Turning email into a platform

Mathilde Collin

Mathilde Collin,

CEO & Co-founder at Front

17 April 20200 min read

You can now integrate your favorite apps into Front, so you can access and edit them directly in your inbox. Read about the start of the Front platform.

E-mail is the platform for work. If you’re reading this post, chances are that anything that is related to your work comes or goes in an e-mail at some point: conversations, introductions, notifications, attachments, assignments, inquiries, updates and summaries, they all find their way into our inbox.

That’s what’s so great about email. There is so much happening in an inbox!

Problem is, it’s incredibly hard for other tools to take advantage of this. E-mail is a combination of complex and aging technologies. Many companies have tried to kill e-mail, transform e-mail, disrupt e-mail, and their lack of success suggests that it’s just plain hard. E-mail has been around for so long, and huge corporate sponsors (Google, Apple, Microsoft) have invested so much in it, that the 2015 standards for an acceptable e-mail user experience are very, very high.

Thusly, much of the rich data that transits in your inbox is completely lost to the rest of your tools; unless you manually build the bridges to connect them. Salesforce, Trello, Asana, Jira or Zendesk are all great tools to get a specific job done, and e-mail is the communication layer on top of all of them — but they don’t integrate well with each other, and this fragmentation is detrimental to productivity.

Introducing Integrations

We built Integrations in Front to solve this exact problem. We’ve already completed the most requested integrations (Salesforce, Slack, Trello, Asana, Github, HipChat, Zapier, Full Contact etc.) and will continue to add native ones in the future. Additionally, our API allows third party developers to build their own apps and integrations directly inside Front, so that it can truly become the unified view of your team’s communication.

See what’s coming on our Front product roadmap.

Written by Mathilde Collin

Originally Published: 17 April 2020

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