Slack, the popular chatting app that uses channels (business groups) last year has this week acquired Astro an email app powered by Artificial intelligence (AI). With over, over 50 million channels created in Slack—this will help users collaborate together.
According to Slack’s blog, “We believe that what makes channels so powerful is a thriving platform that brings together conversations, files, and best-of-breed software tools into one streamlined hub for collaboration. More and more, channels are where work happens for teams around the world.”
Billions of emails are sent every day, and in those are millions of documents exchanged, contracts negotiated and decisions memorialized. Slack has taken some steps to make it possible to integrate email into Slack, but now they are in a position to make that interoperability much simpler and much, much more powerful. Their goal is to make it as easy as possible to help teams shift conversations to where they would be most productive — in a channel, alongside the relevant context and software tools teams use at work, from ServiceNow and Salesforce to Workday and Box.
The acquisition of Astro, a company with deep expertise in email infrastructure Slack aims to achieve all of the above. The team at Astro has also worked on email and messaging tools like Zimbra, Acompli (acquired by Microsoft, and the foundation for Outlook Mobile), and Mumbo (acquired by LinkedIn). We see this as a natural next step as channel-based collaboration becomes the default way of working.
So what happened to current Astro users?
Starting Wednesday October 10, the Astro app will be shut down. To ensure minimal disruption, please the team has advised users to switch now to email apps from Google, Microsoft, Apple or other providers.
Astro continually syncs information with Gmail & Office 365 accounts, so you can switch to other apps without seeing changes in your messages or calendar events. But remember not to leave behind any reminders or emails in Astro that you’ve snoozed or scheduled to send after October 10, since those will be deleted upon shutdown.
