Slack is a platform designed exclusively for business communication. It is developed by an American software company called Slack Technologies.
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Who owns Slack?
Slack was co-founded by Steward Butterfield in the year 2013. He is also the current CEO of Slack. It is headquartered in San Francisco, United States of America.
Features
Slack is a computer and a mobile application that provides a virtual chat room for a whole team in an organisation. It has replaced the conventional way of communication in a team like Emails, text messages as it provides the facility of both individual messaging and group messaging in one place conveniently.
The motto behind Slack is to provide organisations with the facility of both group chats and personal discussions. The flexibility with which the users can collaborate with others in real-time and communicate made Slack the most sought-after application for biz communications. It transformed the communications in an organisation by allowing the folks to catch up real quick if they missed out on a collaboration.
Slack uses the feature Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
Slack offers an organised chat room that is labelled by topic, private and direct messaging groups.
It has a search feature in which the users can search for people, conversations they had and files etc.,
Slack added much fun to the way people communicate by an additional feature in which the users are allowed to add emoji options to the messages they send and allows others to react to the message through their emoticon reactions.
Slack saves the Projects that ended and many other things in its history for a revisit.
Slack saves us of the hassle of going through various tabs and provides all the tools at one’s fingertips by its features like Apps and integrations that streamlines work by connecting slack with other services; Workflow Builder allows us to automate everyday tasks; Search feature reduces the tedious task of asking repetitive questions and allows the users to search and find the required info whenever needed; The File sharing allows the users to save, share and deliver the files effortlessly.
How to use Slack?
Upon signing up on Slack’s website slack makes you your team’s administration giving access to all the settings. The setting on who is allowed to send notifications to alert the people in the group can be confined to the team admins if you’re managing a large team. The setting Channel and private group management can be disabled if the administrator doesn’t want the others to create their channels.
Integrations with the third party services
Slack has been integrated with industry-leading software and applications. The apps directory of Slack includes numerous apps in an organised manner under certain categories.
The different categories include Analytics, Communication, Customer Support, Design, Developer Tools, File Management, Health & Wellness, HR & Team Culture, Marketing, Office Management, Finance, Productivity, Project Management, Sales, Security& Compliance, Social & Fun, Travel, Voice & Video, Media & News. However, the Staff Picks are as follows.
The Enterprise-ready apps give access to the tools for the employees across the Enterprise Grid, some of these apps are Workast, DocuSign, Zoom, Simple Poll, Standup.ly, Polly, OneDrive and SharePoint, Cisco Webex Meetings, Box, Salesforce, Envoy, Webex Call, Google Sheets for Workflow Builder, Bitglass etc.
The Work from home apps include Loom, monday.com, Disco, Google Calendar, Voice Message, Bored, Officely, Halp etc.,
The Daily tools apps are Box, Google Drive, Slack for Gmail, Dropbox, Slack for Outlook, Microsoft Team Calls and more.
The Essential apps are Trello, Simple poll, HubSpot, Zapier, Asana etc.,
The New & noteworthy apps are Poppins, Thanks, Lunch Status Emoji, Managr etc.,
The Brilliant bots apps are Polly, Jira Cloud, Troops, Kipwise Wiki Automate.io etc.
Data Protection
Slack protects the customer data through data encryption and with tools like Slack Enterprise Key Management(Slack EKM) and unique integrations with DLP(Data loss prevention)
Pricing
The quickest way to try slack is to go for its free version which allows integration with 10 other apps like Google Drive and Office 365.
The Pro version is priced at $2.67 a month which is useful for the better collaboration of the small teams.
The Business+ is to scale your business and to increase your productivity which is priced at $5 a month.
The Enterprise Grid is for the most demanding enterprises to scale their growth and it is priced as per the enterprise requirements.
Wrapping up
Since the time it’s been launched the Slack software generated revenue of 630 million until 2020 with a profit margin of 91 per cent. To read more interesting business models, refer to Zeen blog.
