Item: Slack
Rating: 9
Author: Ivan Zolotaryov

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Slack its more than messenger, it's a powerful tool for a people who works in a big organizations. In ours we widely use it, you have to be available in slack during the working hours, it's a part of the job. We have many channels groups and treads where we talk about bugs different updates, merges, or other nice topics as what we are going to eat on a lunch, which updates we have in a different offices and what is the news around a company itself. Most of the real time updates we send via slack, if in our r&d we have troubles we share them in a slack it's basiaclly our stackoverflow where you can search for the solution on your troubles

Pros and Cons

Integration with other services
Messages and UI of the conversation itself
Channels for every different topic

The replies are still looks a little bit overhead if you are talking 1 on 1
Slack has a troubles with the timezones, can just use a fix one which toy settle in the settings

Most Important Features

Channels
Threads
Integrations

Return on Investment

We have a story when one guy mentioned in a our site group with tag @here about his wedding, he didnt know that @here works only for people who are online, so most of the people missed the message, slack is not the best place to update about the important things
Slack helps to solve and be updated if you have an internal problems and you want to know how the solving goes

Alternatives Considered

WhatsApp Business and Telegram

It depends on the company size, if the company is small its better to use other messengers which are more lean and simple, slack in my opinion is very useful once you can use all of it's benefits as an integration with the other services which are very strong, we have integration with Google, Automation, our internal services as Okta

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

GitKraken, IntelliJ IDEA, Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Likelihood to Recommend

Slack has a lot of benefits, but you should know that it's a heavy "messenger" it's very useful in a big companies but not so much if you work in a small startups, it's much faster and easier to send messages via Whatsapp or Telegram, I was working in a startup for 2 years and it was pretty strange to have so many channels with 2-3 person in each which is quiet losing the point of slack. And now, if you are a big company that's the benefits which you will get with slack: - Option to have many channels for different topics - Option to answer to a message in a single tread which makes a whole feed lean and if you want to see and read what goes on you can just enter to the tread - Option to integrate different services like Google Azure or other small 3rd parties - Option to make a calls/group calls

Slack is a great chat app for big companies

Overall Satisfaction with Slack