Slack.
I’ve been hearing about it for months. My reaction has always been:
- Why do I need ANOTHER web application?
- We already have google hangouts, salesforce chatter, google IMs – what more would this give us?
- This is another cash grab in the enterprise technology space!
This blog post will attempt to explain what I think of slack, why it’s cool, and how it’s a game changer.
Business Notifications Engine
I’ve come to the conclusion that slack is a business notifications engine. Think of when you log into facebook and you get that nice red icon in the upper right corner. This is now platform-independent and always on, no matter what device.
Slack is organized.
Emails, chatter posts, IMs, blogs – data is scattered everywhere. Slack helps you get organized by creating channels. Some examples of channels we are using:
- #payments: Any payment that comes in through freshbooks, stripe, or other fashion will automatically push to slack. We also do a quick calculation to determine the money that needs to be moved to our tax savings account
- #chatteralerts: Any personalized chatter alerts will come right to slack. One of the worst things about chatter is sending an email to notify you there is a new chatter post. Yes, I know that notifications are coming in salesforce lightning. But lightning is currently in alpha or beta form – and we’re communicating now.
- #pricing: A list of our standard pricing for internal purposes
- #general, etc: There are all kinds of other channels. We use #general where we used to post on chatter for notifying everyone on the team about something. No more laborious @ tagging every single person you want to see a message; so they get an email.
Slack is cool.
Honestly – slack is cool! It’s fun!
The fact that it’s fun makes people use it. And when people are communicating, business is getting done. That in and of itself makes it worth the cost of entry ($0.00)!
Let us know if you have a differing opinion or agree in the comments.
