Slack unveils new features to allow messaging between companies, including Connect DMs, Verified Organizations, more, coming later this year or early next year
opening up chats with folks outside your company Paayal Zaveri / Business Insider : Slack is greatly expanding the ability for users to message people at other companies, as it works to replace work email and take on Microsoft Tweets: Jonathan Lehr / @fendien : This actually looks cool and could lead to new engagement models between startups and their customers + prospects beyond the functionality that exists today https://twitter.com/... Thanks: @samueljevans
Context & Ripple Effects
Slack has been dismantling the boundary between its customers' workspaces for years: Enterprise Grid scaled the platform inside large firms in 2017, and in June 2020 it launched Connect, letting up to 20 organizations share a single channel for paying customers. Connect DMs and Verified Organizations extend that arc from shared channels to one-to-one messaging between any two companies, plus a trust layer to prove who is on the other end.
The timing matters because Slack is positioning messaging itself — not just internal chat — as a replacement for work email, directly against Microsoft, per Business Insider's report. The follow-through shows the bet was real: by March 2021 Slack shipped Connect DMs to all users, and quickly reworked its opt-in invite flow after feedback that it could be abused — the trust problem Verified Organizations is designed to preempt.
First-order effects
- Slack users gain the ability to message people at other companies directly, and organizations get Verified Organizations to authenticate who they are talking to — with the features slated for later this year or early next year.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's competing workplace suite now faces a rival whose network spans company boundaries, pressuring it to answer on cross-organization messaging rather than internal chat alone.
Third-order effects
- If cross-company DMs become the default, business communication consolidates around a few messaging networks with identity verification as the trust layer — the role email's open protocol has played, but governed by platform owners like Slack and Microsoft.
The trend: Work messaging platforms are evolving from internal chat tools into inter-company communication networks that compete to displace email, with verified identity as the gating mechanism.