There is a lot of efficiency gained since emails can often be heavy and include lots of extra wording, signatures, greetings, etc. There are plenty of conversations that just move faster through a lightweight chat system.
Lots of companies were using MSN, Skype, Lync, Gmail, IRC, etc to do chat before and now there's finally a better crop of tools like HipChat, FlowDock, Slack and others. They all offer various abilities above just chat messaging like APIs and integrations to get notified about various other things all in the same place.
Is Slack a nice tool? Yes, it's finally a chat system that works for actual business needs.
Is Slack worth this much and better than everyone else? Not sure, the other ones mentioned are pretty good too and there are still lots of missing features with all of them. $2.8B seems very inflated, but then again this is Silicon Valley at work.
No, it is not "just chat." Chat is just one function. Slack basically brings ALL of the information that is relevant to your team in one place. It has out-of-the-box integrations with a TON of services, and all the data they are sending to your team's Slack feed can then be search on, which provides massive productivity advantages.
> They all offer various abilities above just chat messaging like APIs and integrations to get notified about various other things all in the same place.
Thanks for the confirmation.
It's OK though. I know you're just being obtuse.
And no it doesn't bring "all the information" together, there's still plenty happening outside of it.
Enjoy using it but we don't need all the abstract hyperbole.
The couple of things that I really like about it:
- it's good for collaborative working or editing - got a fire going? about to push code live? Get all the relevant parties in a chat room and talk through it, and then destroy it afterwards
- the integrations - for automated systems, slack messages are far less disruptive than emails
- the indexing/searching of documents + chats - game-changer for finding that slide deck someone talked about a month ago
> So I now need to scroll through screens of idle chatter to try and figure out what some other team is doing?
It's not great for teams updating other teams on what's happening, we have our own home-grown system for that. It would be very useful if you could have an announcement-only channel, where you could specify the people who have the ability to post, and others cna listen, but they don't have that.
> Is this constantly pinging me while I'm trying to work?
It's configurable, but it has twitter- and irc-style mentions, so you can set your client to only ping you when you get specifically mentioned or something is posted in a critical channel
> Will every conversation descend into bikeshedding as every man and his dog wants to offer his opinion on the new logo or product feature?
It's possible, I guess, but the structure is such that you end up with channels that are important and those that are just interesting. Important channels you monitor throughout the day, interesting ones you check twice a day.
For us, all the product-related channels I monitor as much as possible. Sales- and marketing-related channels, I maybe check sporadically
That being said we are also heavy users of small private groups to keep things focused for specific scenarios.
It's not magical, but Slack is a very well executed product. And compared with trying to use hangouts, hipchat, or Skype as yourchat client, it's so much better.
It also has keyword based notifications. I've got a few keywords set up on our rooms so if someone is talking about pieces I own I get a notification and can join in if necessary.
On the other hand, you could just use IRC (IRCCloud is $5/month and has support for embedded gists etc) and a private chat server. This is what we did at my last company. But I haven't used Slack for real, so don't take my word for it - it's not impossible there are even more benefits compared to IRC.
We're using Slack now and this is not an issue. The search capabilities are nice occasionally, although when I was trying to search yesterday through a private conversation history it only gave me results from public rooms so I finally just had to scroll up a few days to find what I was looking for. Bookmarks/stars are a really nice, simple feature that is incredibly useful though. If someone says something and you think you're going to need to come back to that, just bookmark it right there. I remember years ago having conversations on irc and either copy/pasting into notes files or even taking screenshots of the window so I could come back to it. :)
Email is not a great form of communication. Private chat has a lot of value. Being able to chat in real time is very very valuable.
We use slack where I work, but we have always had a chat program of some sort. Having different chat rooms for different teams means you don't need to scroll through infinite chatter to get an answer, you can just ask it... and ask the right audience. Need to quickly see if you're platform is down? Hop in the OPS channel and see. Want to see what's up with CI? Hop in the Dev channel. Want to see if support is getting hammered? Hop in support...
It's simple, easy to understand, and easy to use. It's searchable, and accessible. The other things you mention seem more like a culture issue than a tooling issue.
In short, I live in Slack now and love it. Its an augmented reality I can share with my team, and the closest I'm getting to shared mind state without an implant in my head.
Yes. The main alternative I've seen at a couple largish corporations is Microsoft communicator/lync. Lync has some good video/screensharing stuff, but slack is more reliable and provides a great search history feature, which is the killer feature IMO. Also, the mac client is much less buggy than what MS offers. I know these sound like tiny features, but Slack is there when you need it and stays out of your way when you don't, which is priceless when you're trying to get stuff done. Communicator always had a knack for crashing when I was trying to search history or in the middle of a chat.
For those saying IRC is a good alternative, I've yet to see a deployment as useful and easy to use as Slack. Obviously IRC is cheaper, but I doubt most bigcorps are too price sensitive for messaging systems.
Slack has very configurable notifications, so you can choose how much specific channels and conversations interrupt you, and you can choose how synchronous or asynchronous you want it to be.
Well-implemented chat is hugely valuable. It's hard to overstate how valuable it is.
- it's always in silos - even if you send to multiples
- Email just creates more email.
In communication methods like slack you can communicate stuff public for people to see if they want - but dont need to
I can see the issue with scaling. There was a great video about the problems of email when Google Wave came out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDu2A3WzQpo . So if this service lets people drop in and out of a conversation with ease then I can see the benefit.
> Email just creates more email.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Email is not intrinsically bad. You can write one line chat-like responses and you can write formal letters. I can that moving your communication to a website with a different look and feel might make people behave differently though.
However I am now curious to give Slack a try...
> Support for private groups and 1:1 direct messaging gives you complete flexibility. Private things stay private, so just the right people see them.
If you haven't managed to work out how to implement this kind of communication with email then aren't there bigger problems at your workplace?
There are other things that bother me, such as
> The “ambient awareness” that comes from increased transparency cuts down on the need for meetings.
> “We no longer wonder what’s happening on the front line, we know. It makes our relationships deeper because we discover things about each other and we're in touch with exactly what’s happening.”
So I now need to scroll through screens of idle chatter to try and figure out what some other team is doing? Is this constantly pinging me while I'm trying to work? Will every conversation descend into bikeshedding as every man and his dog wants to offer his opinion on the new logo or product feature?
I've just never come across Slack in London yet, so maybe I'm yet to understand what it's like in practice.