Welcome back to another news round from the enterprise chat industry. Over the last week, we’ve seen several news stories about Slack, plus new features from Microsoft Teams.
Here are some of the most exciting stories from the sector between the 15th and the 22nd of August.
Slack Raises New Round of Financing
Despite an outage this week, Slack is still moving in the right direction. The company has been working on bringing more funding into its organization — no doubt with a vision for new and innovative services for customers. The Slack Team formally announced that it would be adding an additional $427 million in total to their Series H equity round.
Lead investors for this new equity round include General Atlantic and Dragoneer Investment Group. The announcement from Slack also noted that the team would be using this new investment to access “more resources and flexibility” to help them serve their customers.
Slack Faces Network Issues Again
Following an outage in June, Slack faced significant network problems again this week. On the 16th of August, the issues centered mainly around the Workspace and organization administration services. Many companies found themselves unable to send direct messages, and again, team members had to resort to sending emails or speaking to people in person.
Slack immediately took to Twitter to reassure users that it was looking into the connectivity problems. Within the same day, the service was back up and running. However, users across the UK, USA and Europe were left feeling less confident about Slack’s resiliency measures.
Microsoft Introduces New VSTS Dashboard Integration for Teams
After upgrades to Microsoft Teams at the beginning of August, Microsoft is continuing to deliver new features for their enterprise chat users. On the 17th of August, they announced VSTS dashboard integration for Teams.
The dashboards give companies the flexibility to monitor progress in their Team groups, share information and simplify workflow processes. Once configured, these dashboards will be available to any Team member with the right permissions.
Adding a VSTS dashboard to your Teams is easy. Simply select VSTS from the tab gallery and you’ll be ready to go. Once you’re connected, you can choose the dashboard you want to bring into Teams and save your creation. The dashboard automatically updates whenever you open the tab in Teams.
Evernote Refines Integration with Slack
Evernote announced some refinements to enhance their app within Slack this week. Evernote is the app that keeps your notes organized. Memos are synced so they’re accessible and searchable anywhere. For users of both Slack and Evernote, one within the other makes so much sense.
Erik Robel, Chief Product Officer at Evernote, explained “Earlier this year, Slack announced something called Slack Actions. It allows you to surface an application in a more visual way, so discoverability and ease of use is better to reduce friction”.
Further to this, users can now use Evernote in Slack. Doing so will create a “Notes from Slack” folder in your Evernote app, creating a two way communication channel. From there, users can edit and move notes. You can even save a conversation in Slack and pick it up in Evernote later on.
Thanks for joining us in our latest weekly news roundup. We’ll be back with more updates next week! Remember to catch up with us on Twitter and LinkedIn for more of the latest news about Enterprise Chat!
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