Hot on the heels of Facebook Inc.’s announcement about app integrations for Workplace, Slack Technologies Inc. announced today that it has formed a partnership with Google Inc. to bring native Google Drive support to Slack.

“Turns out many of you love using Slack and Google together — so much so that millions of Google Drive files are shared in Slack each month,” the Slack team wrote in a blog post. “Moving forward, you’ll be able to do even more with our products.”

The new integration comes with Slack’s own chatbot, Drive Bot, which pushes comment and access request notifications for Google Docs, Sheets and Slides directly to Slack. Drive Bot also allows Slack users to approve, reject and settle comments straight without ever having to leave the app, but if still you want to open the file itself, Drive Bot provides a link that will take you straight to it.

Another feature added with the new integration is the ability for admins to create Team Drives, which automatically sync files uploaded to specific Slack channels to a corresponding shared Google Drive folder. According to the Slack team, companies can also choose to set a Team Drive as the main data store for all files uploaded to any of their Slack channels, ensuring that everything that is shared on Slack is backed up on Google Cloud.

The upcoming Google Drive integration will also offer a few quality-of-life improvements, including the ability to preview content from Google Docs that are shared on Slack. In addition, the Slack team said it’s “going to take some of the peskier permission-checking off your plate.” In the future, Slack will automatically check group permissions whenever a Google Drive file is shared to a channel, ensuring that the users in that group are actually allowed to view the file. If not, the user who originally tried to share the file will be notified and the file will not be posted to the channel.

Finally, the new integration will allow businesses to provision their Slack users directly through the G Suite admin console. According to Slack, this feature will work for both new and existing teams.

Slack’s new Google Drive integrations will arrive sometime in the first half of 2017, and the Slack team hinted in the blog post that it may be adding other functions in the future.

Image courtesy of Slack