What is Slack? Why are many companies trying to fix it?

In the age of the Internet and speed, working with a team has become much easier in terms of communication and exchange of ideas and sharing, where you can do business of all kinds on the Internet, saving you large amounts of money and eliminates the presence of offices and institutions for meetings and live meetings with the elements of the team, with the click of a button you can Hold an online meeting from behind the screens. The most popular platforms for working with an online team are Slack, which we will learn about in our article.

Slack

Slack is a collaborative hub where you can get things done with a team from the beginning of the project to budget discussions and between them. It aims to replace the need for a real office by communicating with a team with a modern communications system that ensures everyone stays in constant updates.

History of Slack

Slack was originally developed for the game development issue. In 2011, Tiny Speck developed the online Glitch game, which is now invalid, and discovered that there was no collaboration tool that any team needed, and Slack was the result of this need.

Slack quickly became the focus of the company and the developers renamed their company to Slack Technology and began marketing their new products as the core team of Flickr founders was selected. In 2014 the company became the fastest in history to achieve a $ 1 billion valuation, and now has nearly 3 million users with about one million paid members.

The importance of Slack

Slack is a fairly simple messaging app that provides organizations with access to topic-based public chat rooms, private groups and lives messaging, including public channels such as #random that allow the team to chat on public topics, providing a vital outlet for unrelated discussion. To work.

Slack is different from many other chat apps and offers the option of integration with other services like Google Drive, Trello, Dropbox, GitHub, MailChimp, and Zendesk.

Features Slack

Structured conversations

Slack works on channels, where you can create channels based on teams, projects or even office locations, and your team or organization can join and leave channels when needed.

The ability to search old conversations and files

When you share messages and files in public channels, information flows heavily through Slack, where you can find whatever messages and files you want, no matter how old.

Working with external partners

Shared channels and additional accounts give you the flexibility and freedom to work with clients, contractors and other third parties without having to leave Slack.

Applications and integrations

Applications and integrations are tools that make your Slack workflow easy and orderly, with the Slack App Directory contain thousands of apps that you can integrate into Slack.

Security

Slack protects your data and gives you a high level of privacy.

Some problems you may experience when using Slack

Storage problem

Storage is a big problem with Slack. It’s no more than 10,000 free messages. If you have a team of 5 or more, you will have trouble exceeding the limit, your chat history will not be stored and any message from the past will be archived or deleted. Draws your attention, so try reloading when you run out of storage and exceed the limit.

An enormous number of e-mail messages

The benefit of the inbox is the ability to see everything you need in one place. David Allen says in his book Getting Things Done (GTD), it’s important to have as few inboxes as possible and focus your efforts and team members on a few applications and services as possible.

CTRL + K is the tool you need to insert channels into Slack, but even advanced key skills can’t keep up with the speed of new incoming messages. The possibility of clutter within Slack is very likely in the absence of constant attention and organization of data.

Messages that come in real-time

Real-time instant messaging on Slack can be likened to your situation when you are on a busy, busy street, and continuous logging in or running notifications can damage your productive flow when doing heavy work.

To avoid this, there is one way to get rid of incoming messages by pressing the Do Not Disturb button.

If urgent, team members can override this option by marking the message as urgent, Slack will send an alert notification regardless of DND status.