3 ms·
I've been part of a number of organizations that have tried to use Slack as a knowledge base. It works fine when there is a small amount of information that ne
by hahamrfunnyguy 3y ago
I've been part of a number of organizations that have tried to use Slack as a knowledge base. It works fine when there is a small amount of information that needs to be shared by a small amount of people (say, less than twenty). I find it is really poorly suited for it when you have more people than that and information to be shared.
The biggest Slack I have been on was I think close to 10,000 people. The team that set it up envisioned it to be the place for everything, but it was a big mess. Perhaps separate instances were needed.
A better approach is to make an existing knowledge base work well within Slack. This is something that Microsoft Teams is trying to do, but still doesn't do completely effectively.
- pc86 3y agoI've seen creators move their communities off of Slack because the cost got prohibitive, long before 10k people. I can't imagine how much that cost to operate year-to-year.
- dijit 3y agoEnterprise plans are somewhere in the $20/u/m region, I think Ubisoft got extremely mad that people were making small slacks- so they unified them all under one majorly huge slack and then closed it shortly in favour of teams. Which, was smart since it killed off all the little slacks. For Ubisoft (24,000 people) it was in the region of €5.8MM/y (I saw the bill).
- brazzledazzle 3y agoTeams is a better webex but it's not a better Slack. It's UX/UI is full of tiny annoyances, bugs and stupid decisions and if you find these things frustrating it makes using it for chat a chore at best. I'm sure internal developers opinions weren't even considered by whatever lifeless corporate IT group sitting in Ubisoft HQ. The only reason this keeps happening is because we have so thoroughly declawed regulators that Microsoft feels free to engage in monopolistic behavior again. They don't have to compete on quality or features and only need to make the product good enough to check some feature boxes so that some bean counter can claim it does everything Slack can but it's "free" (read: bundled with a M365 plan we're already paying for).
- samschooler 3y agoFWIW I've been a part of a company where, at a ~60 person engineering team, it worked well as a supplement for documentation. For big projects, planning, etc, we used Confluence and other actual documentation tools. However, for things like debugging, local env stuff, and dev ops tribal knowledge, slack public channels + search was a god send.
- marssaxman 3y agoIt feels strange to imagine using a chat service like Slack as a knowledge base - it feels so ephemeral! How did that work? Does it have an embedded wiki I don't know about?
- imbnwa 3y agoI imagine part of the allure is the delusion that one can precisely skip the hard work of maintaining (read: organizing and carefully cultivating as a culture) a persistent knowledge base.
- hahamrfunnyguy 3y agoPoorly. Information was often duplicated because it couldn't be found. There was not a wiki embedded, as far as I know.
- paxys 3y agoSlack is a chat application. Why on earth would you use it as a knowledge base? Wikis and docs still exist. Use them.