Slack handles our company communications well
Overall Satisfaction with Slack
We use Slack across the whole organization. We have channels for different departments/teams, as well as inter-departmental channels, and heavily use the direct messages. It is used for discussions, and for support, including sharing screenshots, etc. It is also needed for looking back at older conversations, and to reference tasks/decisions from the past.
Pros
- Chat history. You can search the history of chat channels or direct messages, even if you joined at a later date.
- Integrations. Many supported apps, such as Google Drive, Jira, etc.
- Use anywhere. Can run as a program on the computer, or just in a browser, or on mobile devices.
Cons
- Left Navigation Pane. The left nav is not able to be resized, so I can't actually see the whole channel or person name. Really annoying when the phone extensions are added to the end of the names, but they are hidden by the left nav.
- Conversation List Sorting. The conversations, specifically the direct messages, auto-sort, and auto disappear based on what Slack thinks it should do. I constantly have people/conversations missing from the left nav and have to search for them manually.
- More-Actions Bar. The "more actions" bar that shows up at the right of the conversation view frequently gets in the way of actually clicking/highlighting text in that conversation. It needs to be set to not be on top of the conversation that is being hovered over.
- Positive: The ability to maintain a constant point of contact to anyone in the organization.
- Positive: The ability to maintain an archive of company communications.
- Positive: The ability to have "guest" users that don't actually use a paid license.
We selected Slack because HipChat was being deprecated, and we needed to migrate to something else. Slack was the closest product in comparison to what we had tested. There were pains in migrating, but after all, was completed, it was pretty close to the same functionality and user behavior from what we were accustomed to with HipChat.
Comments
Please log in to join the conversation