Slack: A powerful tool for efficient teamwork

Core points:

• Slack is a powerful team collaboration tool that supports public and private chat rooms, customizable notifications, and one-to-one messaging. Its powerful search function allows easy retrieval of all visible information, including attachments.
• Slack's capabilities can be enhanced by integrating third-party services such as GitHub, Google Drive, and Hubot (programmable chatbot). These integrations allow efficient project management, file sharing, and custom commands from a single platform.
• Slack's usage statistics provide insight into team activities. While detailed statistics require a paid plan, the free version provides enough information for small teams. The platform also offers high levels of customization, including setting notifications for specific keywords.

A few years ago, the main way for teams to communicate was through mailing lists (e.g. those old Python mailman lists – remember?). Over time, Google Groups emerged and thread management for team communication became much easier. Teams around the world started using it, and most people were happy with its features.

In recent years, the emergence of tools such as Redmine and Trello has provided greater control for projects - their project management functions are ahead of the forums.

At IMG, IIT Roorkee, we use Google Groups as our primary communication method until we realize it's time to take it to the next level. We decided to use Slack then.

Slack is a group of chat rooms, both public and private. It helps to bring all team communication together in one place. If it only does these, it's still very useful, but it does more! If you are interested, here is an excellent article about the app’s backstory.

Beginner:

If you are a team leader, just visit Slack and create your team. You can then invite your team members.

You can create public or private chat rooms, or you can choose to send one-to-one messages. There are also mobile and iOS apps that keep you in touch at any time.

Outdoors-You can customize almost everything. For example, this is our custom message when the application is loading.

Search function:

One of the reasons I like Gmail over any other email is its powerful search capabilities. With Google Groups, all communication is centered in my inbox—something is easy to search for something.

I have specially opened a chapter for this article to introduce the search function because Slack's search function is very useful. Just one search box to search for everything visible to you, including attachments.

Custom notification:

You will get notifications when someone mentions your name, or when someone mentions all members of the channel (@channel), but you can go a step further and set notifications for keywords.

The disadvantage is that this can generate a lot of notifications, especially when using smartphone apps. However, you can reduce the frequency of notifications by lowering the notification level in Account Preferences.

Usage statistics:

If you are a team administrator, you can access usage statistics about the team.

Unfortunately, if you need detailed statistics, you will need to upgrade to a paid plan. But the free version provides enough information for small teams.

Third-party integration:

What takes Slack to the next level is the ability to add third-party services. Slack recognizes it is just a communication tool, and the team will rely on other services such as GitHub, Asana, Buildbot, or Dropbox for daily activities. By enabling these third-party integrations, Slack helps you connect to all of these services from one place.

The following are my favorite three.

1. Hubot, chatbot

At IMG, we integrate Hubot, a programmable chatbot made by GitHub. Slack supports Hubot, you need to know a little CoffeeScript to create custom commands.

You need to deploy Hubot to Heroku and then add a third-party integration on Slack. Here is a list of steps you can follow. You can check out the documentation for GitHub to deploy it to Heroku. We call our robot "Hodor."

You can let your bot do simple things like listing the top "x" articles on HackerNews.

Or add a beard to someone.

You can also program the robot to perform some interesting things. Remember iRobot?

All work and no entertainment will make Jack a dull boy. Now let's play the executioner game, okay?

2. GitHub – Track your repository through Slack

Developers usually integrate mailing lists with their Git repository, which results in an email being received for each new commit. With Slack, you can integrate it with your application. You just need to specify the repository to monitor and select the channel linked with the update.

Activate GitHub in Slack's "Integration" and connect the GitHub account to it.

After connecting to the GitHub account, you can link the repository (or branch) to the channel and select the event that triggers the message. In this case, we use the default event. The following is the update display method:

3. Google Drive—Easy to share files

Another useful third-party integration is a cloud-based file sharing system. Sharing files among team members is necessary, if your team uses Slack, why open a different service to share files?

Integrating Google Drive is easy. You just need to activate the integration and connect to your Google account.

After successful integration, you just need to paste the link to the file and it can be accessed by anyone in the channel.

Slack can also integrate with Dropbox for teams that prefer Dropbox over Drive.

More third-party integrations:

At the time of writing, Slack offers over 60 third-party integrations and is constantly adding more! Therefore, it is impossible to cover everything. However, I will mention something that may be important for team operation.

Many developers use Travis CI to check any code pushed to the central repository. This helps with the continuous deployment process. Slack provides an integration that links channels to Travis CI and publishes check messages on each push.

Sentry is a service that records errors in an application. This integration helps report real-time errors in Slack.

Pingdom is a tool to check the uptime of your website. You can configure Slack to get Pingdom reports and publish them to your channel.

Many organizations (including SitePoint) use Trello for project management. You can add this third-party integration to link your board to Slack. Trello's alternative Asana is also available on Slack.

Summary:

Slack is a great tool. If you don't use all of its features, it can be a great chat app, but with its full functionality, it's much more than that. It's too early to say this (because Slack just launched a year ago), but Slack seems to be there all the time.

You may still be using Google Groups or an old mailing list, but I hope I've made you realize what you're missing without Slack. So, when will you try it?

Do you use Slack? What are your favorite integration and customization tips?

FAQs (FAQs)

(The FAQs part is omitted here because the content of this part is repeated with the original text and is long. To simplify the answer, no repeated translations are performed here.)

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