Slack gets Google Calendar integration to remind you about your next meeting

Slack is rolling out a new integration today that lets users keep track of when their next meetings are. The service now supports Google Calendar, which can notify teams in a Slack Channel or privately tell individuals when their next meeting will be.

It’s unknown how much time people spend within Slack, but if it’s going to be your main communication platform, it’s tough to have to switch back and forth between apps just to find out what’s on the day’s agenda. We’d all like a gentle reminder, as we’re caught up in the latest work or random discussion in a channel, that says, “Hey, time to go to this meeting.”

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With the Google Calendar integration, users can allow any calendar (even on multiple Google accounts) to post a custom reminder before any events, either publicly or privately via @slackbot. There’s even a daily and weekly events digest that users can opt into.

If you’re interested, here’s how you can integrate Google Calendar into Slack:

• On your team account, select Google Calendar within Slack’s integrations page.
• Connect a Google account to Slack in order to choose from a list of calendars. As mentioned, multiple Google accounts are supported.
• Choose from any calendar associated with that Google account and pick the Slack channel reminders should be posted to.
• Customize the options for the new rule. If updates become too much, they can be reduced to daily/weekly summaries or on days that best work for everyone.
• Save the integration.

While this integration helps keep engagement within Slack, it’s not a way to replace the calendar application — it’s just another supported service. Users will still have to deal with a standalone calendar app in order to create events and schedule meetings with colleagues, but once that’s done, Slack can act as your own personal assistant to let you know when you should go to the next event.

This is the second integration the company has made this month. Two weeks ago, Slack stepped up its emoji support to now allow users to react to other people’s messages. It’s safe to say that more integrations are expected.

Slack revealed in June that teams have set up more than 900,000 integrations now, a pretty big increase from the last revealed count in February, when there was 800,000. Customers can already add services like GitHub, Google Drive, Trello, and Twitter to their channels.

The company counts more than 1.1 million daily active users on the site — that could be a lot of reminders.

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