Item: Slack
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Slack

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

1. Automated workflows and audit trails 2. Convenient way to collaborate and keep a simplified runbook through canvas for the team's access 3. Keeping in touch with teammates located in different timezones. 4. Community channels allows for a more informal way to communicate with everyone in the firm - as a chatline about upcoming internal company events, early bird sales to external events, lost & found, etc.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Automated workflows
Collaboration
Private and public channels
Application linkage

Cons

Ctrl + K being allowed to be the "link" or URL function would be great and very in line with other softwares/web browsers
Customized ordering of starred conversations

Return on Investment

Positive ROI from the workflow automation, where it has helped many teams across multiple business units to work on and launch a new product version fast and more seamlessly.
Positive impact on incident reporting (to inform the masses which a ticket would not be able to do)

Usability

The main thing is the ease of use (albeit after learning how the platform works). Being able to create our own projects and workflow automation makes it all the more better, since we can have forms, polls, or even use channels to allow internal business users to feedback to us or report issues. With everything done on Slack (including approvals), it allows for a public and proper audit trail to be recorded - very useful as evidence to auditors, and for everyone's future reference on what was requested, discussed, approved, and completed before.

Alternatives Considered

Google Workspace, Google Chat, Zoom Workplace, Discord, Skype (discontinued) and Microsoft Teams

In my opinion, the closest to Slack in terms of UI is Discord. But Slack is much more professional with more functionalities that doesn't require very technical knowledge (good for our older staff who began their digital journey within the last decade). In terms of workflow automation and the most external application allowed to be connected, Slack beats the rest. We chose Slack primarily for its collaborative functionality and ability, so these are important points to us.

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Slack again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Chat, Discord, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Amazon Web Services

Likelihood to Recommend

Slack is well suited with it's ability to connect with external applications. Our team uses this to link / preview external documents (such as Google Docs) on our canvas. This is especially useful for us collating ideas or building up the runbook which requires us to link to the documents of other teams' due to linked processes.

Great app for collaboration