Item: Slack
Rating: 8
Author: Layne Latham

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Slack throughout our company to communicate between and within teams. It's used for both projects and regular day to day communication that would otherwise be done via email. Slack allows our employees to share documents and participate in group discussions, as well as communicate around specific events (managed through individual channels).

Pros and Cons

Instant communication with the ability to snooze notifications
Allows you to share documents and refer to them at a later time
Allows you to set your status so that you aren't constantly interrupted with messages if you are working closely on a project

Needs the ability to select specific gifs, the interface to send gifs is clunky
When additional channels are created, it's hard for participants to keep up on the channels that include info for them, basically requires that they are "at mentioned" or they get ignored
It would be nice to be able to hide channels you don't care about

Return on Investment

Increase immediate communication between departments
Helped us to streamline certain processes
Helped us to maintain documentation on discussions, save time.

Alternatives Considered

Olark

We considered adding Olark as a way to chat with website visitors and other people outside of the company. Slack seemed like a better option for internal communication because of the features that were valued by individual teams. The development team specifically wanted to use Slack and they basically drove the decision.

Support Rating

At some point during the implementation, Slack held a customer webinar that was intended to take new users through many of the features of the program. This was the most helpful thing we've had to access during my use of the tool. Other than that I haven't had to use much support.

Key Insights

Do you think Slack delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Slack's feature set?

Yes

Did Slack live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Slack go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Slack again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Slack is a useful tool in instances where you need to get your entire company or team utilizing one method of communication outside of email. It's similar to other chat platforms but has a number of additional benefits like the ability for developers to share code back and forth. It might not be useful in instances where employees use it as a distraction.

Slack, good if you need to chat

Overall Satisfaction with Slack