Impeccable as a real-time communication tool
December 15, 2022
Impeccable as a real-time communication tool
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Slack
It being a large organization with multiple teams in sophisticated structure, timely and effective communication becomes a critical challenge. Slack allows an intuitive chat-like interface for any person-to-person or group discussions—both public and private. Thanks to its extensive list of external integrations (e.g. Google Calendar for scheduling, Zoom for meeting, Lattice for person operations, etc), consolidating other work-related tasks in one place becomes easier.
- Real-time discussions between team members like a chat application
- Direct integrations with calendar and video call applications
- Intuitive shorthand for emoji inputs and Markdown styling
- Smart copy-paste UX for media files and external links that detects the type of assets being pasted
- Streamlined mechanism for archiving older discussions to easily search and find items — currently, any old discussions/threads become hard to find in the sea of more recent discussions
- Ability to categorizing the channels, so that users won't have to comb through a lengthy list of channels — currently, when there are dozens of channels one subscribe to, it becomes challenging to find the signal from the noise
- Direct integrations with Google Apps, Zoom, and other third-party applications
- Ability to directly attach visual assets inside a message thread for quick review
- Real-time notifications for incoming messages and other integrated apps
- Helps maintain context of ongoing projects by an always-on, always-connected medium
- Helps the team members share external resources (E.g. links, attachments, calendar events) in one medium
- Help automate certain repetitive tasks by setting a reminder and synchronized integrations
Teams can be an excellent tool if the whole organization is structured around Microsoft products—e.g. OneDrive, 365 Accounts, Outlook, Office Suite, etc—as it provides a fully centralized integration of everything within MS. But as a standalone chat/communications application, Slack feels more lightweight, faster, and less glitchy. Especially since my current company doesn't utilize MS products much, its focus on MS-product integration is less appealing. Discord could have been a good alternative with its unique features around real-time communications and video streaming integrations, but Slack's tighter ecosystem around business workflows feels a better fit for my current place.
Do you think Slack delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
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?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Slack again?
Yes