Comment by unethical_ban
1 day ago
What do you use if not slack? OPs advice is standard best practice. Respect peoples time by not expecting immediate response, and use team or function based channels as much as possible.
Other options are email of course, and what, teams for instant messages?
I’ve always that forums are much better suited to corporate communications than email or chat.
Organized by topics, must be threaded, and default to asynchronous communications. You can still opt in to notifications, and history is well organized and preserved.
The bullet points for using Slack basically describe email (and distribution lists).
It’s funny how we get an instant messaging platform and derive best practices that try to emulate a previous technology.
Btw, email is pretty instant.
If you work in a team, email is limited to the people you cc: while a convo in a slack channel can have people you didn't think of jump in* with information.
See the other point in the article about discouraging one on one private messages and encouraging public discussion. That is the main reason.
* half a day later or days later if you do true async, but that's fine.
I am neutral in this particular topic, so don’t think I’m defending or attacking or anything.
But aren’t mailling lists and distribution groups pretty ubiquitous?
2 replies →
I get it, email accomplishes a lot. But it "feels" like a place these days for one-off group chats, especially for people from different organizations. Realtime chat has its places and can also step in to that email role within a team. All my opinion, none too strongly held.
We use self-hosted Mattermost (team version, i.e. without limits but no enterprise features like LDAP). Fine for a small team (around 40 active users here) where you can script account actions via the API, probably not fine when users become a lot more, or you might need access to the compliance functions for audit purposes, etc.
For us the free version of Slack was insufficient, the commercial one too expensive, and anyway, given that it's a cloud-based system, it's not compliant with our internal rules for confidential information (unless we can get some specific agreement with them). On the side, there is a bit too much analytics/telemetry in the Slack client.