Our larger team is now ready to use Slack! How do I make this happen?
June 8, 2016 7:14 PM   Subscribe

I created a Slack account for my sub-team of 5 people a year ago. Now our larger team of 40 that consists of other sub-teams wants to use it too. We want all of our sub-team's chat history to remain just available to us. Because all of our chat history is in #general, I can’t make it into a private channel. What do I do now?

Export/Import all of that history into a private channel? Create a whole new team for the larger group? I really would like to use our existing one if possible, but I could be persuaded otherwise. Help me understand how this sort of thing works in Slack.
posted by allison00 to Computers & Internet (6 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: You might try just emailing their support. They're really friendly and responsive. (Disclaimer: I used to work there.)
posted by asterix at 7:23 PM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


Best answer: This is going on at my unit right this second. A couple departments had our own Slack teams and then the director heard about it and decided to push for everyone to get on board. Me and the other two admins of the other current teams got together to try and figure out how to approach it. What we've landed on is starting a new team for the entire unit, encouraging people to use it for cross-department projects and general socializing (our unit is spread willy-nilly across three non-contiguous floors of an 8 floor building, so general collegiality is for sure value added for us), and also making sure that everyone knows that it's a-okay to create a new team for your department for department-internal communication and I'll even help you set that up. It's easy to switch between teams on the various Slack desktop and mobile clients, and none of us wanted our pre-exisitng teams to be disrupted (or read) by a bunch of other randos from around the unit, so that's how we're going.

I'm the official technical trainer of this initiative, and we're luring people to a lunchtime training sessions with pizza. I'm hitting pretty hard the idea that you can be on multiple teams, it's easy to be active in multiple teams and PLEASE DOWNLOAD AND USE THE DESKTOP CLIENT.
posted by soren_lorensen at 8:21 PM on June 8, 2016 [2 favorites]


Response by poster: I really like both of these options. I think I'll probably go with Soren's idea and just make a new team.

We all work at different locations, so we don't see each other face to face very often. Any thoughts on rolling this out? I really want for it to catch on like it did with my sub-team.
posted by allison00 at 8:33 PM on June 8, 2016


My team just had an issue where we wanted to archive our #general and start fresh. We emailed support and they made a difference room our new #general in about 60 seconds.
posted by wemayfreeze at 10:30 PM on June 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


We're still at the very beginnings, but while strategizing we decided we need to create a channel or two regarding and upcoming all-unit event (for us it's our summer picnic which is happening in July) so that people would have an immediate topic of conversation to jump right into. My hunch is that there will be holdouts (there always are--I'm a technical trainer at a non-technical institution so I am used to this) but that if we start with an active topic that is NOT do-or-die business-wise but that has the potential to create some good chit-chat with also a light amount of organizational talk, people will be able to quickly see the utility and relevance before they have time to forget this tool exists. The hope is that the holdouts will hear people talking about thus-and-such they saw on the Slack and reconsider their position.
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:54 AM on June 9, 2016


Breaking! We've just discovered the Smooz integration which allows two separate teams to create a channel that exists in both teams without having to invite one another into their own teams. We're testing it now, seems to work great. So another check in the "different teams" column.
posted by soren_lorensen at 7:38 AM on June 9, 2016


« Older Hi-Tech 21st Century Meeting Room AV Equipment?   |   Looking for plastic hex pieces seen in Stephen... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.