Slack

Opmerkingen: Overall experience has been great. All the features work as intended. We have never had people miss notifications, fail to send attachments, not able to logon etc... All issues we have had with MS Teams.

Pluspunten: It is very easy to use. Appealing graphical interface. Many integrations with other apps. Easy to use features. Shortcuts make work quick, as well as the slash commands. Easy to navigate, create channels (public or private) and customize for your team.

Minpunten: The cost is high. Our company has the paid version of slack, which is a great product. However, since we are using O365, teams is included for *free*. It was hard to justify keeping Slack as a paid product when we have another solution available. Keep in mind, teams is a sub par replacement.

Opmerkingen: Wether Slack is an advantage to your internal communication and productivity depends entirely on the pre-existing culture and the amount of self-discipline and thought your employees can provide. It's crucial to establish communication on the rules for using Slack in order to avoid wasting time.

Pluspunten: The openness of Slack for plugins and useful integrations is awesome. You could easily employ one person just to optimize workflows, channels etc in Slack for a company with some hundred employees: that's the amount of possibilities. Also, Slack is a way of promoting the exchange of information and establishing personal relationships among employees.

Minpunten: In the worst case, Slack is a tool that places you at the disposal of each of your colleagues, at each moment of your day. Slack fosters a culture of deflection by communicating all the time and sharing more or less useful content with a far too high number of people.

Opmerkingen: Amazing. We have a team the works remote and using Slack is a lifesaver. As offices modernize, it's hard to just go to someone's desk to ask a question. Leaving a Slack message is much less invasive an easily searchable paper trail in case you need to reference it later.

Pluspunten: Slack is great for teams and personal life communication. The amount of categorizing and partitioning you can do within a workspace is astounding. You can utilize certain project hashtags when speaking about it, then later go in search the hashtag to find all messages about said project. Different channels can be set up for various teams/ clients/ projects and the number of 3rd party integrations are immense. For instance, I can create a task in my TSM "Wrike" instantly from a Slack message making things super easy as messages are flying past.

Minpunten: There's not much to complain about here. The Chat bot can get a little annoying if you already know what you're doing. Also, if your friends/ family use Slack for a group chat, it can be difficult to separate work/ personal life as all of your spaces are in one place and you can see you have work messages.

Opmerkingen: My experience with Slack has been really good.
Slack helps me a lot on my daily activities and even more when I'm working from a remote location or inspecting something and need to interact with our team at the main office.

Pluspunten: Slack is easy to use and its interface is very similar to other IM applications we have been using for years.
That makes the transition from whatever IM software currently in use to Slack quick and smooth.
In our company, nobody needed to be trained to use Slack and users went well with the transition process.
Slack allows users to customize their names, profile picture, and current status.
It's also possible to send messages to individuals, groups of people, and into channels.
Users most commonly send text messages but they have the option to send screen captures, pictures, and files in general at their own convenience.
A very useful resource in my opinion is the ability to create shared channels where you can add people from outside your organization as well as users from other Slack organizations.
With this feature, you can create a support channel with a service provider and have quick interaction with them, for example.

Minpunten: I don't have too much complaints about Slack.
One of them is that as an Administrator, I believe that the management interface is a bit confusing.
Sometimes it takes me a while to remember certain basic operations because Slack has its own way of having that done.
Also, I had issues with some of my users a couple of times because of bugs with Slack application.
The last I remember would freeze half of the user's screen so nothing shown in that area was clickable of selectable.
Closing and reopening Slack would temporarily solve the problem.
I contacted Slack support and they confirmed that as a known issue and that would be fixed soon with a software update.

Opmerkingen: Making progress on internal discussions can start in seconds with a Slack group chat. It is hard to imagine a way of managing teams in different countries any other way. Slack removed a reliance on internal emails which often fell short where key people weren't copied in or involved in the discussion. In a similar way, it avoids the CC happy emails where some team members may not need to be included and is an unnecessary distraction. With public channels, anyone can decide if they continue to remain invovled or just choose to 'mute' a channel, even just for a period of time. After using it for over 2 years now, the results are that people in our organisation can manage their communication and let it fit in their workflow. With various integrations it can also be a real timesaver when on the move.

Pluspunten: The options of private/direct group conversations and public and private channels make the various types of cross-team communication most companies need so simple that it's hard to remember how we got anywhere when relying on email. As a personal favourite feature, the option to upload custom emojis makes messaging easier, not just for fun but in the cases where logos/symbols can be easily understood by everyone, it makes quick shorthand.

Minpunten: Someone who reccomended this product did warn to be careful that it may take over our lives, and they weren't wrong! Through no fault of Slack , the ease of adding channels, setting up groups etc does admittedly add to the noise that can sometimes be a distraction. The Slack call quality can sometimes be unreliable and audio quality isn't amazing.