Slack

I recently had the opportunity to attend a technical talk with Slack CTO, Cal Henderson.  We had already been using Slack within our teams, and it had proven to be much more efficient than prior tools.

While email has its place, it has become a noisy distraction.  Email is an overused tool that consumes too much of our time, energy and focus.  Most of us hate email, and for good reason – we send and receive too much, and sifting through many trivial messages to find the vital few has become a chore.  But it’s not just email that’s the problem. Enterprise technology in general – instant messaging, file sharing, intranets, team sites, and video conferencing – pales in comparison to consumer technology. At least until Slack came along…

Slack is one of the better-known workplace communication platforms.  Slack is the new email, instant messenger, chat room, intranet and social network all rolled into one.  Slack is a good balance between simplicity and sophistication, enterprise and consumer, synchronous and asynchronous communications.

One of the biggest benefits of Slack is that it allows you to have different “work spaces” with different groups.  This gives you the option to have a separate space for each business you work with, plus a space for your worker or member communication.  Inside these work spaces, you can create different channels to keep conversations organized.  For example, if you have a group of members helping you organize an event or a group of members wanting to learn more about a specific topic, they could create private groups where all communication will happen only with those involved in that effort.