Slack Connect DMs were unveiled last fall and now the company is rolling out support for the new feature. It means you can message partners, clients, etc. outside of your organization or anyone that’s on Slack. Going further, Slack also teased more advanced communication features coming later this year to create private business networks that will link multiple organizations.
Update: Discovered by Menotti Minutillo, it looks like Slack may need to update how Connect DMs work to prevent the feature from being abused. For now, there doesn’t appear to be a way to block incoming invites and the included custom messages. Check out the tweet from Menotti below for full details.
Update 2: After hearing about the abuse flaws, Slack has pulled the option to send a custom message when requesting to send DMs. The new feature is still live, it’s just the ability to send a custom message when inviting others to DM that has been removed.
The company shared the statement with The Verge:
“After rolling out Slack Connect DMs this morning, we received valuable feedback from our users about how email invitations to use the feature could potentially be used to send abusive or harassing messages. We are taking immediate steps to prevent this kind of abuse, beginning today with the removal of the ability to customize a message when a user invites someone to Slack Connect DMs,” Jonathan Prince, the company’s vice president of communications and policy, tells The Verge.
Slack detailed Connect DMs becoming available starting today and more new business communication features that will be launching in the future in a pair of blog posts (via The Verge). While the ability to direct message anyone on Slack will have lots of use cases for businesses and organizations, any paid Slack account can use the feature to slide into the DMs of both paid and free Slack users.
Slack Connect is a faster, more secure way to work than emailing people outside your company. It’s the same Slack you use every day, but with people outside of your workspace.
Simply send an invite to any partner and start messaging in Slack as soon as the other side accepts. If you need a dedicated space for planning projects and looping in others, create channels between organizations, where members of invited organizations can freely come and go as needed.
We’re seeing the feature live now. You can check if it’s available for you by clicking “Slack Connect” near the top of your sidebar in Slack. From there you’ll just need the email of the person you’re wanting to message to get started.
Once your partner accepts the emailed invitation, they’ll automatically appear in your list of direct message recipients and you’ll be able [to] message them in Slack. This includes any current user of Slack, even those on the free plan.
Free users can’t send Connect DMs for now unless they sign up for a trial of a paid Slack plan. But the feature is slated to arrive for all Slack users soon.
You can find more tips and details in Slack’s blog post on Connect DMs here.
And in another post today, Slack shared how it will expand all this with the ability to “Link together multiple organizations to create a private business network, allowing for unified directories, channel discovery and more (available later this year).”
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