Item: Slack
Rating: 9
Author: ISHAN DEEP

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Using Skype for Business, it was becoming increasingly difficult to connect all our organization's employees on a single reliable cloud solution. After careful consideration and planning by the DevOp team, we moved to Slack. It's being used for notifications, personal chats, files sharing, departmental updates, team meets, and as a personal notepad. There are still multiple plugins to support more features. After using it for 2 years myself and performing administration, I can safely say it lacks nothing. It's better than my Whatsapp!

Pros and Cons

App notifications using Slack Hooks.
Departmental updates on Slack Channels.
File sharing across organization.
Integrations with Bitbucket.
Personal notepad and reminder tools.
Calendar organizer.

Search feature. It's really hard to search for old data across channels and personal chats.
Syntax highlights for code.
Mobile app sometimes misses notifications.
Creating files inside Slack directly to send to a channel or person.

Return on Investment

Reduced clutter across multiple tools and multiple vendors in the organization.
Very easy to manage and requires less knowledge (has a smaller learning curve).
Cheaper compared to other competitors.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Teams is mostly for working in development teams and really not suitable as normal day to day messaging/collaboration tool.
Skype for Business is reliable but not suitable for code management and has very high costs for movement to cloud.
Cisco Teams is mostly suited for team project collaborations and can't be used for organizational connection. It's a better solution than Slack for audio/video conferencing but pales in all other areas.

Support Rating

In all 2 years, we only had one issue where message syncing was not working for some users and they had to click repeatedly on "load new messages" to view the latest messages. We had to contact Slack customer support and they were really helpful. They involved their product team and took 2 days to identify a bug on their end.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Slack go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Slack again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Cisco Webex Teams (formerly Cisco Spark), Microsoft Office 365, Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Cloud Datastore, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud Storage, Google BigQuery, Notepad++, Brackets, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Google App Engine, ServiceDesk Plus

Likelihood to Recommend

it's best suited for organizations with multiple teams and who want to cross collaborate. App notifications using Slack hooks are very easy and I personally feel that app notifications are better on Slack than on email, much less clutter!

It's not really appropriate for teams looking to work on code who are stationed across the globe. It becomes kind of hard to use Slack collaborating on multiple files in a single project.

Slack - Professional Whatsapp

Overall Satisfaction with Slack