In the year 2000, I began my first position working on a team building websites. We were a team of 4 designers and developers building and maintaining a web application for a dot com start-up. Back then AOL instant messenger was the only viable online messaging solution. Yahoo, Microsoft and a handful of other companies also had IM solutions. Since 2000, I’ve used some kind of IM service to communicate with both associates, freelancers, and clients.
These days, the Aslan team uses Slack as our main form of chat communication. We also use Skype to communicate with freelancers. Slack is easy and works on all platform and devices. It’s easy to create group IRC type chat channels, as well as, private groups and direct messaging. In my everyday work I have four main windows open – Gmail(MailPlane), Evernote, a web browser(either Chrome or Safari), and Slack.
I recently saw that the WordPress team has begun using Slack for all their chat communications.
Slack has a very large directory of other online services that integrate with Slack. For example, use Server Density to monitor our servers and apps. Alerts are sent directly to our Slack account to notify the entire team. Then we can discuss who is going to investigate the alert.
We’ve also tried Hipchat, which we also liked, but found Slack to have a more polished interface – and better emojis. 🙂
If you are involved with a team that you work with everyday, Slack is a great way to communicate in real-time.
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