asks the same questions.

Obie has integrations with several existing services: Google Docs, Confluence, Google sites, Evernote and Dropbox. This means companies don't have to start from the ground up with training Obie. Giving Obie access to this existing knowledge ensures a short training period for Obie.

InfoQ reached out to founder and CEO Chris Buttenham to ask him some questions about Obie.

InfoQ: We tried Obie a little bit in our Slack, but had the idea that it did not analyze our previous conversations. Is this a feature that will be added in a future version?

You could probably imagine you’re not the first to ask this question! Although it would seem that content living in Slack would be a natural place Obie would start, we actually feel that most conversations are fairly unstructured and somewhat useless when it comes to organizing team knowledge. We’re definitely considering adding content that lives within Slack as something Obie can reference, but we feel the low hanging fruit is the rich content scattered across multiple sources within an organization.    ... " 

Microsoft Teams is off Running

Seen it in Beta,  a group collaboration tool,  better than Slack, especially for users of other MS tools.    And who isn't?   Free for 365 users as I understand.   But it needs critical mass in groups to make it fly.   Continue to nurture it, Microsoft.  Keep it aimed at productivity, as opposed to another thing to update.   Connect it effectively to bot intelligence.   I had used Slack for real examples, but it was tedious.

Teams is Microsoft's most intriguing productivity app yet
The potential Slack-killer is rolling out to all Office 365 users today.

Devindra Hardawar, @devindra .... 

See also, related Google Hangout Chats.

Bot support is becoming common on these offerings.

Scientists using Slack

And other messaging tools.  My own experience is that most people that are balancing multiple real time, multiple participant tasks use messaging tools.   More are now also emerging.   And AI bot style add-ons are also now being included to enhance the experience through attentive and cognitive methods.  Expect that to evolve.  In Nature: 

How scientists use Slack
Eight ways labs benefit from the popular workplace messaging tool.  by Jeffrey M. Perkel ..... 

Microsoft Teams

Have been using advanced chat capability Slack for a project.  Not overly impressed.  Impressed me because it was new, not because it had real value.  Now Microsoft is attempting something similar:

Review: Microsoft Teams tries to do Slack one better
Microsoft is now offering the beta of Teams, its new group communications tool, which promises a new level of productivity for Office.

While it's become the standard productivity suite for many businesses, Microsoft Office has lacked a tool specifically built for group communication and collaboration.

Enter Microsoft Teams, a cloud-based, chat-centric app for group communication and collaboration, which lets groups and subgroups create their own channels to work together using text chat, file sharing, calendaring, and voice and video chat. It's targeted squarely at Slack, which has become a well-known option for businesses that want to encourage workplace communication (and is, incidentally, something that Microsoft reportedly considered buying for $8 billion until CEO Satya Nadella nixed the idea). ... " 

Slack Handling Your Mail

Still some time before we get to this but it would be nice. Fine tuning the details, and handling exceptions well will be key.  Current Slack is no where close.  In Inc: 

Slack Co-Founder on How Artificial Intelligence Could Eliminate the Need to Check Your Email Ever Again     ...  As Slack gets smarter, you might have to spend far less time sorting through your messages.  ..... By Kevin J. Ryan

HipChat on Echo for the Office Assistant?

With Alexa providing a more active orientation.  HipChat is team chat and file sharing system.   Akin to Slack, which I have used with a client.   Is this the way to bring assistants to the office?  But does this require the more difficult challenge of multi step, intelligent, conversational, memory augmented interaction?  Not there yet on the Echo.   Following.

Amazon's Echo is making its first moves into the office   by Matt Weinberger
On Tuesday, $5.5 billion Atlassian announces that it's bringing its popular HipChat app to the Amazon Echo family of smart speakers — making HipChat the first chat program available on Echo, and possibly marking a milestone in using virtual assistants at work.  ...."   via Walter Riker. 

Microsoft Slack Competitor via Skype?

 A Microsoft Slack Competitor via Skype?

Might Microsoft show off its Slack competitor at November 2 event?
Microsoft is planning to talk up team collaboration technologies at a November 2, 2016, event in New York City. Maybe we'll see the beta of Skype Teams launch then, too.  ... "   By Mary Jo Foley

Follow Mary Jo's Foley's ZDnet Microsoft blog for more on this.

With bot infrastructure to compete with Google Allo for the workplace?

Skipflag Rover

Furthers look at workplace bots.

What would you first want from a workplace conversation bot?  Reminders of how the current conversation relates to the knowledge derived from previous conversations, documents and analyses. Internal and external.

We looked at systems (bots)  that would watch while one developed a document, searched in wikis and other resources, and suggested and filled in links to past knowledge.  Is such straightforward search enough?  Perhaps best linked to a knowledge graph.  With deeper knowledge of natural language and context.

See work by  Skipflag   

" ... Turning conversations into knowledge ... 

Tired of sifting through information at work? .... 
Rover automatically discovers and organizes what you need to know. ... 
SkipFlag is using machine intelligence to build the knowledge graph for teams. Our software understands the people, projects, and topics in your company, organizing and connecting the dots to proactively keep you up to date. Join our waitlist at http://skipflag.com "   .... '

On Workplace Bots

Interesting on state of the art.   Slackbots and beyond

Jassim Latif on workplace bots
The O’Reilly Bots Podcast: Bots that can respond to groups of users.
By Jon Bruner