Reports from the beginning of this year show the Slack messaging platform is taking off in a big way.

In January, Financial Times reported on innovations through which the Slack system can be expanded to serve an entire company rather than just a set of connected individuals. The article quoted Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield as marking the $200 million milestone exceeded by the company with new cloud services attached to its messaging platform design.

Paul Armstrong, the founder of HERE/FORTH, is getting in on the power of the Slack platform by offering a service called social-lens that he says will be useful in North African countries and elsewhere in the world. The social-lens program gives users an analysis gleaned from places like Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter. Armstrong describes the service as something that helps users to “understand the big picture.”

“Slack communities like social-lens have the potential to really disrupt communities and businesses alike,” Armstrong told Maghreb News Wire Oct. 3. “While social-lens focuses on changes in the social media and technology spaces, there is no reason why different communities that focus on SMEs, health care or any other interest area couldn't exist.”

Armstrong said services like these need to refine the process by which companies get the message out to recipients, stressing the importance of user-facing design.

“The key is distributing the information so that it better serves the end user’s goals – be that knowledge- or action-based,” Armstrong said.

Slack isn’t the only company working quickly to generate new functionality – the Financial Times story also cites Dropbox, which, according to the report, “laid out new upgrades to try to address the way teams of workers across companies access common information” early this year.

What does this mean for Maghreb countries?

With a better connection to work teams in other regions of the world, companies in Morocco and Algeria and Tunisia and Libya can more proactively join the global economy. Some of these developments are real lifelines for businesses that need to expand beyond their national borders, and take on a highly competitive global business environment.