6 ms·
My work is a bit of a mess, we've historically never been that joined up of a business, but on the same floor we have people using Skype, Skype for Business, Sl
by iDemonix 10y ago
My work is a bit of a mess, we've historically never been that joined up of a business, but on the same floor we have people using Skype, Skype for Business, Slack and Teams.
Skype - Actively getting people to move away from this, fairly easy as new people in to the business don't setup accounts, everyone has experience with Skype, it's not a business tool.
Skype for Business - Clunky, conversation history is there, then disappears, sometimes it appears in your Outlook (in our case in a folder), sometimes it doesn't. Feels like a half-baked platform, but as my office is very Office365/MS-in-the-cloud they force it upon us.
Teams - Better than SfB, but still not usable. It tries to do everything, such as integrate planners, to do lists and so on. It dresses up as a business tool, then it has 'make your own meme' generators, which makes it seem a bit of a confused app. My biggest bug bear is when you're viewing a conversation, if someone replies to an old message, the entire message thread then appears as the 'newest'. I've missed countless conversations because of the funky ordering of chat.
Slack - Awesome. A bit memory hungry, but a really well thought out app in terms of UX. Does exactly what you need it do, clicking a username does what you expect, as does mentioning and so on. You can apply themes, tons of plugins and extra stuff.
Whilst Slack is everyones preferred app, the business refuse to pay for it as they pay for Office365. wORK are, for that reason, promoting both Teams and SfB, because Teams has planners and so on, but SfB has somewhat usable VOIP. Anyone slightly technical uses Slack though on the free plan, it's just a lot better and features like Code Snippets are great for tech teams.
There are a subset of us that are thinking of moving to IRC, which has the added feature that PMs and managers can't figure it out.
- fs111 10y agoI still don't get why everybody is hyping slack so much. I have used MSN, skype, hangouts, MS office messenger thing, IRC, hipchat and slack in my professional life and it is really all the same. You chat, you send files, you make calls. Nothing stands out really. What is so great about slack, that everybody is going nuts over it?
- Navarr 10y agoAt low volume that's true. Slack stays easy to use, keep up with, &c at high volume - which is what I like about it. IRC and Slack are nearly the same, but IRC comes with some overheads of finding or setting up a server, figuring out your own backlog, &c
- fs111 10y agoThe exact same can be said about HipChat, yet it receives no hype at all..
- abricot 10y agoBecause HipChat sounds like a sex thing. I'd feel silly talking about it in professional company.
- Navarr 10y agoI would not say the exact same about HipChat, any more than I would say the exact same about Microsoft Teams. I've had the (fortunate?) opportunity to use both, and neither of them feel like they do as good of a job. I even used HipChat first, so it's not just bias. (Wanted to stay in Atlassian tools) So perhaps it's just the added polish Slack seems to have? I know the Hipchat for Android app was god awful. Just the worst. Microsoft Teams didn't consistently scroll down automatically for new messages when you were already at the bottom for quite some time - supposedly that's fixed now. Perhaps the example you should bring up is "MatterMost" - though I certainly have not used that.
- vertex-four 10y agoEverybody is going nuts over it. That's what's "great" about it. As you say, it was done several times before.
- dagw 10y agoWhat is so great about slack, that everybody is going nuts over it? Easy access to all your conversation on all your devices and search that works better than any of the other platforms
- fs111 10y agoI only use one device for my work. Important stuff goes into email, not chat. I guess our communication patterns are very different.
- iDemonix 10y agoWe're a tech org, the ability to get data in/out of Slack with ease, using any scripting language, makes it awesome.
- fs111 10y agoWhat is all that data that you put into a 3rd party chat system? Serious question.
- iDemonix 10y agoWe're aware that data is being piped in to a 3rd party system, so obviously some things don't go in to Slack. An example of usage could be, we have a StatusPage.io site. Rather than subscribe everyone to email updates or similar that works here, and maintain that list, we simply have a plugin that pipes the updates in to Slack. That way if someone raises a status page update for a web server being down, everyone is aware that this is now public information on StatusPage. This is just one of a lot of examples, but things like that once embedded become the norm quickly and you wonder what it was like before them.
- AsyncAwait 10y ago> really well thought out app in terms of UX. Does exactly what you need it do, clicking a username does what you expect, How do I see a person's username instead of their real name when hovering over them?
- iDemonix 10y agoIt says their username at the top of the conversation if it's a private conversation, if it's a channel then selecting the user and pressing view profile will reveal their username. The great UX is that you don't even need their username, you can type the @ sign and then either their account full name or username, either way it will find them in an easy to use list.