Slack announced the availability of User Groups, which enable people to target messages at specific groups separate from entire channels. The feature enables you to send a message to only the engineers or only the marketing team, for example, regardless of how you have your channels set up.

“User Groups also help you manage channel membership and bring an additional level of order to the team directory,” Slack says in a blog post. “When you create a user group you can define a default set of channels to which all members of the group will belong. Then, whenever you add a new employee to the @engineers group, they’ll automatically be added to every one of your related engineering channels and get up to speed on previous Slack discussions that much quicker. It’s a small part of this new feature, but a huge win that helps automate onboarding at growing companies.”

“User Groups also help you manage channel membership and bring an additional level of order to the team directory,” it says. “When you create a user group you can define a default set of channels to which all members of the group will belong. Then, whenever you add a new employee to the @engineers group, they’ll automatically be added to every one of your related engineering channels and get up to speed on previous Slack discussions that much quicker. It’s a small part of this new feature, but a huge win that helps automate onboarding at growing companies.”

User Groups are enabled for all Slack teams on paid plans, including Standard and Plus. Those using Single Sign On on the Plus plan can use groups to control provisioning accounts from their SSO tools.

Earlier this week, Slack announced Group Messages, which enable you to add up to 8 people (in addition to yourself) on any direct message conversation.

Clearly both of these features continue to make Slack an even better communication tool when you’re dealing with teams.

Image via Slack