Slack

Vorteile

Our favourite feature for slack is that it makes it super easy for teams to collaborate and communicate very easily. There are ways to connect with just single individual users, groups of users, or even have channels to communicate with people about different projects or topics of interest, super cool.

It makes it really easy to communicate between members or within channels, so groups of people, set groups of people, and even with other organizations. So you can get on to another workspace at the company and you’ll communicate back and forth through that which is awesome.

Also, there's some really good Zapp integrations and Native integration. So, for instance, we use it so that when a proposal is signed off on, we get a message to a specific channel on Slack to notify the whole team, of course with a cheesy GIF because why not, that a proposal was accepted and that this kicks off a whole bunch of other processes for us. And then as well, it has a really good direct integration with Google Drive. So, if somebody sends me a document, it shows up in a Slack channel for me so I can access that really easily, I can see any documents really easily.

Nachteile

Although you can jump between workspaces really easily, it's a little bit cumbersome actually making that transition. So, I'd like to see it organized a little bit more like Asana where you've got a dropdown and you switch over rather than having to navigate over to the side and then select it, there's a little bit of a time lag.

Vorteile

I really enjoy how flexible Slack allows you to be by creating any number of channels you may need to break down conversations per topic. Beyond having the ability to create and join channels based on your needs, the feature to star items is particularly helpful when you are on the go and want to come back to a specific point in time quickly. It is easily accessible with just one click (or tap on mobile) and makes it easy to remember key conversations that are happening. Slack also integrates brilliantly public conversations and what's called "direct messages", enabling you to have private conversations with any member within the organization, hence avoiding the need to use an additional platform for this specific purpose. There is also a neat and practical solution brought by Slack apps, which add even more features including the ability to share polls with Polly, integrate with GitHub, share files stored on Google Drive and Dropbox, which are the apps that we use the most. Being able to control notifications precisely, automatically snoozing them when you are unavailable, makes for a more peaceful experience when dealing with hundreds of members. There are also other features that make you life better, such as the many keyboard shortcuts and the built-in commands you can fire up directly from the reply area, including formatting options and interactions with Slack apps.

Nachteile

On the down side, I have found it somewhat confusing to get to set up Slack within other services through their API, for instance to connect Slack on GitHub. Although the reply area is feature-rich, some functions like text formatting could be more intuitive. For example, you don't get to see live if your text will be bold or italic. Slackbot is useful to ask simple questions, but many times it will provide answers that are too simple and could easily be improved. Once again on formatting, Slackbot doesn't explain how to format "code" snippets in-line or even on multiple lines. Many hidden features can only be found by looking online in the "Help Center" or by trial and error, which is not as practical as being able to ask questions directly to Slackbot which should be able to handle those requests. I have also found the desktop application to simply be an exact replica of the web application. Apart from the fact that it adds a little Slack icon in the notification bar, I find it even less intuitive to use than the web application, as it requires to open a new tab in the web browser to sign in. By not being completely independent from a web browser, it basically just results in having a separate web browser that can only handle one tab, which makes it rather inconvenient, especially considering that notifications are well integrated in the web version and that you can "pin" tabs in most web browsers to keep Slack one single click or keyboard shortcut away.

Vorteile

1) User Interface: Slack is quite user-friendly but requires a little bit of an initial learning curve in order to get that hang of things (considering it's a bit different from your average personal communication tools). In no time, you'll be able to locate new channels, switch between them and message individuals directly.

2) Making Work Fun: As its name suggests, "Slack" allows users to ease professional tension and stress by providing them with a wide range of "Fun Gifs", emojis, etc. Users can even make use of different "reactions" (Just like you have on most Social Media Platforms). This is quite useful for us because we can vote on posts using various reactions. Our in-house designers often compete with each other on various projects and the rest of us vote for them. Therefore; Slack = Increased Productivity. Of course, you can have your own methods of applying this feature.

3) Suitability: Slack is best suited for small or medium sized businesses. They have a "free forever" plan, a "Standard" plan and a "Plus" plan. The main differences between these subscription models are chat-log backup capacities, the number of third-party app integrations you can use (Unlimited for all paid plans), Customer Service response timings, file storage per user and few other differences.

4) Notifications: Slack makes it possible for its users to have many options of getting notified. The best feature, in my opinion, is where someone can "@" you in a message or a post.

Nachteile

1) File Preview: It would be nice if you can preview a document without having to download it first.

Vorteile

- Slack allows me to commimicate in real time without using email with clients and colleagues all over the country & the world. The free version doens't have as many features as paid, but still robust enough to work for a small 1-man shop
- Channels (topics/groups) allow for communication on a topic w/only relevent members (by invitation). preventing tons of emails to track = it's all in one place, in timeline format; this allows you to see who wrote what, when and, whatwas shared (urls, files/photos, etc).
- Direct/private chats for more sensitive info
- Notification types vary based on your set preferences: when you're mentioned in a channel, indexing keywords. w/hashtags for searching history (like bookmarking).
- Video conference calls (paid version allows for up to 15 participants, screen sharing, more storage space & unlimited msgs)
- Save comments for later w/reactions or saves to something shared.
Clients can be invited to channels and only see that channel's content, allowing things to continue.
- File sharing, video calls & integrating with lots of other software/services listed on their site) combines all communication in one tool reducing the need for emails
- Cost for the paid plans is relatively nominal and since it elminates the need for emails in many cases, it ultimately pays for itself by saving time + the additional features you get.
- Online access to customize your account
- Multiple teams (i.e. 1 for your main business, 1 if you're invited, etc

Nachteile

Based on my experience using the free version, I find some of the features to be less intuitive = I can't be sure if I can integrate something for a smaller fee or if it's only available in a paid plan.

Since many chats tend to grow over time, the free version limits you to 10k messages; you'd be surprised how fast that gets used up. If you try to search for something once you exceed 10k msgs, you may not have access to it. (I get it, it's the free version but it's like texting for business. 10k is small in grand scheme of things so you have to remember to save things you really think you'll need or you'll lose them.

Vorteile

Slack is the best team chat software I ever seen. It works great on any platform, it looks cool and convenient, and you definitely should try it in your team or company if you never done this before.

Team discussions are organized in channels, while direct messages is also available. In our company we also heavily use other messages organization feature: threads, which is like having channels in channels. So, we usually post only one message in channel for one topic, and then all who want to participate in discussion goes to thread attached to this message. In this way, channels stays clean, and anybody who don't want to participate in this discussion gets only one notification ― from discussion start. I really can't understand why other team chats can't implement threads in the right way ― like Slack did.

In addition to the above, Slack has many features that helps organizing work. My lovest feature is posts, which is something between usual messages and documents. So, if you want to post something really big, what should be properly formatted with headers and so on, you can use post. And posts also has collaboration features, so it sometimes can replace Google Docs (integration with which is also included).

Nachteile

Slack is based on web technologies, which is great for portability, but on the other side Slack really not as responsive as I want. It still works fast enough for generic user, but I can clearly say it is not native application.

Any chat app can't live without files sharing. And while file sharing is available, I can't even say it is OK. While viewing images and photos works pretty normally most times, anything more complex works illy. I can't sometimes understand if file downloads or not, and when it comes to video playing -- oh, it works awful most times.

The last thing I should mention, but which can be the big one for somebody: Slack is cloud-hosted only. So, all data is saved on Slack servers, and there is no way to use your own server. Moreover, it also means that you are bound to Slack infrastructure and should pay for it if you want bigger history of messages and some other features.