Slack is making it easier to never leave Slack

Slack, the office workplace messaging app used by about three million people a day, took another step in its quest to become the app where you spend most of your working life. It added buttons.

They’re called message buttons, and they link to tasks in third-party applications. A common example: The boss sees "approve" and "deny" buttons in an automated message in their Slack feed for dealing with expense reports. In that instance, the buttons are connected to Abacus, a corporate expense reporting app.

Abacus is only one of a dozen third-party apps with buttons enabled in Slack. Others include Trello for managing projects; Kayak for travel; PagerDuty, an app for tracking and resolving unexpected problems; and Greenhouse, for approving new hires. Slack users who have those apps enabled can start using the buttons right away.

Slack also said the number of third-party apps it works with has grown to 500 since it launched its app directory in December.

Interview with Slack's Stewart Butterfield and other CEOs

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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