Use Slack to Work with People Outside Your Organization

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Use Slack Connect to centralize your work and conversations into one secure place.
Invite others to join the conversation by using Slack Connect.

Trailcast

If you'd like to listen to an audio recording of this unit, please use the player below. When you’re finished listening to this recording, remember to come back to the unit, check out the resources, and complete the quiz.

Get to Know Slack Connect

If you already use Slack, you know that it’s a great tool for communicating, sharing ideas, and making decisions with people in your organization. But what if you want to work with others outside your company? Slack Connect makes it easy. With Slack Connect, you can share channels externally, build relationships, and easily communicate with other organizations to streamline work, increase productivity, and collaborate more efficiently with partners, vendors, and customers.

Who Can Use Slack Connect?

Anyone! That’s right. Slack Connect is for anyone who needs to work with others outside of their organization. If you have a Slack paid plan, you can start using Slack Connect right away. It’s easy to start conversations with others, even if they don’t currently use Slack.

As your business grows, your relationships and your workload grow along with it. Slack Connect supports this growth by allowing up to 250 organizations to work together in a single channel. There’s no limit to the number of channel members. And because you can create an unlimited number of channels, you can reach as many organizations as you need to.

So, how do you start using Slack Connect and inviting others to join? To work in channels together, each organization must subscribe to a paid Slack plan. External channels (channels shared outside your own company) behave just like internal channels: People can join them and add other members of their organization. You can send direct messages (DMs) to people outside your organization, but if you want to work in a group DM, everyone must be in at least one channel together.

What if your partner or customer isn’t on a paid Slack plan? No problem. If someone you’re working with doesn’t have a paid plan, or isn’t using Slack at all, simply invite them to use Slack, and they get a 90-day free trial.

Get Organized with Channels

Slack replaces email and meetings by moving your communications into channels, which organize your work in easy-to-find conversations. A channel is your one-stop-shop for information and conversations related to a particular topic or focus area. You can invite others who share that common focus—whether it’s a project or a topic of interest—to join the channel.

Example of a Slack channel.

What are the benefits of using channels? Keeping channels targeted and customized to your work helps everyone:

Stay organized. Creating a dedicated channel for projects or topics helps you be more focused and have meaningful conversations.
Increase productivity. With channels, conversations are searchable. You can easily find answers and make better decisions without looking through emails or chasing down people or information.
Align with channel members. Did you recently add a team member to your project? No problem! With channels, members have full context when they join, since they can access all previous conversations and information.
Control access. You can make channels public or private, or use direct messages to reach out directly to other users.

Channel Ownership

If you create a channel in your organization’s workspace, your organization owns that channel. Only the channel owner can invite other organizations or remove them from the channel.

Invite Others to Join Your Channel

Ready to start collaborating? Whether you’re using the Slack desktop app or the mobile app on your IOS or Android device, you can invite others to join your channel in just a few simple steps. When you send an invite, it expires after 14 days (but if this happens, you can always send a new one).

Note that your Slack admin can restrict who can invite people from other companies to channels. If you don’t see this option, find an owner or admin and ask for help.

Desktop

Create a new channel, or open the channel you’d like to invite people to.
Click the channel name in the conversation header.
Click the Settings tab. Below Slack Connect, click Work With Another Company.
Enter the email address or name for anyone you’d like to send an invitation to, then click Send.
Click Done.

iOS and Android (when creating a new channel)

Tap the Home tab at the bottom of your screen.
Tap the plus icon next to Channels.
Tap Create in the top-right corner.
Enter a channel name.
Add a description to let others know what the channel is about.
Tap Share outside (workspace name).
Tap Share a Link or Choose from Contacts.
Tap Create in the top-right corner to finish.

IOS and Android (when inviting others to an existing channel)

Go to the channel that you want to share.
Tap the channel name at the top.
At the bottom of the screen, tap Share this channel.
Tap Share a Link or Choose from Contacts.
Tap Done in the top-right corner to finish.

That’s it! You’re ready to connect with other organizations using Slack Connect. In the next unit, we take a look at security.

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