Dive Brief:

• Slack and Google announced Wednesday they are partnering to bring their shared customers "a suite of deep integrations."

• The integrations will include a Google Drive bot for instant permissions, previews and notifications, provisioning Slack from G Suite and other features designed to help users simply their working lives.

• The new integrations will be available in the first half of 2017, and according to a Slack blog, they are just the beginning. "Through this partnership we’re increasing our joint product and engineering efforts to strengthen the link between the content in Google Drive and the communication in Slack," according to a Google blog.

Dive Insight:

The new partnership could be a win-win. Google does not yet have an offering in the highly competitive workspace collaboration and productivity space, so they lack a way to compete with Facebook Workplace and Microsoft Teams. The partnership with Slack gives them an easy inroads into that market.

Up until now the companies have only had an informal partnership, where Google can integrate into Slack as one of its third-party functionalities. A Drive file is imported in Slack approximately 60,000 times every weekday, according to Google. 

The move is also key for Slack. One of its main weaknesses has been its ability to scale, which Google should help it easily accomplish.