Slack

Vorteile

Slack is the only communication app that I always have open, no matter what.

What I like most is the fantastic UI. The design is great "out of the box", but the real bonus is being able to customize it with your logo and brand color palette.

I love being able to set up an account for a client and give them a color link that applies their branding to their desktop app with one click.

Nachteile

Navigating set up and preferences is clunky. Some features are hard to find, especially the custom branding, which is a shame as it's such a lovely feature. Once you find the right page, the process is a cinch!

To change the colors: click on the tiny arrow to the right of the workspace name to get the dropdown menu. Choose "Preferences", NOT "Customize Slack" (that opens up a web page where you can load your own icons etc).

In the preference menu select "Themes". Scroll down to the bottom to access the custom feature, where you can enter the exact Hex color references or pick colors you fancy. (Pay attention to contrast of text against background). Copy the line of code from the box to share the same values with others on your team (just paste it into a message). All they need to do is click on it to apply the colors to their desktop app.

Vorteile

Slack is easy to use and simple to integrate with other products. My team uses it not only for Help Desk Support request notifications, but also for group conversations on projects.

Nachteile

There isn't a lot that I don't like about Slack. If I'm going to nitpick, it's not that easy to explain how to use something like Slack for the non-technical / non-tech savvy user. One of our biggest issues was adoption outside of our software development team. While Customer success stories are great, a walk-through scenario would go a long way to helping give users ideas about how they can use it on a day-to-day basis.

Vorteile

Before Slack, our team primarily communicated through email and one-on-one chat services. This caused a lot of miscommunication and wasted time going back and forth between people, passing on information, etc. Using Slack took away all of that. Being able to chat through channels allows us to communicate with groups of people at one time so everyone has access to discussions that might apply to them. We also really value the video chat feature because we have several remote employees that you can talk to face to face with a click of a button. Which is far better than having to go open some separate video chat app just to make a phone call.

Nachteile

Slack can be a little "noisy" for some people, but there are ways around that, so I don't really consider it a bad thing. It's just up to each user to figure out how to make Slack work best for them.

We've had some complaints within our team about the new text formatting, most specifically our engineers that preferred doing it on their own and find the new user-friendly format to actually be a hindrance. They'd really like for that to be a feature that each user to choose to enable or not.

Vorteile

Slack is a team communication tool, it very well categories the different processes in different channels, restrict the conversation is relevant to the channel and everyone who join that channel can collaboratively contribute to the topics.

It also provides a neat feature call thread, which you can start a discussion under a message and solve issues with that person. It reduces the distractions from the channels and help other members concentrate on the topics they care about.

You can also integrate automatic messages from other apps, softwares, e.g. we implemented the gitlab automation messages in the developers channel, it indicates what work has been done, it passes or break the build, etc.

Lovely integration of slash command feature, for giphy images, for icons, for text formats, etc. Making the conversation more fun.

You can also pin useful information, that you can easily access in anytime.

Nachteile

when you enter a message without sending, it places that person's icon into a draft section in the navigation area. It is kind of tricky to find that person, if you forgot you have a pending message to send and you are wondering why that persion is disappeared from your direct message section.

search bar can be improved as well, it would be nice to have more advanced search terms like what google does.

Vorteile

First off we don't use any of the add-ons. They seem incredibly useful for those who need them but we just don't have the need. What we like about Slack is that it's simple and very fast. We used HipChat back in the day and liked that but once they got bought out by Slack we tried some Rocket.Chat and Microsoft Teams. In the end we had issues with both of these and decided to give Slack a shot. Slack is very simple and easy to use and is extremely quick. We constantly found the competition software would lag after as little as a month or two of use due to all the messages.

Nachteile

Price. Compared to the competition it's expensive. When Slack bought out HipChat we were initially bummed because our price per user was going from around $2 a month to $7 a month. As a company who doesn't use any of the add-ons this seemed a bit steep. All and all I would say it's still too expensive for what we use it for but the other options out there have issues so large we continue to use Slack.