We're big users of Slack at my current employer, and we love it. But, no, it is not a silver bullet. The couple of things that I really like about it: - it's

We're big users of Slack at my current employer, and we love it. But, no, it is not a silver bullet. The couple of things that I really like about it: - it's good for collaborative working or editing - got a fire going? about to push code live? Get all the relevant parties in a chat room and talk through it, and then destroy it afterwards - the integrations - for automated systems, slack messages are far less disruptive than emails - the indexing/searching of documents + chats - game-changer for finding that slide deck someone talked about a month ago > So I now need to scroll through screens of idle chatter to try and figure out what some other team is doing? It's not great for teams updating other teams on what's happening, we have our own home-grown system for that. It would be very useful if you could have an announcement-only channel, where you could specify the people who have the ability to post, and others cna listen, but they don't have that. > Is this constantly pinging me while I'm trying to work? It's configurable, but it has twitter- and irc-style mentions, so you can set your client to only ping you when you get specifically mentioned or something is posted in a critical channel > Will every conversation descend into bikeshedding as every man and his dog wants to offer his opinion on the new logo or product feature? It's possible, I guess, but the structure is such that you end up with channels that are important and those that are just interesting. Important channels you monitor throughout the day, interesting ones you check twice a day. For us, all the product-related channels I monitor as much as possible. Sales- and marketing-related channels, I maybe check sporadically That being said we are also heavy users of small private groups to keep things focused for specific scenarios. It's not magical, but Slack is a very well executed product. And compared with trying to use hangouts, hipchat, or Skype as yourchat client, it's so much better.