In a year, Quip will no longer be listed in Salesforce’s catalog.
Subscriptions will stay active until they expire, but cannot be renewed after March 1, 2027.
Salesforce is opening the door wide to Slack and Agentforce Sales. It explains that it has decided to “reimagine the main use cases of Quip.” It mentions four: account planning, meeting notes, help documentation, and collaborative drafting.
For affected customers, a three-step process will begin at the end of the subscription:
- Read-only access for 90 days;
- Login locking for 30 days;
- Data deletion, typically within 30 days.
The transition will not be automatic. Salesforce will, however, provide a way to convert Quip documents into Slack canvases and to export other content types to third-party applications. It also promises change-management tools.
Live Data, Live Apps… Quip, a “Unified Canvas” Before Slack
Quip is the product of an acquisition. Salesforce took it on in the summer of 2016 for $750 million. It was then a productivity app combining communication and collaboration. One of its creators was Bret Taylor, a former CTO of Facebook… and future COO, then co-CEO of Salesforce.
The first bridge had been built at the SSO level (signing into Quip with a Salesforce account). The Live Data feature followed in early 2017. It allowed data from Salesforce to be integrated into Quip documents and spreadsheets and updated in real time. In parallel, a Lightning component was made available to search, view, and create Quip content within Salesforce.
Late 2017 brought Live Apps. They enabled actions on Salesforce objects (records, calendars, and kanbans to begin) and on third-party services (Atlassian, DocuSign, Lucidchart, New Relic…). In combination with Live Data, they embodied the concept of a unified canvas, which Salesforce would later champion with Slack.
And Then Came – the Ephemeral – Salesforce Anywhere
With these integrations in place, the Quip for Salesforce brand was born in early 2019. It quickly became Quip for Customer 360, granting access to Quip within the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud offerings, thanks to the Lightning component in question. The two initial content types—word processing and spreadsheets—were joined by slides (added to Quip in 2018) and chat rooms.
Still in 2019, Salesforce had established a connection with Process Builder and Flow Builder. The aim was to automate the creation of documents from CRM data. The following year, Quip could create slides embedding Einstein Analytics dashboards. Amazon, Autodesk, Cisco, DHL, HPE, Qantas, and Ticketmaster were then among the customers.
By mid-2020, Quip had found its place within the Salesforce Anywhere package. The brand, adopted in response to the “remote work” phenomenon, returned to the core of Customer 360. It linked, among other things, technologies inherited from a relatively recent acquisition: Vlocity, which had developed vertical CRMs on Salesforce. It depended mainly on a mobile and desktop application—then in beta—designed to centralize the work experience around Salesforce workflows. In particular, a chat and video module powered by Amazon Chime and integrated with Zoom. Quip had its place there as the collaborative layer. Tanium was also in the loop to help scale IT support.
Salesforce Anywhere would soon fade from view. And the Quip brand would reappear accordingly, in September 2021. A few weeks earlier, Salesforce had completed the acquisition of Slack.
