Salesforce doubles down on Slack at annual Dreamforce event

Salesforce is increasingly using workplace messaging app Slack to attract customers to its core sales software service.

Most of Salesforce’s announcements on Tuesday at its annual Dreamforce user conference centered on Slack, which Salesforce bought for $27.7 billion in July.

Salesforce pitched the announcements as part of an effort to make Slack a central hub for corporate customers to chat about business deals, discuss marketing data stored in Salesforce, and more quickly meet to talk about customer complaints.

The announcements involve what’s known as “integrations”—the rewiring of corporate apps so that they better work with each other and thereby free customers from having to manually connect them. In one example, businesses that use Salesforce’s Quip workplace software will be able to more easily access Slack to discuss projects.

Salesforce also on Tuesday debuted a new Slack feature, Slack Clips, that lets users record videos of themselves giving presentations. The feature would make attending video meetings more convenient because people would be able to watch them when they want, rather than having to log in at a specific time, while also getting access to automatically generated transcripts. The new tool is akin to services offered by fast-rising startups like Loom and Weet, except it’s embedded directly into the Slack app.

“So you get the context that comes with the video, the voice the facial expressions, but you don’t have to spend time in a status call as people go round robin,” Slack chief Stewart Butterfield said.

Clips is among several new features Slack has debuted to expand beyond its core messaging service. Earlier this summer it added Huddles, which lets users make audio calls to colleagues in a way that’s supposed to replicate spontaneous hallway conversations.