How fitting that a dragon is draconian.
At this juncture Iād just like to point out that ādraconian enforcementā is literally in our forum terms of service.
9 Likes
I set the group up this morning and it was really easy to do. The integration with a dozen other web services is pretty cool, too (Dropbox and Google Drive have most of our other documents). Maybe this will help cut down on the 30+ emails all copied to the same people every day for my team.
Thanks for pointing me there.
I like the concept, but as the quote says, āif itās free then youāre the productā. No matter how fabulous it is, I think Iāll wait until I hear how they plan to stay in business with a free product, and see if that both seems like a sensible enough long term plan that I donāt have to worry that theyāll vaporize, and that I donāt find their business plan so intrusive or expoitative that I donāt want to have my communications go through them. Besides, if it really is such a great approach and takes off, someone will probably do an open source version in the next couple of years that you can run on your own server.
I went to the website because this looks like a solution to my problem, but you have to give your email address to even click around and see what itās about. It might be the solution to my problem, but Iāll never know because I hate giving my email addy out before I get a chance to really look at a product.
ETA: Nevermind. My tiny screen was the problem. I can scroll down and see whatās up after all. I just couldnāt sort it out on the teeny tiny screen Iām on. User error.
The assumption I made was that someone forgot to turn on the āsponsored postā checkbox when posting it. This post is:
(a) glowing review
(b) of a web-2.0-ish software product
Ā© with an accompanying bland picture
(d) from a contributor most have never heard of before
I understand youāre unhappy at accusations of malicious intent, but you donāt see how this could look like paid advertising? (In other words: Iām surprised youāre surprised that this would need explanation.)
2 Likes
The review says āwe somehow needed something on top of/instead of [ā¦] Skype,ā but I donāt see any mention of voice or video communication.
Does Slack support voice chat? Video chat? Screensharing? Multi-person voice/video meetings?
Iām having trouble seeing how this is better than hipchat, which works pretty well for us. Whatās great about it that makes it worth switching?
I havenāt used Hipchat, so I donāt know what it does better, but Iāll second the glowing review. A new team member suggested Slack, and we took to it immediately. The Mac app and iOS app are both awesome - simple & lightweight. Weāve had one or two small outages, but they communicated well around it and they were short-lived.
To the person who wondered at the price, it is NOT free - they have a couple of pricing plans, and weāre going to end up paying $8/user/month. So itās actually more expensive than our email (free google apps plan), but we definitely think itās worth it.
Looked at it. The website isnāt very informative, seems to value form over function.
Hosted isnāt ideal for a company that prefers to keep everything in house (ie discusses secret stuff), but ok. Native clients for iOS, Android and OSX. Huh? Are there enough companies out there with just OSX users to be not worth making other clients. That pretty much makes this a non-starter for us. I was hoping I could the portion of the company still using skype to switch to something less stupid (the other half is using an internal jabber server).
Meetings/conferences are actually pretty time-wasting, particularly for every day and ongoing stuff. Why should we expect people to interrupt their work flow for meetings five times a day when a quick conversation online would be far more efficient?
I really hope youāre not a manager, particularly a manager who likes to have lost of pointless meetingsā¦
Try clicking on the contributorās name, and maybe follow a link or two from there.
Most of us here know who Alice is.
Edit: 1066 rulez OK!
For caitifty1 and others worried about the freeness of this product, there is actually a paid product here. It is well hidden, but I managed to find the page with pricing:
The free account has limited storage and search facilities, with paid accounts getting more storage space and extra features.
Perhaps they should make it more clear up front that this exists to assuage fears of āthe customer is the productā and āthis is not monetised and will go out of business when the VC money runs outā.
1 Like
People being cynical about this stuff seems fairly natural to me, given how websites of all sorts, even fairly ārespectableā ones, have participated in a ārace to the bottomā in finding sleazy ways of trying to monetize the site.
This looks like a nice autodoc tool for replacement of phone infodump office kerchunks. IRC is another way of likening itā¦I think Iād have to use some Mac OS X IRC with a very very nice macro toolset (gotta swat those out of office panic bootnotes.) Certainly an image than can be embiggened seems decent so itās a little more clear what kind of XSSL one has to rumble with in the free phone memory at hand, but at least the phone-sized screenshots on the slack.com Tour (4 pages) are full size.
The tour hasnāt engulfed CRM and supplychain handling, but -there-, they can monetize the verticals firewall (or whatever your cloud calls that.)
It would be better if they offered a self-hosted solution for those of us who value our privacy.
If there was an open source version of this that I could host and run, I certainly would. Iād also try to get my job to use it instead of yammer. That said, they arenāt going to replace a known, paid, service (yammer) with an unknown, paid, service.
The old problem: Promising service but only hosted. This makes it useless for many companies, even if the service would be super cool.
Iāve been using Slack for a while now. Iām part of a small ops/dev team, most of whom are distributed. We moved from Skype chat to Slack and havenāt looked back. I always know when Iāve picked something right for our team when my CTO just rattles his corporate card details into a billing interface without question.
And to be honest, if I had a platform like bb to try and pimp something I liked, Iād do it too. Bit of a shame @doctorow had to respond as he did, but well played for calling out an asshat.
@albill, there probably wonāt be an open source version of Slack, but they are planning a Slack-in-a-Box turnkey solution at some point.
1 Like
Unfortunately, if it isnāt open source, Iām unlikely to deploy it.
