12 ms·

Ways scientists use Slack

108 points by kungfudoi 10y ago

rl3 10y ago
Imagine how much more productive they would be with threading support. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/804971838271004672 https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/804971838271004672 As an aside, I think it's delightful someone made a Twitter handle named @slackThreadsYet for this.
- neximo64 10y ago
  And if the client used some kind of reliable and fault tolerant connection method so that the app open opened up and connected really quickly instead of being behind layers of websocket over socket handshaking. At the moment it takes nearly 30s-1m from open to latest chat message visible. Instead of improving the speed they've put more effort into making the loading screens dynamic and appealing, which is quite myopic. I think i've written to Slack over 2 years ago letting them know how painful it is to use slack in Africa, Australia or where latency is high (even with a fast connection). I was hoping their valuation and billions and funding would help them improve their software or even make a native mac app.
  - shade23 10y ago
    They have a native(if electron can be called native) App now for mac. I agree with the latency and performance issues though. The Slack app practically freezes on changing network or if you wake you mac from sleep.
    - eschaton 10y ago
      It's not native.
  - ec109685 10y ago
    They have a plans for improving usability for remote users: https://slack.engineering/making-slack-feel-like-slack-a7c4e9b6d4fb#.7f0f5accr https://slack.engineering/making-slack-feel-like-slack-a7c4e...
- hackerkid 10y ago
  You should check out Zulip. https://zulip.org/ https://zulip.org/
  - Novex 10y ago
    Flowdock is also pretty great https://www.flowdock.com/ https://www.flowdock.com/
- tmail21 10y ago
  The way chat threads are currently implemented (in chat apps other than Slack) are kind of sucky. I hope Slack doesn't do the same. Basically, the UX of chat means that threads are typically inline in the chat room or channel. This means that your threads are constantly "disappearing up". A better approach (from a UX standpoint) is to make threads first-class entities and have ways to organize threads. TMail21 (https://tmail21.com https://tmail21.com) takes just such an approach. As such it is much more geared towards the asynchronous (offline) use-case than the synchronous (real-time) use case of chat apps.
jboggan 10y ago
Back when Google Wave came out I got my lab to use it and they really liked it for awhile. Alas.
- paveway 10y ago
  I feel like the Google Drive/Docs/Hangouts combo pack provides all the things that Wave was supposed to be, no? All the ground-breaking features, such as live interactive multi-user caret presence are part of Docs. Did Wave promise more than that? What are the missing pieces that got lost along the way, and never made the jump?
  - aub3bhat 10y ago
    An Open client server protocol. I think Google Wave debacle is a great example of how the advice/vision dished out on HN is disconnected from the reality of consumer experience/expectations. With Wave Google saw writing on the wall and discontinued Reader and GChat XMPP integration.
    - johnchristopher 10y ago
      Could you clarify what the writing on the wall is ?
      - aub3bhat 10y ago
        That walled garden with better user experience are more successful than open standards where user experience might be difficult to due to issues in changing protocol specifications.
        CaptSpify 10y ago
        In the short term. It seems to me that long-term the opposite is true. Have there been any studies to show either way?
    - paveway 10y ago
superkuh 10y ago
tldr; some labs adopt a proprietary communication and content management system (instead of using existing open protocols) because they don't have the technical support, or time, to do it right. In the short term this increases productivity but in the long term the lock-in will constrain.
- eschaton 10y ago
  At the largest CS schools there was some use of a federated Zephyr system for a while from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s. While Zephyr the protocol isn't great, the culture was. And being based on an open protocol and Open Source codebase — since it came out of MIT Project Athena — lots of fun hacks were written atop it too. Also, the primary client "zwgc" (Zephyr WindowGram Client) could run reasonably on a low end workstation like a DECstation 3100 or SPARCstation 1 (8MB RAM, 25MHz RISC CPU, thin Ethernet or SLIP/PPP via dialup). None of this megabytes-of-HTML-and-JavaScript, gigabytes-of-RAM nonsense.
- lvs 10y ago
  The very few examples cited in the piece represent outliers. I don't have any peers who are chatting on Slack. Email is fine, and most people know that distractions (like HN) are the devil's work.
johnhenry 10y ago
In every industry that I have worked in, there has always been a battle between using the latest innovative technology to improve everyone's job, and holding back to ensure that nothing breaks. I've always been an advocated of the latter and it appears that some industries may not be ready to start using slack. Take Ginkgo Bioworks, for example. Sure, being able to open a door through slack because you don't have your keycard is convenient, but this introduces a few security holes and likely makes the whole keycard system useless. Also, there doesn't seem to be any mention of the need for data security in the article, but it should be noted that slack does not use end-to-end encryption, so they can read everything your organization shares. And, even if they are a trustworthy third-party, they have been hacked before (http://www.businessinsider.com/slacks-security-breach-may-be-worse-than-its-letting-on-2015-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/slacks-security-breach-may-be...), so it's worth noting.
- eschaton 10y ago
  How is browser-based chat like Slack "the latest innovative technology?" It's just IRC or Zephyr, but accessed via a browser. It's not something people didn't have in the early 1990s. Hell, it's not substantially different than AOL or Yahoo chat rooms either, except that it's so heavyweight you couldn't even think about accessing it from systems that accessed those just fine.
  - tluyben2 10y ago
    Many people including me say this but people do not want to see it. It is even worse tham IRC imho as the clients are slow and wonky, they just 'look better' which is perception. They did their marketing very well indeed.
    - vehementi 10y ago
      Slow, wonky, heavyweight clients are not a factor in productivity. If it takes an extra 1 second to send/display a message, it doesn't matter. The communication is close enough to real time. The tradeoffs (which are being massively and hilariously exaggerated here) are worth it because anyone can easily use it from anywhere without having to stay connected or set up logging systems etc.
elkos 10y ago
I wish more people in science and medicine used open source solutions like Matrix (even the riot.im Matrix instance would be nice).
- terraforming 10y ago
  I agree. I seriously hope Matrix becomes the open standard for everyone to use.. I dream of the day my contacts will stop using skype.
  - elkos 10y ago
    To be honest, I'm a bit disappointed when I see open source projects adopting closed source platforms. While they can have similar functionality with Matrix, without having to support a Matrix instance.
eschaton 10y ago
I'm constantly amazed by professionals who complain about their email inbox. Do they not bother to learn their tools, and set up simple mail filters? Mailing lists are actually one of the best collaboration tools available because: (1) They can be, but don't have to be, nearly real-time; (2) The content comes to you, you don't have to check it; (3) They allow a full suite of content to be exchanged, if participants are willing to accept the overhead; and (4) They're straightforward to build tools atop, including archives, autoresponders, and various kinds of automation. Realtime tools like IRC & Zephyr and their awful browser-based clones like HipChat and Slack can be useful too, but should be treated as supplements, not primary. Web forums aren't quite as awful as browser-based chat, but they're generally better treated as a front-end to a mailing list for people who don't otherwise have access to a good mail client. (Really, all of this would be even better served by NNTP instead of mailing lists, but almost nobody runs organizational NNTP servers and mail clients long ago dropped support for it.)
- VMG 10y ago
  > Do they not bother to learn their tools, and set up simple mail filters? You know the answer. They don't, because they have actual work to do.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - amelius 10y ago
    Communication is part of their work.
    - tvanantwerp 10y ago
      Managing my office's IT, this is absolutely how I feel about it. If their job depends on technology X, they should master technology X! But through experience I know that this isn't what happens. The technical stuff is my job. I'm responsible for holding hands and getting everyone to the level they need to be at. If I don't go out of my way to bring people along, they won't even think about it.
nemoniac 10y ago
Very disappointing to see such a fluff piece in Nature. One scientist who says "I have a lot more discipline" while another says "“I'm just typing whatever comes into my head". The "ability to incorporate 'bots'" is lauded as a feature, suggesting that it's not possible with email while further down reporting how one lab has triggers from email to post to Slack. To top it all off, every "feature" of Slack mentioned is also a feature of email.
- cbsmith 10y ago
  Also a feature of IRC...
  - grenoire 10y ago
    Any service that has group chat and the most basic API to just read and write messages can have bots. Stuff like providing button options or inlining images is just icing.
- whyagaindavid 10y ago
  If anyone from Nature/influential is reading, you cant even close your Nature.com account. I tried closing my 10 year old account, they replied that according to terms and conditions I _had_ agreed while opening the account, it will stay forever.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Small claims court.
    - freyir 10y ago
      On what grounds?
      - brianwawok 10y ago
        Sure you can figure out something, angry lawyer letters tends to get people to fix things for you. :)
isostatic 10y ago
The features of slack I like that traditional irc lacks * Sms 2 factor authentication * Historical logs * instant search * Offline messages * The client isn't called "BitchX" It's replaced IRC at my work because our own irc servers were cert based which is a pain to set up, but mostly because you don't miss things when you're offline, it's easy to get new starters and non tech people (especially developers) on board, and the history functionality is seemless.
- drc0 10y ago
  do you really expect people to read chat backlogs and be on track?
  - avh02 10y ago
    no, but I expect to read messages sent while my laptop was on standby.
- mugsie 10y ago
  * Sms 2 factor authentication - Yup, slack has IRC beat there * Historical logs - Eh, that is increadibly easy for an IS/IT team to set up and run. * instant search - As ^ * Offline messages - It is called an IRC bouncer - again easy to set up and run * The client isn't called "BitchX" - mIRC, XChat, irssi, weechat, KiwiIRC, the list goes on. Not using IRC because you don't like the name of one client out of probably hundreds short sighted. (and you know you can connect to slack from BitchX right?) I grant it is not perfect, and for some use cases just paying the money to slack is worth it, but IRC can have most of these features.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    How many IT hours does it take to set all that up? And a nice phone client? Seems cheaper to pay slack a few bucks...
    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      Really? I set up an IRC in a couple of hours. Why pay slack a few bucks over years when you can pay a decent admin a couple hours worth of work? (I do admit I've not seen a good IRC phone client)
slack_hater 10y ago
> When geneticist Daniel MacArthur checks into his lab, the first thing he does is fire up Slack, a workplace messaging app. I am sorry for this geneticist. His life sucks as much as a software engineer's.
- pvdebbe 10y ago
  Luckily Slack isn't that big a deal abroad. For instance, we didn't jump into that wagon since it cost money. We tried MS Teams, I was able to argument our people off of it.
  - cyberferret 10y ago
    I assume you meant "augment", but "argument" may actually fit the context better!
    - pvdebbe 10y ago
      'Argument' is what I meant. Not being a native English speaker my sentence was probably throwing you off guard!
whyagaindavid 10y ago
In my uni, I strongly forbid use of any proprietary apps, as much as possible. Please forgive me, I do agree software devs needs to eat ... etc. but let me explain. We all moved to macs in the last 5 years, which means when I upgrade from mountain lion to Mavericks to sierra, we need to get a BUY Endnote. Every second major version of OSX needs and new EndNote. Even with academic license, it costs, about EUR 600 for every device. 1 Prof, 2 Staff scientists, 4 postdocs, 6 PhDs (charged a bit lower EUR 200 per year). You calculate. There are universities where Endnote is cheaper but subsidized by the bulk-contracts. Oh yes, we do use MS-office. Atleast MS does not force us to buy new MS-Office for every OS upgrade. Also remember, that grants pay mainly for equipment and rarely any/expensive software. As other posters indicated, mailing-lists + proper filtering is the optimal.
- drc0 10y ago
  thank you.
- njbooher 10y ago
  Where do you live? Even retail pricing doesn't seem to be that high. http://endnote.com/buy http://endnote.com/buy http://www.adeptscience.co.uk/products/refman/endnote http://www.adeptscience.co.uk/products/refman/endnote
- walterstucco 10y ago
  I don't get why people still use proprietary software for team communication. Slack is just a glorified IRC owned by a private company that you have to pay to get something remotely useful. My teammates hate me for not even having slack installed on my computer.
  - glogla 10y ago
    Especially when you can use Mattermost, which is self hosted and open source and it can do pretty much anything Slack can.
    - brianwawok 10y ago
lyschoening 10y ago
It works well in our research center. It offers advantages over mail (instant, accommodates multiple people writing short messages at once) and IRC (file sharing with preview, longer posts, editable messages, zero configuration client software). With its multiple modes of communication it works both for people who are in the lab and those who spend most of their day at the desk. The search is a big advantage too. It is better than any search in email clients or IM clients I have seen. It even looks into files. With the academic discount it also comes at a reasonable price. I don't want to make this a sales pitch, but unlike earlier collaboration tools, Slack actually adds some value. Competitors are well advised to study its features.
- snarf21 10y ago
  Do you find that you spend collectively more time checking Slack than you used to spend dealing with email? Do you think you spend more time in switching costs from concentrating on your work to focusing on the Slack conversations? I've found it to be analogous to converting all my emails and meetings into a 500 mini meetings and email but spread across the whole day with no real opportunity to compartmentalize them.
  - lyschoening 10y ago
    No, I don't. When the messages become a distraction, you can just snooze the notifications for a few hours. If a message pops up in a channel with a topic that isn't a priority, you can just leave it unread until the more important things are dealt with. In these regards Slack is not very different from email for me.
stevesun21 10y ago
I think it's not quite right and fair as people keep comparing email vs Slack. Email is a open info transfer protocol, anyone can create their own email system as long as they follow the email protocol, however, Slack is app and owned by a company. Yes you can say it has some advantages than email, but, I hard to believe that people willing to shift from a protocol to a specific software – this sounds to me like people give up on buying appliances which computable with standard power outlet, and get started buying appliances from a specific brand and these appliances can only plugged into this brand owned power outlet. I think this is ok as long as you are a big fun of this brand and bless the it will not be disappear early than you :-)

108 points by kungfudoi 10y ago

rl3 10y ago

Imagine how much more productive they would be with threading support. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/804971838271004672 https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/804971838271004672 As an aside, I think it's delightful someone made a Twitter handle named @slackThreadsYet for this.

neximo64 10y ago
And if the client used some kind of reliable and fault tolerant connection method so that the app open opened up and connected really quickly instead of being behind layers of websocket over socket handshaking. At the moment it takes nearly 30s-1m from open to latest chat message visible. Instead of improving the speed they've put more effort into making the loading screens dynamic and appealing, which is quite myopic. I think i've written to Slack over 2 years ago letting them know how painful it is to use slack in Africa, Australia or where latency is high (even with a fast connection). I was hoping their valuation and billions and funding would help them improve their software or even make a native mac app.
- shade23 10y ago
  They have a native(if electron can be called native) App now for mac. I agree with the latency and performance issues though. The Slack app practically freezes on changing network or if you wake you mac from sleep.
  - eschaton 10y ago
    It's not native.
- ec109685 10y ago
  They have a plans for improving usability for remote users: https://slack.engineering/making-slack-feel-like-slack-a7c4e9b6d4fb#.7f0f5accr https://slack.engineering/making-slack-feel-like-slack-a7c4e...
hackerkid 10y ago
You should check out Zulip. https://zulip.org/ https://zulip.org/
- Novex 10y ago
  Flowdock is also pretty great https://www.flowdock.com/ https://www.flowdock.com/
tmail21 10y ago
The way chat threads are currently implemented (in chat apps other than Slack) are kind of sucky. I hope Slack doesn't do the same. Basically, the UX of chat means that threads are typically inline in the chat room or channel. This means that your threads are constantly "disappearing up". A better approach (from a UX standpoint) is to make threads first-class entities and have ways to organize threads. TMail21 (https://tmail21.com https://tmail21.com) takes just such an approach. As such it is much more geared towards the asynchronous (offline) use-case than the synchronous (real-time) use case of chat apps.

jboggan 10y ago

Back when Google Wave came out I got my lab to use it and they really liked it for awhile. Alas.

paveway 10y ago
I feel like the Google Drive/Docs/Hangouts combo pack provides all the things that Wave was supposed to be, no? All the ground-breaking features, such as live interactive multi-user caret presence are part of Docs. Did Wave promise more than that? What are the missing pieces that got lost along the way, and never made the jump?
- aub3bhat 10y ago
  An Open client server protocol. I think Google Wave debacle is a great example of how the advice/vision dished out on HN is disconnected from the reality of consumer experience/expectations. With Wave Google saw writing on the wall and discontinued Reader and GChat XMPP integration.
  - johnchristopher 10y ago
    Could you clarify what the writing on the wall is ?
    - aub3bhat 10y ago
      That walled garden with better user experience are more successful than open standards where user experience might be difficult to due to issues in changing protocol specifications.
      - CaptSpify 10y ago
        In the short term. It seems to me that long-term the opposite is true. Have there been any studies to show either way?
  - paveway 10y ago

superkuh 10y ago

tldr; some labs adopt a proprietary communication and content management system (instead of using existing open protocols) because they don't have the technical support, or time, to do it right. In the short term this increases productivity but in the long term the lock-in will constrain.

eschaton 10y ago
At the largest CS schools there was some use of a federated Zephyr system for a while from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s. While Zephyr the protocol isn't great, the culture was. And being based on an open protocol and Open Source codebase — since it came out of MIT Project Athena — lots of fun hacks were written atop it too. Also, the primary client "zwgc" (Zephyr WindowGram Client) could run reasonably on a low end workstation like a DECstation 3100 or SPARCstation 1 (8MB RAM, 25MHz RISC CPU, thin Ethernet or SLIP/PPP via dialup). None of this megabytes-of-HTML-and-JavaScript, gigabytes-of-RAM nonsense.
lvs 10y ago
The very few examples cited in the piece represent outliers. I don't have any peers who are chatting on Slack. Email is fine, and most people know that distractions (like HN) are the devil's work.

johnhenry 10y ago

In every industry that I have worked in, there has always been a battle between using the latest innovative technology to improve everyone's job, and holding back to ensure that nothing breaks. I've always been an advocated of the latter and it appears that some industries may not be ready to start using slack. Take Ginkgo Bioworks, for example. Sure, being able to open a door through slack because you don't have your keycard is convenient, but this introduces a few security holes and likely makes the whole keycard system useless. Also, there doesn't seem to be any mention of the need for data security in the article, but it should be noted that slack does not use end-to-end encryption, so they can read everything your organization shares. And, even if they are a trustworthy third-party, they have been hacked before (http://www.businessinsider.com/slacks-security-breach-may-be-worse-than-its-letting-on-2015-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/slacks-security-breach-may-be...), so it's worth noting.

eschaton 10y ago
How is browser-based chat like Slack "the latest innovative technology?" It's just IRC or Zephyr, but accessed via a browser. It's not something people didn't have in the early 1990s. Hell, it's not substantially different than AOL or Yahoo chat rooms either, except that it's so heavyweight you couldn't even think about accessing it from systems that accessed those just fine.
- tluyben2 10y ago
  Many people including me say this but people do not want to see it. It is even worse tham IRC imho as the clients are slow and wonky, they just 'look better' which is perception. They did their marketing very well indeed.
  - vehementi 10y ago
    Slow, wonky, heavyweight clients are not a factor in productivity. If it takes an extra 1 second to send/display a message, it doesn't matter. The communication is close enough to real time. The tradeoffs (which are being massively and hilariously exaggerated here) are worth it because anyone can easily use it from anywhere without having to stay connected or set up logging systems etc.

elkos 10y ago

I wish more people in science and medicine used open source solutions like Matrix (even the riot.im Matrix instance would be nice).

terraforming 10y ago
I agree. I seriously hope Matrix becomes the open standard for everyone to use.. I dream of the day my contacts will stop using skype.
- elkos 10y ago
  To be honest, I'm a bit disappointed when I see open source projects adopting closed source platforms. While they can have similar functionality with Matrix, without having to support a Matrix instance.

eschaton 10y ago

I'm constantly amazed by professionals who complain about their email inbox. Do they not bother to learn their tools, and set up simple mail filters? Mailing lists are actually one of the best collaboration tools available because: (1) They can be, but don't have to be, nearly real-time; (2) The content comes to you, you don't have to check it; (3) They allow a full suite of content to be exchanged, if participants are willing to accept the overhead; and (4) They're straightforward to build tools atop, including archives, autoresponders, and various kinds of automation. Realtime tools like IRC & Zephyr and their awful browser-based clones like HipChat and Slack can be useful too, but should be treated as supplements, not primary. Web forums aren't quite as awful as browser-based chat, but they're generally better treated as a front-end to a mailing list for people who don't otherwise have access to a good mail client. (Really, all of this would be even better served by NNTP instead of mailing lists, but almost nobody runs organizational NNTP servers and mail clients long ago dropped support for it.)

VMG 10y ago
> Do they not bother to learn their tools, and set up simple mail filters? You know the answer. They don't, because they have actual work to do.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- amelius 10y ago
  Communication is part of their work.
  - tvanantwerp 10y ago
    Managing my office's IT, this is absolutely how I feel about it. If their job depends on technology X, they should master technology X! But through experience I know that this isn't what happens. The technical stuff is my job. I'm responsible for holding hands and getting everyone to the level they need to be at. If I don't go out of my way to bring people along, they won't even think about it.

nemoniac 10y ago

Very disappointing to see such a fluff piece in Nature. One scientist who says "I have a lot more discipline" while another says "“I'm just typing whatever comes into my head". The "ability to incorporate 'bots'" is lauded as a feature, suggesting that it's not possible with email while further down reporting how one lab has triggers from email to post to Slack. To top it all off, every "feature" of Slack mentioned is also a feature of email.

cbsmith 10y ago
Also a feature of IRC...
- grenoire 10y ago
  Any service that has group chat and the most basic API to just read and write messages can have bots. Stuff like providing button options or inlining images is just icing.
whyagaindavid 10y ago
If anyone from Nature/influential is reading, you cant even close your Nature.com account. I tried closing my 10 year old account, they replied that according to terms and conditions I _had_ agreed while opening the account, it will stay forever.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Small claims court.
  - freyir 10y ago
    On what grounds?
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      Sure you can figure out something, angry lawyer letters tends to get people to fix things for you. :)

isostatic 10y ago

The features of slack I like that traditional irc lacks * Sms 2 factor authentication * Historical logs * instant search * Offline messages * The client isn't called "BitchX" It's replaced IRC at my work because our own irc servers were cert based which is a pain to set up, but mostly because you don't miss things when you're offline, it's easy to get new starters and non tech people (especially developers) on board, and the history functionality is seemless.

drc0 10y ago
do you really expect people to read chat backlogs and be on track?
- avh02 10y ago
  no, but I expect to read messages sent while my laptop was on standby.
mugsie 10y ago
* Sms 2 factor authentication - Yup, slack has IRC beat there * Historical logs - Eh, that is increadibly easy for an IS/IT team to set up and run. * instant search - As ^ * Offline messages - It is called an IRC bouncer - again easy to set up and run * The client isn't called "BitchX" - mIRC, XChat, irssi, weechat, KiwiIRC, the list goes on. Not using IRC because you don't like the name of one client out of probably hundreds short sighted. (and you know you can connect to slack from BitchX right?) I grant it is not perfect, and for some use cases just paying the money to slack is worth it, but IRC can have most of these features.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  How many IT hours does it take to set all that up? And a nice phone client? Seems cheaper to pay slack a few bucks...
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    Really? I set up an IRC in a couple of hours. Why pay slack a few bucks over years when you can pay a decent admin a couple hours worth of work? (I do admit I've not seen a good IRC phone client)

slack_hater 10y ago

> When geneticist Daniel MacArthur checks into his lab, the first thing he does is fire up Slack, a workplace messaging app. I am sorry for this geneticist. His life sucks as much as a software engineer's.

pvdebbe 10y ago
Luckily Slack isn't that big a deal abroad. For instance, we didn't jump into that wagon since it cost money. We tried MS Teams, I was able to argument our people off of it.
- cyberferret 10y ago
  I assume you meant "augment", but "argument" may actually fit the context better!
  - pvdebbe 10y ago
    'Argument' is what I meant. Not being a native English speaker my sentence was probably throwing you off guard!

whyagaindavid 10y ago

In my uni, I strongly forbid use of any proprietary apps, as much as possible. Please forgive me, I do agree software devs needs to eat ... etc. but let me explain. We all moved to macs in the last 5 years, which means when I upgrade from mountain lion to Mavericks to sierra, we need to get a BUY Endnote. Every second major version of OSX needs and new EndNote. Even with academic license, it costs, about EUR 600 for every device. 1 Prof, 2 Staff scientists, 4 postdocs, 6 PhDs (charged a bit lower EUR 200 per year). You calculate. There are universities where Endnote is cheaper but subsidized by the bulk-contracts. Oh yes, we do use MS-office. Atleast MS does not force us to buy new MS-Office for every OS upgrade. Also remember, that grants pay mainly for equipment and rarely any/expensive software. As other posters indicated, mailing-lists + proper filtering is the optimal.

drc0 10y ago
thank you.
njbooher 10y ago
Where do you live? Even retail pricing doesn't seem to be that high. http://endnote.com/buy http://endnote.com/buy http://www.adeptscience.co.uk/products/refman/endnote http://www.adeptscience.co.uk/products/refman/endnote
walterstucco 10y ago
I don't get why people still use proprietary software for team communication. Slack is just a glorified IRC owned by a private company that you have to pay to get something remotely useful. My teammates hate me for not even having slack installed on my computer.
- glogla 10y ago
  Especially when you can use Mattermost, which is self hosted and open source and it can do pretty much anything Slack can.
  - brianwawok 10y ago

lyschoening 10y ago

It works well in our research center. It offers advantages over mail (instant, accommodates multiple people writing short messages at once) and IRC (file sharing with preview, longer posts, editable messages, zero configuration client software). With its multiple modes of communication it works both for people who are in the lab and those who spend most of their day at the desk. The search is a big advantage too. It is better than any search in email clients or IM clients I have seen. It even looks into files. With the academic discount it also comes at a reasonable price. I don't want to make this a sales pitch, but unlike earlier collaboration tools, Slack actually adds some value. Competitors are well advised to study its features.

snarf21 10y ago
Do you find that you spend collectively more time checking Slack than you used to spend dealing with email? Do you think you spend more time in switching costs from concentrating on your work to focusing on the Slack conversations? I've found it to be analogous to converting all my emails and meetings into a 500 mini meetings and email but spread across the whole day with no real opportunity to compartmentalize them.
- lyschoening 10y ago
  No, I don't. When the messages become a distraction, you can just snooze the notifications for a few hours. If a message pops up in a channel with a topic that isn't a priority, you can just leave it unread until the more important things are dealt with. In these regards Slack is not very different from email for me.

stevesun21 10y ago

I think it's not quite right and fair as people keep comparing email vs Slack. Email is a open info transfer protocol, anyone can create their own email system as long as they follow the email protocol, however, Slack is app and owned by a company. Yes you can say it has some advantages than email, but, I hard to believe that people willing to shift from a protocol to a specific software – this sounds to me like people give up on buying appliances which computable with standard power outlet, and get started buying appliances from a specific brand and these appliances can only plugged into this brand owned power outlet. I think this is ok as long as you are a big fun of this brand and bless the it will not be disappear early than you :-)