Dive Brief:

• In an effort to better workplace collaboration, Slack is opening its platform to other workplace software integrations, according to a company announcement. The "Actions" tool allows users to incorporate features like creating a task, commenting or message follow-up with other software like Hubspot and Jira.

• The integration allows specific actions to be done through Slack's communication platform rather than in another workplace software. However, the tasks are meant to be "short" and "bite-sized" so companies will still need full access to the integrated workplace apps to access more in-depth data or services, according to April Underwood, chief product officer, reports Fortune.

• The communication platform already has more than 1,500 apps in its directory and 94% of its users use apps and integrations. But because the company is not creating services like sales tracking, for example, integrations like this will help round out Slack's performance portfolio, according to Underwood.

Dive Insight:

Slack is known as the original communication platform and was dubbed most innovative by experts. However, because the platform lacked some qualities needed for an enterprise tool, it gave way for companies like Microsoft to surpass Slack's hold on the market.

The company reported significantly more service outages than its competitors, Atlassian's HipChat and Stride. In a single year Slack reported 40 days of outages and 51 days of disrupted services while Atlassian had four days of outages and 25 days of interruptions.

In an effort to maintain pace with its behemoth competitors, Slack says it is remedying the situation with a stronger chaos engineering team.

But before Slack unveiled more workplace software integrations, the company announced a partnership with Workday in March. Similar to how the new integrations work, only certain functions can be done on Slack's platform, though more are expected to be added.