Item: Slack
Rating: 10
Author: Adam Hatfield

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Slack has been used across our software delivery teams as the go to collaboration tool for a number of months now. It helps us work together across geographic boundaries and is integrated into our workflow and development pipeline. It means we can all be sure we are on the same page and also easily contactable.

Pros and Cons

Remote collaboration
Team Collaboration
Enable communication with external companies

Can come across as not a serious tool due to use of gifs emojis
Notifications can be annoying
Sometimes hard to be across all channels without explicitly being invited

Return on Investment

Hard to quantify but it has made collaboration significantly easier
Far easier to communicate with external teams

Alternatives Considered

Jabber, Workplace by Facebook and Skype for Business (formerly Lync)

We found that for group collaboration and communicate that Slack was a far superior solution for our business. We found it extremely easy to use and adoption of the service was viral. With the alternatives when we trialled them we found it harder to gain traction amongst our technical teams.

Other Software Used

Oracle Eloqua, Optimizely, Tealium AudienceStream

Likelihood to Recommend

Slack is really well suited for organisations with geographically dispersed teams who need to collaborate and communicate effectively. It is particularly well suited for collaboration amongst technical teams. It also works very well to enable communication with third parties such as vendors or suppliers.

What we have found does not work as well is collaboration with more business focussed teams, for some reason they don't take to it as well.

Slack - Awesome at enabling collaboration

Overall Satisfaction with Slack