Item: Slack
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Slack for communicating with the team and cross-team collaborations. Before that, everything was communicated via email. With Slack it is definitely easier and smoother to reach out colleagues without spamming others. In addition, there are some plugins we can make use of, which is quite convenient sometimes. Such as, we decide which topics to cover for some department wise meetings using the voting tool built in Slack, which is efficient.

Pros and Cons

Many plugins to make use of, like voting tool, gif, auto messages
Creating channels is easy, then messages can be limited to the people who are interested in the topic
You can react to people's messages instead of replying, that is more efficient

I hope Slack only show the number of new messages I receive, not including the reactions on my messages
There can be a better way to organise the channels. When there are many channels, it becomes messy and difficult to follow

Return on Investment

Chatting with people is easier and smoother
Searching the chat history is helpful

Alternatives Considered

Skype for Business and now part of Microsoft Teams

For a big tech company, Slack is more suitable. In my personal opinion, I would prefer Skype for business because it is so clean and focused. You basically talk about work related stuff with colleagues without being distracted from other topics or other fancy features. Slack seems too casual (then having the feeling of less professional) IMO. However, I get the point of choosing Slack for connecting people and building up a better working relationship.

Key Insights

Do you think Slack delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Slack's feature set?

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?

Other Software Used

SAP Concur, Mapiq, Sourcegraph

Likelihood to Recommend

I like the plugins and gifs in Slack. It makes the conversations more fun. However, sometimes I also feel it is kind of difficult to follow the key points of the discussions with some gifs. I think Slack can improve that part, for example, limiting the display size of gifs. Meanwhile, I really feel struggling with many channels. It is difficult to navigate between channels if you have too many. Some of them are hidden because they are inactive. In addition, I hope Slack probably can have a more clean version without so many fancy features (just like Skype business).

Slack is good but can be better :)

Overall Satisfaction with Slack