Tag: slack

Slack: What Great Execution Looks Like

For those of you who know me, I’m a huge fan and user of Slack; both the company and the product. Here are some things that Slack has done and continues to do right:

  1. Social Media: They know how to use social media to connect with their users. They respond to every tweet and do their best to help you. If they can’t help you they connect you with somebody within Slack that can help.
  2. Integrations: Out of the box they offer an extensive list of products and services that they integrate with. This is a HUGE one as I use many of these integrations when I setup my new Slack groups. Oh, and did I mention that they work and they work as you would expect to work.
  3. API: The Slack API is very well thought out and documented. I have developed several bots, some simple and some quite complex using their API. There isn’t much you can’t do.
  4. Just enough features: Slack doesn’t try to be all things to all users. I’m hoping that Slack continues to carefully craft the user experience in the same way that they already have.
  5. Mobile, Web and Desktop: Right out of the gate they offered first class desktop, the web and mobile clients. All that worked very well.
  6. App Store/App Directory: Need I say more.

It’s these six things that make Slack a company and product to admire. There are so many companies trying to take on Slack and there are some other products that do what Slack does. Bottom line is that they are not Slack the company and Slack the product.

I expect in the forthcoming weeks, to see other companies announcing products to challenge Slack’s dominance and I’m looking forward to seeing how those new products align with the six things I outlined above, if at all.

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Are You Looking for a Change? Let’s (all) Chat

The one thing I have been doing more and more of lately is helping people find their way in the world of ever changing technology. Most of them from the IBM Lotus Notes/Domino/XPages world. As a result, I have fired up a Slack group of friends, collegues and students to talk about what I call “Career 2.0”. If you want to join this diverse and dynamic group of individuals on Slack, please send me your email address and I would be happy to add you to the group.

See you on Slack.

With only 17 lines of code

Screenshot 2015-11-07 08.51.42

With only 17 lines of PHP code I was able to add a Slack “slash” command (/whatshot) to bring up the list of “What’s Hot” ideas from http://ideajam.net. To do this I used the IdeaJam JSON API and some PHP code to produce the list you see in the picture above. Slack makes it very easy to add integrations. In fact, I also coded another Slack integration for an IBM Notes customer that allows them to pull up data from their CRM database with a simple “/customer” command. That code was also less than 20 lines.

Want to learn more about the Slack API and how you can integrate it with it your apps? You can contact me or you can learn yourself Slack API.

PS – no server reboot was required to add the integration 🙂

Workforce Magazine – Slack Attack: Software Designed to Delete Email

Bruce Elgort happily ditched the online discussion forums he used for three community college Web development classes he teaches and replaced them with Slack, a group chat application that’s becoming the darling of workforce communication and collaboration.

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While older enterprise social networks and collaboration tools such as Chatter, Jive and Yammer reside on a company intranet, Slack works like any other iPhone, iPad or Android app. It’s also free, at least for the most basic edition. Versions with more message archiving, user support and analytics start at under $7 a month. Slack spokeswoman Katie Wattie said the San Francisco startup is working on a beefier enterprise-level version that will debut later this year.

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