What is Slack?

An American software company, Slack Technologies created a proprietary platform for their business communication. The software provides few features persistent chat rooms (channels) grouped by topic, private groups, and direct messaging in the IRC style.

History

Slack reported as hacked for four days in the month of February 2015 as highlighted in March 2015, it had been compromised with some user account-related information, including email addresses, usernames, hashed passwords, phone numbers, and Skype IDs. Slack reacted with two-factor authentication to its service in the addition.

The company shut down it's corresponding gateways for non-proprietary messaging protocols for Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and XMPP, but in May 2018 though it was previously compatible for the following.

"A backronym for "Slack" is "Searchable Log of All Communication and Information".

Slack went public without an IPO on April 26, 2019, and saw its stock skyrocket to a value of $ 21 billion.

Salesforce revealed on December 1, 2020, that it was purchasing Slack for $27.7 billion. Salesforce aims to merge Slack with its Customer 360 software from Salesforce, which gathers customer information from a business in one location, and make Slack its new interface.

Features

Features like persistent chat rooms (channels) grouped by topic, private groups, and direct messaging are provided in the software in IRC style.

Within Slack, material, including files, conversations, and individuals, is all searchable. Users can add emoji buttons to their messages, which can then be clicked by other users to communicate their responses to their messages. In the software's free plan, users are allowed of viewing and browsing of most recent 10,000 posts.

Slack customised it's user experience by an update on March 18 2020.

Teams

Though Slack came for Professional and organisational communication to be embraced as a community forum, replacing message boards or social media groups but the teams also allow a "workspace" which can be joined by communities, groups, or teams through a particular URL or if invited by a team admin or owner.

Messaging

Team members can connect through Public channels without even using of SMS email or community (texting). In the workspace, public platforms are open to all.

Private channels allow smaller sub-groups to converse privately. To coordinate large teams, these private networks can be used.

It allows users to send private messages to particular users rather than a group of individuals in Direct Messages. Up to nine individuals may have direct messages. Once started, it is possible to turn a direct message community into a private channel.

Integrations

Slack released its software application ("app") directory in December 2015, consisting of more than 150 integrations that users can install.

A collaboration with financial and human capital management company Workday was revealed by Slack in March 2018. This integration enables Workday customers to directly access the functionality of Workday from the Slack interface.

API

An application programming interface (API) is provided to it's users to create applications and automate processes, For example generating internal support tickets automatically, sending automatic human-input updates and sending warnings under specified conditions. For its compatibility with several types of programmes, frameworks, and utilities, the Slack API has been noted.

Business Model

Slack is a freemium product whose primary paid features allow more than 10,000 stored messages to be searched and unlimited applications and integrations to be added. For an infinite number of users, they demand support.

However, Slack faced several technical difficulties when freeCodeCamp tried to move its group of over 8,000 users to Slack in 2015 and Slack restricted their channels to "no more than 1,000 users (ideally more like 500)" as told by Slack support.

The particular limit was valid no more by the January 2017.

Rivals like HipChat and Stride sold their intellectual property to Slack on February 11, 2019, as announced by Atlassian with it's rivals' shutdown on July 26 2018, after assuming the services' user bases. A pledge to work on integrating Slack with Atlassian resources was also announced by the companies.

A directory developing company, Rimeto acquired by Slack in July 2020. This acquisition will include additional employee search offers inside the workspace of Slack.

Reception

Around 8,000 customers signed up Slack's the services within 24 hours of it's launch in the month of August 2013. Those figures had risen to 200,000 paying subscribers and a total of 750,000 active daily users by April 2015. After a few times this number increased up to a million daily active users in 2015.There were 3 million of paying accounts and more than 8 million daily users in May 2018. Over 150 countries with more than 600,000 organisations, around more than 10 million daily active users were registered on the software during it's S-1 IPO filing, on April 26, 2019.

Slack was the first software which was used more than for personal use than business after Microsoft and Blackberry in March 2015 as written by The Financial Times. New York magazine attacked on the site in 2017.

TechCrunch hosted Crunchies Awards in 2017, where they honoured Slack for best start-up of the year.

Criticism

Users also criticised Slack for storing user information solely on cloud servers under Slack's power.

In addition, Slack has been criticised for a retroactive 2018 update to its privacy policy, allowing workspace administrators to view both public and private chat messages without the need for permission from any party using the software. Slack users will not be informed when their information is accessed, according to the policy.

Slack is a forum for channel-based messaging. With Slack, people can work more easily, by attaching their software tools and services, and find the expertise as per they need to do their best work, all in an environment that is safe secure, enterprise-grade.

A workspace in Slack consists of channels where members of the team can interact and work together. To learn about four of Slack's main features, keep reading.

Organised Conversations

In Slack, members of the team send channel messages and share files. Develop channels for our company for teams, projects, office locations or anything else that is important. For communications that should not be available to all members, we can make channels private, or we can use shared channels to communicate from our own workspaces with external organisations.

Searchable History

Knowledge flows across Slack transparently as messages and files are exchanged on public channels. In Slack, we can scan the chat history of our team to find related posts, files, channels and individuals. Conversations will become standard institutional knowledge with Slack's searchable past.

Connected Apps

To connect services or software that we already use to Slack, add applications to our workspace. If the correct applications have been installed in the user's device then, one can work in any dimension without ever leaving our Slack workspace.

The user can find thousands of apps in our Slack App Directory and also provide feedback which help us stay efficient, organised and reliable.

Slack Calls

The slack call can be made directly to any of its member within the workspace.

The user also has a special facility of drawing on his phone while sharing the screen to show the other teammates exactly what the user sees on his screen or monitor.