Tips and tricks for using Slack
September 2, 2014 7:38 AM Subscribe
Do you use the communications tool Slack? (Background here.) What are your tips and tricks for getting the most out of it?
My company, a small independent media outlet, is moving from Campfire (and the Basecamp suite of tools) to Slack. I've played around with Slack a bit, but would love to hear ideas from more experienced users on how to use it best. Thanks!
My company, a small independent media outlet, is moving from Campfire (and the Basecamp suite of tools) to Slack. I've played around with Slack a bit, but would love to hear ideas from more experienced users on how to use it best. Thanks!
Slack is awesome. I'll second what littleroberthead said about creating a pile of channels before you end up with everything happening in #general.
posted by foodgeek at 10:19 AM on September 2, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by foodgeek at 10:19 AM on September 2, 2014 [1 favorite]
Nthing creating a bunch of channels first. Just started using it on a side project with a few friends and having some stuff there when they signed on was key towards getting it going. It took us all of a day to go from primarily all email and IM conversations to only Slack.
posted by beep-bop-robot at 10:48 AM on September 2, 2014
posted by beep-bop-robot at 10:48 AM on September 2, 2014
We have a few hundred people on Slack, and the service recently added the ability to turn off @channel and @everyone notifications. It helped cut down on reply-all style noise.
We no longer do out-of-office emails; there's now a Slack channel for that. A few people have connected their calendars to Slack via IFTTT, so anything with “OOO” in it is automatically posted to the appropriate channel.
You can make your own emoji.
Private channels are a great place for gripes, and can be set to auto-delete things older than a certain number of days.
posted by migurski at 9:41 PM on September 2, 2014 [1 favorite]
We no longer do out-of-office emails; there's now a Slack channel for that. A few people have connected their calendars to Slack via IFTTT, so anything with “OOO” in it is automatically posted to the appropriate channel.
You can make your own emoji.
Private channels are a great place for gripes, and can be set to auto-delete things older than a certain number of days.
posted by migurski at 9:41 PM on September 2, 2014 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
- Use all the integrations that make sense for you. We use the Screenhero, Bitbucket, Zendesk, and Hubot integrations and they make those tasks super simple.
- Try and make a handful of channels before you go inviting everyone to the service that might help shape communication. We have a channel for each product/project as well as ones for jokes/stupid stuff, and one for Zendesk tickets so they actually appear right alongside everything else. Creating channels seems obvious, but it's easy to miss.
- Don't forget the native apps. They're really good and they make things easier. I find a lot of folks still use the web versions of apps like this—which is fine, but they miss a lot of possible integration and speed advantages doing that.
You're making the right choice; Campfire/Basecamp is getting to be a real dead end these days.
posted by littlerobothead at 7:54 AM on September 2, 2014