What is Slack?
Slack is a messaging app that works as a very effective collaborative tool, and brings together all of your team communication in one place. Slack offers real-time messaging, search and archiving for teams. It integrates with a number of external services and applications and comes with built-in sharing options, so that you can share your files or emails with anyone, either internally – within a team, or externally.
Why Do You Need Slack?
While it has only been two years since it was first introduced, Slack has become very popular with business executives in many Fortune 500 companies. It is easy to see why. The problem is with the nature of email. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, most of the email one received – 70% to 80% – was from another person. So much of the email communication received was important enough to be viewed.
But now, only 8 to 10% of the emails one receives is really important, and comes from an actual person…while the rest of the 90% comes from machines, email marketing companies, Facebook comments, Twitter responses, monthly bills, bank statements and so on and so forth.
When you are working in a competitive corporate environment, picking out the emails from within the organization or from your team members from the rest becomes a real headache. That’s why Slack can be so useful.
What Does Slack Do?
When you tap on the Slack icon, it makes available only the emails and other communication received from the people at your company or your team members. Slack creates a wall between your internal communication with your team members and the rest of the stuff you deal with, generally. So you know what’s important and what’s not and focus on only what you need for work.
Slack has advanced search features, filters and sorting functionality and makes it easier for you to get the files that you need. Slack has powerful native apps for both Android and iOS and can be synchronized across several devices – mobile phones, tablets, laptop and desktop computer. So if you read an email on your laptop, the Slack app on your iPhone will know about it and will mark the email as “read”.
There’s no need for status reports and stand-up meetings as Slack makes sure that everyone in the team is in the loop. This simplifies a lot of things for you and your team. All team communications on Slack are public, so everyone can see what’s going on elsewhere in the organization.
The marketing department can get an idea of the challenges faced by the customer relationship managers, and engineers are always aware of what the designers are working on currently, and don’t have to ask.
Slack has a searchable history of the entire team’s communication, which allows you to stay updated with what’s going on. With Slack, you can go through every decision made by your team, every discussion, link, or file shared. You don’t have to waste time on the triaging of emails and status updates any more. This saves time and does a lot to boost productivity at the workplace.
Slack – Price and Plans Slack is available in four different plans.
- Free – no limits on time or users
- Standard – costs $6.67 per user/month.
- Plus – costs $12.50 per user/month
- Enterprise – costs $48 for the whole team/monthly
Conclusion
Slack is one of the best apps for online communication and collaboration out there. It works as a perfect private back-channel for members of a team within an organization. It provides for a seamless communication within the workplace, saves time and improves productivity.
Source: Internet Marketing
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