Slack goes after email with ‘Connect DM’ — opening up chats with folks outside your company

Slack is useful to connect with your teammates and avoid sending them emails for things that can be discussed quickly through a chat. However, to talk to a person from a client or partner organization whom you interact with regularly, you’d need to email them and maybe even schedule a meeting or call them to check a trivial detail.

Now, Slack is solving that problem by introducing a new feature called Connect DMs that’ll let you chat with someone from outside your organization through just a few clicks. This sounds like an email but in a chat format.

In June, the company introduced Slack Connect, a way for multiple companies to have a joint slack channel. It said that over 56,000 organizations have been using this feature after the launch, and Slack Connect DM is the next step of that.

The implementation is easy: you generate a link for starting Slack Connect DM and send it to your contact. Once they accept the invitation, you can chat with them directly in Slack. Plus, you will have control to revoke access at any time.

If you talk to people in a particular firm frequently, your admin can add that company to trusted contacts as well so you don’t have to go through the approval process every time.

In addition to that, Slack will verify some organizations with a checkmark — something like a verified marker of Twitter. So, when someone from that company sends you an invitation, you know it’s a genuine request and not an attempt for phishing.  This comes in handy when you’re talking to sales or customer support reps of a service that you use frequently

Along with this, Slack also announced tighter integration with apps such as DocuSign to securely send and receive documents from within the app.

Slack Connect DM and verified organization is going to roll out in early 2021.