Add the missing ingredient for total Slack domination
We all know and love Slack for making work communication fun. It’s a messaging service for team collaboration, with heavy splashes of color, interrupting bots, and lots of emoji.
Beyond the design, it’s actually quite useful. Two things that stand out to me is that it’s far superior to (1) email and (2) meetings.
I hate email strings, not knowing what is attached, where it ends and picks up, and who is on the effing cc or bcc. Slack un-hides all of that, and places it in context for dynamic ongoing discussion and preserves for later historical recapture.
Slack also has reduced team meetings to almost zero, as team channels capture ideas and inspirations as they happen and as they develop. Less chit chat, more typing of what is relevant. When we do have live meetings, we often fill a team channel in advance of the meeting with documents and the agenda.
With both email and meetings covered in spades, Slack has become the digital office, except that it’s missing some really good filing cabinets.
Perhaps by accident or by design — for whatever reason — Slack is the place where we transfer files, lots of it, practically everything.
It makes sense that this is happening, because working around files is part of how teams work and Slack has brought down the barriers to how teams work.
In the past, you may have queued up an email and carefully considered the attachments; or, in preparation for an office meeting, you gathered documents together and printed out multiple sets for every attendee. With Slack, you just hit the “+” and add your file, in mid stream, in real time, in context, all the time.
Slack, however, does not manage files so well. And that makes sense, too, because Slack was designed for messaging, not files.
“A file is worth a thousand words”
Ok, I may have bastardized the old Chinese saying. But it’s true that files say a lot about what teams are doing or working on.
The problem with files in Slack is finding them, accessing them, and organizing them. This is where the odrive integration comes in to save the day.
Organized. You can directly access all your files in Slack channels and direct messages as individual folders on your desktop file system.
Direct access. You don’t need to download the files posted in Slack. You’ll find them on your local desktop, automatically and instantly.
Gallery view. You can take a gallery tour of a room that has tons of pictures for easy sorting.
Bi-directional sync. Unlike the British music sensation, our sync goes in Two Directions. If you add new files or make a saved edit, these will automatically post to your Slack channel or private message. This means that you and your team can stay *N Sync whether you are messaging in Slack or working locally on your files. (Sorry for the homage to boy bands).
What do you think so far?
We think the combination of odrive and Slack is so hot, like 98 Degrees hot. As a newly formed duo on the market, we may be the New Kids On The Block, but I can easily see odrive and Slack being used by every team, in every office, in every Backstreet. Boys and girls will love it! (can you tell we really love boy bands?)
If you haven’t yet, try it today as odrive is the Featured act in Slack’s app store: https://slack.com/apps
Stay tuned to this radio dial, because there is a lot more to come.
Slack’s API, documentation and integration team have been amazing, like with a capital “A”. Love them!
They quickly updated their API to accommodate a file handling method that we needed to make this magic. I feel that there is a lot more we can do to enhance the file experience with Slack.
So let us know what odrive and Slack can do together to make you less busy.
