A good communication within a company is essential for everyone to direct their efforts in the same direction and projects to go forward. To communicate with the rest of our team have many tools such as email, chats, video-conference or file sharing, etc. but today we speak Slack, a tool designed to simplify the communication process by grouping all in one channel.
Stewart Butterfly, co-founder of Flickr, initiated this project is having some success in many organizations. Its objective was to reduce the use of email and the number of tools used in each project to improve communication between members of the team. Thousands of users are already using Slack with good results and has a free version so you can try it in your projects. How does it work?
The “communication channels” are its mainstay. For each project or issue a communication channel is created that shared by all stakeholders. All members use this channel to provide information, upload documents, code snippets and give their opinions so all information related to this matter is centralized in one place. In this way the staff knows all the information relating to the project that will also be stored being possible to search in it when necessary.
Slack offers integration with many services like Dropbox, Google Docs, Asana, Trello, GitHub, Twitter, Jira and Subversion. It also has mobile application for both iOS and Android so you can have all the information on your smartphone or tablet and continue the conversation from anywhere.
As for prices, Lite version is a completely free with limitations that we can eliminate from $6 per user per month. Users who already have it in place agree that it reduces the use of email and external tools and that improves communication between all members of the team.