Slack

Comentarios: Great communication tool and indispensable in the modern world of business.

Puntos a favor: It's IRC for business communication with a (much) nicer interface. Slack organizes discussions into channels and IM. It's easy to reach out to anyone in the company and have a discussion. Even better is the ability to bring in external users (customers) who can then quickly converse with support and engineering teams. For any new open source project, Slack is the preferred way to communicate with other contributors and users. Recently Slack has even added the ability to do VOIP calls through their platform. The mobile app works well and the UI is well designed to mimic the desktop app. Slack also integrates with pretty much everything out there and it's also simple to write your own bots and plugins for Slack. For instance, we have a bot that alerts whenever someone writes to use on Intercom, as well as another that checks Stack Overflow for new messages pertaining to our project. Finally Slack pricing is fairly competitive. There's a free tier which gives you most functionality except for the ability to search (if you exceed 10,000 messages). Then multiple paid tier options based on the number of users in your organization.

Contras: The desktop and mobile apps are my preferred way to use Slack and occasionally the performance tends to drag. Once in a while the Slack mobile app will unexpectedly terminate, although in recent updates it does that less frequently. I also don't like the fact that private conversations aren't really private as companies have the ability to request Slack for those records. I get it for compliance reasons, but be warned that private conversations are never private! The search UI workflow isn't the most intuitive, they should just op for some universal search versus organizing the search results by type.

Comentarios: I use Slack for daily communication business and to stay connected to coworkers and suppliers distributed among different locations. We have implemented Slack as a missing link that smoothly makes working with people on the other side of the country as if they would be sitting in an office just down the hallway.

Puntos a favor: Slack is simple, it is easy to use it has a lightweight user experience thus, at the same time is very powerful. In day to day routines it is just a great way of communicating (chatting) with coworkers. Perfect, reliable, fast asynchronous communication. Then someone tells you something you need to remember next week- use integrated reminders, that send you a message when you need it. Or you want to share your desktop real quick, to sho someone something in order to get their opinion. Slack has you covered. Or have a video call with someone or even a group of people. There you have it. Share files ? No problem. Want to have your conversations deleted after a while. there you go. The most impressive thing about all this is the simplicity and ease in which these features integrate into the core functionality which is a chat. Bravo !

Contras: Some of the features seem - behind the scenes - not optimized allready. Sharing data from my mobile device require it for example, to be uploaded first and then downloaded to the recipient. It works, but it takes more time and, I don't care when it is on the server I only care for it to reach the intended recipient(s). Synchronize it to the server whenever its suitable. Connection and reconnection gets tangled up sometimes, with Slack insisting that there is no connection available although all other applications have reconnected already. This however is complaining on a very high level, as these issues are really minor compared to almost all other platforms for online communication I have used.