Smart Cross-Organization Collaboration with Slack Canvas and List
Currently, I’m collaborating with engineers from multiple companies via Slack Connect for the product development of Giselle.
Have you ever struggled with information sharing tools when working with external partner companies? Situations like “Company A uses Notion, but Company B’s standard is Confluence, and our company mainly uses Google Workspace…” are quite common in many projects.
The hassle of creating accounts for new tools, information silos between tools, and above all, the fruitless coordination of “which tool should be the source of truth.” These small frictions gradually erode the overall productivity of a project.
This time, I’d like to share how our team solved this tool proliferation problem using Slack Canvas.
In our project, Slack Connect channels served as our primary communication hub. However, with just chat exchanges, important information quickly gets buried, making it difficult to look back later.
In particular, I felt that technical Q&A about services provided by partner companies—information we wanted to organize systematically—didn’t fit well with the flow format of chat.
That said, as mentioned earlier, forcing everyone to use a specific documentation tool wasn’t realistic.
Slack Canvas is a documentation feature that can be linked to Slack channels and DMs. What’s noteworthy is that as long as you’re connected via Slack Connect, all members from participating organizations can use it without any special preparation.
We immediately created a Canvas in our channel to consolidate technical Q&A. Specifically, we use it in the following way:
This allowed us to naturally build a “living document” with questions and answers paired together, without having to scroll through chat logs.
Based on actual use, I’ve identified three main advantages of Canvas:
This is the biggest benefit. For members participating in Slack Connect, no additional account creation or tool installation is required. As long as you have access to Slack, anyone can immediately participate in viewing and editing documents.
Being able to collaborate on the common platform of Slack, avoiding the “which company’s standard tool should we use” debate, is great for peace of mind. This is a neutral choice that isn’t affected by power dynamics between organizations.
Since documentation is handled within Slack, where we normally communicate, there’s no need to switch applications. This significantly reduces the cost of context switching and allows work to proceed without interrupting your train of thought.
Since our main focus was document sharing, we didn’t use it this time, but Slack also has a feature called List.
This is a simple task management feature that, like Canvas, is self-contained within Slack. It seems useful for shared issue lists across organizations or simple ToDo management, and I see great potential in it.
Using the distinction of “Canvas for documents, List for tasks” should make cross-organization collaboration even smoother.
In cross-organization collaboration, unifying tools is an eternal challenge. However, I feel that Slack Canvas provides one simple answer to this challenge.
If you’re struggling with information fragmentation in a project that involves collaboration with multiple companies, please try setting up a Canvas in your Slack Connect channel. You’ll surely be freed from the small frustrations you’ve been experiencing.
That’s all from the Gemba, where we’ve started leveraging Slack Canvas with multiple companies.