It is increasingly common for a company of any size to have its workers spread out over different cities in the same country or even in different countries.
Traditional work environments are gradually giving way to new ones in which communication is no longer face-to-face, but through programs that allow video calls or instant messaging services. In this sense, we have already spoken to you on several occasions about the benefits of Skype, and how much it has facilitated business and personal communication, and now we want to present a real-time messaging tool designed for communication between teams: Slack.
WHAT DOES SLACK CONSIST OF?
As we said, Slack is a real-time messaging tool that facilitates the management of work groups. Being able to saving time and centralizing communication, and that above all succeeds at the business level.
Slack allows you to create workgroups among an unlimited number of members, hold private conversations, establish public and private channels or share files.
This means that it can be useful, for example, for a freelance designer who is developing a project for a company. Also for a group of writers who work for the same website. Or for the IT department of a company that has as many projects as channels.
In a very competitive environment such as communication, Slack has managed to win over thousands of users worldwide for three main reasons:
It’s free (although it includes paid versions with more features). It’s very intuitive and configurable. And, especially, it integrates with other commonly used tools, such as Dropbox, Twitter, Google Drive, Trello or IFTTT.
WHY IS IT SUCH POPULAR?
Slack is convincing because of its possibilities, but also because of its charm. One of the elements with which it has conquered the public is its ample capacity for personalization. The program allows us to configure the notifications to our liking: we can receive alerts for all of them, for private ones, only for those that mention us or for those that contain a specific word.
This customization also affects their appearance, since Slack offers a series of themes to configure from the wallpaper to the sidebar. It includes emojis, allows searches (with filters) within the channels and shows “previews” of links or attached messages. Also it has a mobile version (also free). So that you can follow the news of the group without having to be in front of the computer.
How do you start it up?
Another point in favour of Slack, as we said, is that it is very intuitive from its initial phase, which would be the installation and implementation. To do this, enter Slack and on the main screen enter your email. Click on create new team and name your group.
Now choose your username, which is the one that will be shown in the channel and with which the rest of the members will see you. Finish the process, review the writing and start with the button Create my new Slack team.
We already have the group! Although it cannot have such consideration until there are no more members. And that’s exactly what Slack suggests at this point: that we enter the email addresses of the people chosen for that work group. Note that in this step you are only adding members to the application, then you can decide which people are part of each channel.
In case you don’t have the emails of your future Slack partners at hand, you can postpone this step now. If you log in to your email, in addition to suggesting that you set a password, you’ll see that Slack allows you to invite new members using other methods. With the desktop application in place, a wizard called @slackbot will help you create channels (public or private) to share files or customize notifications. Enjoy Slack!!