Dec
01
2020
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Loop Team wants to give remote workers an in-office feel

As we’ve moved to work from home during the pandemic, it’s been challenging for remote workers to feel connected. Loop Team, a new entrant into the enterprise communications space, thinks the way we are communicating needs improvement. That’s why the startup is releasing Loop Team today, a tool that is trying to use software to reproduce the in-office experience.

Company founder and CEO Raj Singh says that he learned about the problems of feeling disconnected first-hand at a previous remote-first company, but in spite of his best attempts to use technology to produce that in-office feel, he said he continued to feel out of the loop (so to speak). That’s when he decided to build the solution he wanted.

“We’ve looked at a lot of the interactions that happen when you’re physically in an office — the visual communication, the background conversations, the hallway chatter, the serendipitous bumping, things like that. And we built an experience that effectively is a virtual office. And so it tries to represent the best parts of what a physical office experience might be like, but in a virtual form,” Singh explained to me.

While he created this company prior to COVID, the pandemic has highlighted the need for a tool like this. Before he created the software, he interviewed hundreds of people who worked from home to understand their issues working outside of the office and he heard a lot of common complaints.

“There was an office and they didn’t necessarily know what was going on. They didn’t know who was available. They didn’t know who was around. It was difficult to connect. Everything was scheduled through a calendar. They were missing some of that presence — and they were feeling lonely or out of touch or out of the loop,” he said.

His company’s solution tries to reproduce the office experience using AI, good old-fashioned presence awareness and other tech to let team members know what you’re doing and if you’re available to chat. So just as you would wander down the hall and see your colleague on the phone or deeply involved with work on the laptop, and know to leave them be, you could get that same feel with Loop.

Loop Team Highlights

Image Credits: Loop Team

It gives the current status of the person, and you can know from looking at the list of people on your team who’s available to talk and who’s busy. As you go into virtual discussions, the team can see who’s having meetings and individuals can pop in too, just as you might do in the office.

What’s more, you can set up rooms (like in Slack), but these are designed to give you a more personal connection using video and audio for actual discussion. You can work on projects via screen share and people who miss these meetings because of other obligations or time zone differences can always review what they missed.

While you can do all of these things in Slack and Zoom, or in some combination of similar tools, Loop’s layout and presentation is designed to help you see the conversations in a clear way and expose what you want to see, while hiding parts of the day that don’t interest you.

The product is available for free starting today, but Singh wants to introduce a pricing model sometime next year based on team size. He expects there will always be a freemium version for teams with fewer than 10 people.

The company was founded in 2018 and nurtured at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). It has raised $4.75 million so far. Today it starts on its journey as a startup with its first product, and it’s one that comes with good timing as more teams find themselves working remotely than ever before.

May
12
2020
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Atlassian acquires Halp to bring Slack integration to the forefront

Atlassian announced today that it was acquiring Halp, an early-stage startup that enables companies to build integrated help desk ticketing and automated answers inside Slack. The companies did not disclose the purchase price.

It was a big day for Halp, which also announced its second product today, called Halp Answers. The new tool will work hand in glove with its previous entry Halp Tickets, which lets Slack users easily create a Help Desk ticket without leaving the tool.

“Halp Answers enables your teams to leverage the knowledge that already exists within your company to automatically answer tickets right in Slack . That knowledge can be pulled in from Slack messages, Confluence articles or any piece of knowledge in your organization,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the deal.

Note that integration with Confluence, which is an Atlassian tool. The company also sees it integrating with Jira support for other enterprise communications tools down the road. “Existing Halp users can look forward to deeper (and new) integrations with Jira and Confluence. We’re committed to supporting Microsoft Teams customers as well,” Atlassian wrote in a blog post.

Halp is selling early, having just launched last year. The company had raised a $2 million seed round in April 2019 on a $9.5 million post valuation, according to PitchBook data. The startup sees an opportunity with Atlassian that it apparently didn’t think it could achieve alone.

“We’ll be able to harness the vast resources at Atlassian to continue with our mission to make Halp the best tool for any team collaborating on requests with other teams. Our team will grow and be able to focus on making the core experience of Halp even more powerful. We’ll also develop a deeper integration with the Atlassian suite — improving our existing Jira and Confluence integrations and discovering the possibilities of Halp generating alerts in Opsgenie, cards in Trello, and much more,” the company wrote.

Halp’s founders promise that it won’t be abandoning its existing customers as it joins the larger organization. As a matter of fact, Halp is bringing with them a slew of big-name customers, including Adobe, VMware, GitHub and Slack.

Aug
14
2019
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Slack announces new admin features for larger organizations

Slack has been working to beef up the product recently for its larger customers. A couple of weeks ago that involved more sophisticated security tools. Today, it was the admins’ turn to get a couple of new tools that help make it easier to manage Slack in larger settings.

For starters, Slack has created an Announcements channel as a way to send a message to the entire organization. It would typically be used to communicate about administrative matters like changes in HR policy or software updates. The Announcements channel allows admins to limit who can send messages, and who can respond, so the channels stay clean and limit chatter.

Illan Frank, director of product for enterprise at Slack, says that companies have been demanding this ability because they need a clean channel with reliable information from a trusted source.

“With this feature, [admins] can set this channel up as an announcement-only channel with the right folks in [IT or HR] who can who make announcements, and now this is a clean, controlled environment for important announcements and updates,” Frank explained.

The other piece Slack is announcing today is new APIs for creating templated workspaces. This is especially useful in environments where users have to create a bevy of new spaces frequently. Picture a university with professors setting up spaces for each of their classes with a set of tools for students, who all have to join the space.

Doing this manually, especially when everybody is setting them up at the same time at the beginning of a semester, could be tedious and chaotic, but by providing programmatic templated workflows, it brings a level of automation to the process.

Frank says while workspaces in and of themselves are not new, the automation layer is. “What is new about this is the API and the ability to automate the creation and management of these connectors [programmatically with code],” he said.

For starters, it will allow automated workspace creation based on information in Web forms. Later, the company will be adding scripting capabilities to build even more sophisticated workflows with automated configuration, apps and content.

Finally, Slack is automating the approval process for tools used inside Slack channels or workspaces. Pre-approved applications can be added to Slack automatically, while those not on the approved list would have to go through a separate process to get approved.

The Announcements tool is available starting today for customers with Plus and Enterprise Grid plans. The API and approval tools will be available soon for Enterprise Grid customers.

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