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Workday and Slack are teaming up to help employees access human resources information and complete related tasks without bouncing between apps.
The companies announced an upcoming integration on March 21 that will enable Workday users to directly interact with the human capital management platform using Slack, the popular chat-based collaboration tool. Beginning in the fall of 2018, users will be able to access many of the functions available in Workday by simply typing commands into a Slack conversation.
“For customers, this strategic partnership means they will be able to engage Workday from within the Slack interface for contextual and actionable data to complete tasks,” wrote Joe Korngiebel, chief technology officer at Workday, in a March 21 announcement. “Initially, employees will be able to interact with Workday through conversational language to gain access to co-worker information, provide anytime feedback to a colleague, or request time off, all without having to leave Slack.”
More capabilities are in the works, revealed Slack in a separate announcement.
IT teams will be able to assign employees to the proper Slack channel based on the department in which they work. Custom notifications will allow users to configure the Workday alerts that show up in Slack and allow users to act on those notifications without switching out of the app.
Workday is just one of companies that are extending their platforms with Slack’s help.
On March 14, Slack and SAP announced the public beta availability of the Concur Expense and Travel bots for joint U.S. customers. Acquired by SAP’s U.S. subsidiary for $8.3 billion in 2014, Concur is a cloud-based expense and travel management service.
The Concur Expense bot allows users to upload receipts using Slack, tag expenses by typing a simple descriptor and get updates on the status of expense reports by requesting a summary. Managers, in turn, can approve expense reports in Slack.
In terms of business travel, the Concur Travel bot, a collaboration between online travel site Hipmunk, Concur Travel and Concur Labs, allows users to search and book flights. Users can request itineraries or trip details and have the results delivered in a Slack conversation.
In February, Slack announced an improved GitHub app that allows developers to keep better track of their software projects. Users can subscribe to GitHub repository notifications with a simple command and view rich previews of links that point to public GitHub repositories that are posted to Slack. Rich previews for private repositories will arrive in a future release.
Workday, meanwhile, has been turning its attention to improving security for its users.
The company announced that it had partnered with Duo Security on an enhanced security toolset that layers additional protections onto Workday’s existing authentication schemes. The integration allows organizations to add more identity verification steps or prohibit access to the platform if a device is running an outdated or vulnerable version of an operating system.