Meet Slack
Some people hear about Slack and wonder whether it can meet their needs for communicating in a work group, a non-profit or academic organization, or a social situation, like a book club or sports team. Others receive an email message one morning inviting them to a Slack team explaining that Slack is the new way they’ll communicate at work.
Regardless of how you’ve been introduced to Slack, this chapter offers a high-level overview of how Slack works and helps you understand what you can get out of it—whether you want to try it or you need to for work. I explain what makes Slack special and where its strengths lie.
Teams
Slack teams divide topics of discussion into separate channels. Members create, pick, or are invited to those channels, which are typically broken up by topic, department, or task (Figure 1).
Team members can also converse in direct message conversations, both one-on-one and in small groups.
At the main Slack hosting site, every team gets a unique subdomain, which is the central repository for all the team’s accounts, uploaded attachments, and messages. Team members can access their Slack team via the subdomain’s URL in the Slack Web app or through a native Slack app installed on a computer or mobile device.
History
As well as Slack handles active conversation among many people, it also has the important capability of letting team members find past discussions. This is not only good for everyone in the group, but also provides an easy way for new people—whether employees, board members for a non-profit, or parents in a school soccer league—to come up to speed on what has been said before. (The corporate-speak for this is onboarding.)
All discussions are organized chronologically, and a new team member can scroll back hours, days, or even weeks.
Notifications
Slack gives users a great deal of control over notifications, so you can set which new messages you’re alerted to, and where you see them. That’s key for avoiding the alert overload that would happen if you were told about every new message. Slack can even help with work/life balance by letting an entire team snooze all notifications outside of defined time periods, although individuals can override this setting.
Integrations and Bots
Slack also offers integrations, which let hundreds of third-party tools transfer data in to and out of Slack teams. Integrations can, for instance, let you launch videoconference sessions and add calendar events from within Slack. In the other direction, integrations can centralize where information is viewed by, for example, updating a Slack channel when someone tweets @ a group account, a news aggregator sees a headline of interest, a Trello card is changed, a Zendesk ticket is updated, or Pingdom reports on a server’s status. This enables you to use Slack not as yet another information source that you must monitor, but instead as a central dashboard.
Slack provides a programming interface for simple integrations, so a modestly knowledgeable programmer can create custom ones, too.
Another important type of integration is a bot. Bots are services that you talk to within Slack as though they were other team members. A bot can also monitor message activity and take action based on it. Every Slack team has Slackbot, which lets you store private notes and can even remind you of appointments. Other bots can report on your Google Analytics stats, book travel, help run meetings, and more.
Paying for Slack
Slack comes in free and paid forms, and the free tier is remarkably powerful and expansive, providing the majority of Slack’s features to all comers. Slack’s various client apps for mobile and desktop are free to all, which is one reason why Slack has become a tool of choice for informal, school, non-profit, hobbyist, and social groups. The free version provides access to only the most recent 10,000 messages posted across a team, but upgrading to the paid service makes those older messages accessible again.
The paid flavor of Slack offers comes in two forms: Standard and Plus, and an Enterprise version is expected later in 2016. These versions have several special features, including letting a team have guest accounts for people who neither should see everything nor need the overhead of seeing everything. Paying for Slack also lets a team use an unlimited number of integrations; free teams are limited to ten. For more information about what you get if you pay for Slack, read the Slack Pricing Guide.
Slack Pros and Cons
Slack users in larger organizations are finding that their previous use of email to set up meetings and negotiate logistics has shifted nearly entirely to Slack, while they use their previous instant messaging tool only with people outside the team. Email remains a fallback for certain tasks, and a way to communicate with people who aren’t part of the team, but for most Slack groups, it’s a distant second choice to communicating via Slack.
I’m a member of five active Slack teams, and while that’s still a lot to keep up with, neither email nor other messaging solutions were nearly as effective. Put simply, Slack is the most interesting take on group communication that has happened in years, and the first that has helped reduce email overload.
But let me be upfront here. Slack doesn’t fit every person, group, or purpose. Because it lacks message threading, in which messages take the form of a set of ordered, often nested replies to an initial post, it’s not easy to track specific discussions. (According to Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, who was interviewed for an article in the Verge, threading will be coming to Slack later this year.) Rather, Slack is best at creating, fostering, and expanding a community with collective knowledge presented in a conversational setting—and making those conversations available in the present and in the future with full archiving. At the moment, Slack is an evolution of chat rooms rather than an evolution of threaded discussion forums.
Slack can also be fun (Figure 2). The apps have jokes and upbeat messages. For instance, in the desktop app’s preferences, in Advanced Options, there’s a checkbox labeled Surprise Me! Check it and you get…a surprise! There’s whimsy and joy throughout.
For some people, Slack is a welcome break from corporate communication tools; Slack tries for a tone that feels authentic, like it’s speaking to you, not talking at you or down to you. But for other people, Slack’s informality can be a distraction, or, worse, have the feeling of fingernails scraping down a chalkboard.