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Slack's new 'action buttons' could let you get more things done

Press a button to fire up a task.

Sean Hollister Senior Editor / Reviews
When his parents denied him a Super NES, he got mad. When they traded a prize Sega Genesis for a 2400 baud modem, he got even. Years of Internet shareware, eBay'd possessions and video game testing jobs after that, he joined Engadget. He helped found The Verge, and later served as Gizmodo's reviews editor. When he's not madly testing laptops, apps, virtual reality experiences, and whatever new gadget will supposedly change the world, he likes to kick back with some games, a good Nerf blaster, and a bottle of Tejava.
Sean Hollister
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Slack

I'm one of approximately 8 million people who use Slack every single day. I chat with co-workers, share links and pics, and the occasional emoji. Most of the time, I'm using it to coordinate actual work. Sometimes, I use it for fun. 

Soon, I'll be using it to launch other apps too with Slack's new Action Buttons. They're buttons that can send data from Slack to third-party apps, without you having to leave Slack.

Here's what that looks like:

Slack

According to Slack's official blog post on the subject, the new buttons will be pretty enterprise-y to start: Jira, Bitbucket, Asana, Zendesk and HubSpot will offer buttons that may help programmers, project managers and customer support reps do their jobs a little bit faster.

But you can easily imagine this coming in handy for all sorts of tasks, if or when app developers take advantage of the feature. Slack already had support for third-party app integrations, mind you, but this gives users and developers a clear way to take advantage of them in the natural flow of a Slack conversation.