What is Slack, and Why We Use It

Slack Logo

You’ve probably heard a lot about Slack - the messaging app that almost every workplace seems to be using. 

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What is Slack?
Slack is essentially a chat room for your whole team, designed to replace email as your primary method of communication and sharing.  Its workspaces allow you to organize communications by channels for group discussions and allows for private messages to share information, files, and more all in one place.  Plus, Slack integrates with a host of other apps so you can manage your entire workflow through one platform.

Here are a few of Slack’s key features:

Teams & Workspaces
Slack allows businesses, communities, and other organizations to create a private, dedicated workspace complete with a custom URL.  After a simple signup process, you’ll be able to invite your team to join and start getting work done.  For small to medium-sized teams, you’ll likely need just one workspace organized by public and private channels to meet all your needs, but Slack also has features to help enterprises manage multiple workspaces if that makes more sense (more on that below).

Team-Wide and Private Messaging
Slack messaging is grouped into channels and direct messages to organize conversations and replace communications that might otherwise be scattered across emails, text messages, or in person meetings.  Public channels are open to all members of a workspace and can cover everything from different marketing and sales operations to random discussions and streams of memes (if you’re company likes to have as much fun as we do).  You can also create Private channels in Slack to help break down large teams into their relevant working groups or restrict sensitive conversations or work materials to relevant team members.  And Slack allows private messages, sent directly to other team members, so you can have one-off communications or keep things organized between you and specific members of your team.

Integrations
Integration with third-party services is one of Slack’s most powerful features.

These let you use some of your favorite apps right within Slack - so you don’t have to keep switching tabs, remember where that shared link went to, or open up another application just to quickly double check something.

Some of Slack’s major integrations include:

• Google Drive
• Dropbox
• Heroku
• Github
• Zendesk
• Zapier