Everyone praises Slack here but I find e-mail + IM completely sufficient and I work in a very large company.. Something urgent? Use IM. Something can wait? Use e-mail. It's that simple.
I work at a small company (<10 employees) and we use HipChat all day. Since we are geographically dispersed, it helps to maintain the inter-team communication that is hard to do remotely. We probably only use it for 40% "work." The rest is random news items and discussions about sports.
We're a sports company and everyone is usually involved with most of the discussions. I catch your point, but it's pretty easy to ignore if you are heads down coding. You can get someone's attention (for important stuff) but addressing them directly (@username).
> Which probably means that you have a coworker or two that's passively annoyed at you and/or actively ignores the channel.
I don't see how that's all that different from people having a discussion in a physical office. Someone might be annoyed people are chatting about sports, some might put headphones in so they don't hear.
> The rest is random news items and discussions about sports
Out of curiosity: how do you manage to get any work done with IM on? I get like 40-50 _emails_ a day (very low number by the industry standards) and if I don't close my Gmail tab it's a huge distractor during periods when I do long stretches of coding.
I have the audio notifications turned off. All it does is bounce the icon when someone addresses me directly in chat. It's pretty easy to ignore if I'm head down.
We don't do much email in our company, so that's not a distraction (it's <10 people in the company).
Slack's value comes from integrations. The way it compiles all the information from a variety of services in one place and presents it in one format (chat messages) removes a ton of overhead and inefficiency.
I typically have Gmail open with Chat and Slack. My team also has Gmail Chat but we find it easier to organize conversations, files, etc with Slack. It let's us have a channel for each project, a scrum channel for what everyone's working on, direct messaging when you need it, etc. Uploading files from Dropbox and other integrations like Github are also useful.
I used to think the same but with IM, you have to find out the right account and add it (someone might prefer their personal gmail over corporate or whatever) ... but with this, everything is right there. completely replaced any need for im for me.
I don't understand- that only seems to hold if everyone agrees to use Slack.
If everyone agrees to use a single chat service, like OC (like most large enterprises), then you don't have to search anything but the company directory, so the comparison doesn't seem to make sense. What you're saying is that IM is sub-optimal because everyone uses different services, but Slack is better because everyone is forced to use it?
Actually you get all of that with an e-mail as well - services send you e-mails when something happens (which you can filter to different folders, you get desktop notifications and so on); you have a full history as well and at least at my company we have an "off-topic" group, which can be easily filtered out if you don't want to be bothered. To be honest a live chat seems to me like a bad idea at a company, because it just encourages people to spam. I don't know, maybe I just prefer an efficient use of simple tools.
You get that, but not in the same user friendly way. Plus email is passive, while chat is active. I think this is the main selling point of chat. With email you do not get the same feeling as a chat room, and maybe that feeling is what drives people to use Slack, Hipchat etc.
>Actually you get all of that with an e-mail as well
Things that "you get with technology X" by having to do 10 extra steps and have everybody else on the team do the same to get the same benefits do not count.
The web hook integrations add a lot of value. Plus consider that most communication is archived and searchable but multiple users. Not the case with email + IM.
