General by Leon Hitchens on June 05, 2016
Slack has made our team by far a more cohesive unit for many reasons but in this article I want to cover the top 3. For preface, Slack is a communication platform that has recently sprung into a staple for most teams in any niche of the business world. Development teams, marketing teams, to even small businesses use Slack as their main communication platforms. Slack is also really popular in managing communication between remote teams, which is what we do at Ninjality.
Slack has many ways to access it with their Web App, Desktop Apps, and Mobile Apps. No matter where you are or what device you are on you can access Slack effortlessly. I personally find this to be one of my favorite features because you can ping someone on Slack and they are able to respond fast because they always have access to it. This is great if there is a pertinent issue at hand or if you’re wanting to check in on how a project is going. It is also nice because once you get a notification on your phone you can jump on the computer and be able to get started on whatever issue there is without skipping a beat.
There are endless amount of integrations for Slack and new ones pop-up every single day. At Ninjality we use different integrations like Trello, Twitter, Bitbucket, and Laravel Forge. All these integrations give us instantaneous feedback on events that happen on those services. I personally find the Twitter and Bitbucket ones very helpful because you’re able to keep a close eye on what is happening on those services. I like to see when we get interactions on our Twitter accounts and then when we see those notifications we can discuss right then and there how we want to reply. For Bitbucket I can see when code is pushed so we can all stay on the same page for progress on whatever project we are working on.
Slack’s features make the app dead simple. You can chat directly with a person, with a group of people, or in a channel. This helps to organize the entire team without having to see unneeded notifications about something you are not involved with. This also helps you be able to reference past conversations if there is something that you forgot at a later time. Another feature that is built into Slack that I love is the search functionality. This lets you search through any conversation for a specific message or file that you need. The search feature definitely helps me uncover lost files and other things that I may have missed.
Without Slack, I don’t think Ninjality would be as cohesive of a team as we are today. All of these features make it not only easy for us to communicate but it also helps us keep on top of all of our other happenings across the web. The team at Slack are doing an amazing job and I cannot wait to see what they cook up next!