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How do you Slack off?
March 09, 2016

How do you Slack off?

D'Ana Guiloff | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Slack

Slack is currently used across the whole organization, though some departments have their own channels and processes to best utilize slack for their team's needs. It gives everyone a real-time connection and considering 50+% of the company is remote, it makes the distance seem much shorter or non existent. The ability to invite customer users also helps resolve support type business issues.
  • Real-time interaction.
  • Reactions & emoji integration.
  • Very easy to spin up a new slack team.
  • It needs a single sign-on to be able to easily manage multiple teams. Not specifically tied to email address.
  • It would be great if there was a pause button/AFK messaging. Sometimes you just need to step away and messages that are sent need to be halted so the person on the other end knows they aren't going to be getting an immediate response.
  • Tagging (other than hashtags). Some way for individual users to tag conversations so when they are searching back through their chats they can pinpoint a conversation about a specific topic. We have gotten around this by having a room for everything, but that gets overwhelming with 110+ rooms on a single team to keep track of.
  • Slack replaced Sococo and previously HipChat for our company. The sleek UI and intuitive navigation/use of the system made it easy to adopt.
  • We have many more integrations connected to Slack (which is super easy to do) that makes many teams much more productive.
  • The infinite number of channel possibilities tends to lead to tribal knowledge issues and the "I thought you knew because you were in the channel" mentality.
Sococo was much more of a "virtual office" with separate visual rooms where you could see people were talking or hanging out. Eventually the call quality and reliability ended up sinking Sococo for us as a company especially since it was a cost per user and we had many users (completely different time zones) that never utilized the system, but we were paying for.
Slack is great for real-time discussion when video/meetings are not an option, but it is not a replacement for them. Quick "tap on the shoulder" questions or feedback is also another great use of the platform, but that same interruptive style of communication can lead to reduced productivity without a mechanism or standards in place to reduce the possibility of that.

Slack Feature Ratings

Project Management
4.8
Task Management
2
Workflow Automation
1
Mobile Access
9
Search
7
Communication
6.2
Chat
9
Notifications
8
Discussions
7
Internal knowledgebase
2
Integrates with GoToMeeting
Not Rated
Integrates with Gmail and Google Hangouts
5
Integrates with Outlook
Not Rated
File Sharing & Management
6.5
Versioning
7
Video files
5
Audio files
5
Document collaboration
7
Access control
7
Advanced security features
7
Integrates with Google Drive
7
Device sync
7

Using Slack

The system does seem to hang quite a bit, completely unrelated to my internet connection, which can get a little annoying when you are in the middle of a conversation and cannot respond and the conversation moves on without you or creates a lull in the discussion that gets everyone off topic.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Mentioning someone or an entire channel is very easy
  • Adding a reaction to someone else's comment or even your own is very easy
  • The flow of how to integrate other software was simple to do
  • Search is a bit cumbersome and never fully finds what I am looking for unless I remember the exact phrasing of how something was typed
  • Pinning items is annoying because you can't just set something to pin when you post it, you have to go back into it and pin it which creates additional room noise.
Yes - I actually prefer the mobile interface to the desktop app or browser versions. It is easier to switch between teams, the responsive time is generally much more predictable and it consolidates my various slack teams into a single interface that I can move around in without much additional effort or time.