Item: Slack
Rating: 8
Author: Amod Shinde

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Slack is used to collaborate among all the employees of the organization ranging from developers to QAs, digital marketer, and HRs. As usual, there is a general channel, which is a group for all the employees to interact with, which involves discussions related to the company as a whole (and wishing employees well on special days and events). Each department has its separate channel to discuss department-related issues, for example, HR's will discuss increments in their group, developers will discuss the new software integration on their group, etc.
This has helped the organization to segregate the discussions and manage departments well. Sometimes a new channel is also created for a particular module and all the documents needed are attached to that channel for the module-specific process.
Added to that, Slack has integration for apps like Google Drive, Trello, etc., so team management also is possible with Slack as a center for all the linked apps used in the organization.

Pros and Cons

Integration with apps like Zoom, Google Calendar, Google Drive
Ability to create dedicated channels
Segregation between personal chats and channels
WYSIWYG editor for typing text

Slack app on Windows consumes a lot of RAM
Slack bot should be programmed to do more things
Small storage space available by default

Return on Investment

Organization saw better team coordination
Work/discussion segregation with dedicated channels
Apps integration helped in better management of teams

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Teams, Bitrix24 and Workplace by Facebook

Slack offers a seamless experience with a very simple and easy understandable user interface. Slack is better when it comes to memory management on Windows. The menu design offered by Slack to the left of the screen offers a much better user experience than those provided by counterparts. Some of the competitors offer only the app integration for the apps provided by their parent company while Slack provides app integration for most of the famous third-party apps. This really helps you cut down your costs as you choose the best apps and plans for your organization. Clean chat- and discussion-centric app, no unnecessary marketing tools integration. Slack does the work that it's meant for.

Usability

Some of the positives of slack are

Slack offers a platform for app integration, which helps in managing the whole of an organization's activities in once place, bethey calendars, Trello, Google Drive cloud, GitHub, Gmail, or Bluejeans
GitHub is a boon to developers and managers to track the issues in the code

Negatives are

Storage space offered initially is low and once it's over, all the data is encrypted and saved on Slack. The user has to pay to get that data back from the slack

Support Rating

Slack's help page offers almost everything you need to know about using Slack.
It provides options like getting started, using Slack, profiles, preferences, administration and customization of workspace, and roles and rights of the users, a tutorial for the integration of tools into your Slack workspace.
Slack also gives an option to contact them where we can report bugs or ask questions by attaching a file and sending a query.
The customer support is quite good, whether you are a free user or paid customer, the responses from the support team are very quick and, of course, you get added attention if you are a paying customer.

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

Other Software Used

Jira Software, Microsoft Teams, GitHub

Likelihood to Recommend

Slack is well suited for midsize to small organizations for collaborating, text messaging, sharing pictures and documents. For a large organization, there can be a separate workspace made for each team within the organization itself. It's the best tool if you wish to keep your personal life separate from professional life, as it has a scheduled snooze timer that will snooze the notifications after a specified hour so that you can spend your personal time without disturbance. Workspaces in Slack are suitable for teams within the bigger organization. It lets you completely separate a team from others if you wish to. If the aim is to have everyone under the same workspace, Slack is a bit costlier as an option. The storage offered by default (for free) isn't enough and one needs to invest more to buy more space or delete older conversations and files.

Slack is the nucleus of team collaboration and management

Overall Satisfaction with Slack