Slack's new Shared Channels feature is almost magical

Just a day after Microsoft introduced guest access for Microsoft Teams, Slack is taking its own guest access support a major step forward. At its Frontiers conference in San Fransisco today, the company introduced a new feature called Shared Channels. The service’s new Shared Channels will let teams invite members from another organization into their own Slack.

From there, both teams will be able to interact with each other within the shared channel, conduct meetings, share files, and do literally everything else you can do with a normal channel on your Slack workspace. Guests from another organization will also have a tiny logo of their company near their avatar so that it’s easy for you to identify who’s from the company you are working with. These shared channels can also be public or private just like a regular channel (this isn’t launching today), and users will also be able to use the different integrations and apps that are available on the channel.

Slack’s shared channels are super cool, mainly because you will no longer need to invite users from another organization individually. Instead, you can just invite the whole organization and get right to the work. Shared Channels are only available to teams using Slack’s paid Standard and Plus plans as part of a beta, and it’ll be later rolled out to all paid teams.

Slack also announced today it now had more than 50 thousand paid teams earlier this summer, along with 2 million paid users. For comparison, Microsoft announced just yesterday that the company’s Teams service is being used by 125,000 organizations only 6 months after its launch. At the end of the day, Microsoft Teams is integrated into Office 365, which means Microsoft didn’t really have to do a lot in order to get 125 thousand companies to use Teams.