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Slack Platform Launch

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Re: Slack Platform Launch

#221

Post by wstrange »

rv77ax wrote: post #201
wstrange wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see Google using Slack for things like the Dart and Kubernetes projects. I understand the ease of use aspect (Slack is quite nice) - but one thing that concerns me is that the discussion that happens is no longer (easily) searchable. Mailing list archives are handy when you are looking for a solution to a problem. With Slack, a lot of that knowledge disappears.

Do you even use Slack? I don't work for Slack but your comment is so misleading. > but one thing that concerns me is that the discussion that happens is no longer (easily) searchable. No it is not. Look at the top right and type your words. If you use free plan, only 10k message will be archived, other than that it will be deleted.[1] > Mailing list archives are handy when you are looking for a solution to a problem.…

I use Slack often, and yes I know about the search feature.

How do I find the answer to a question that was posted two months ago, for an open source project that is not paying to keep more than 10K messages?

History vanishes with Slack. I get why this is very cool for internal communication. I just question the use of Slack for open source community driven projects.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#222

Post by wadenick »

amatix wrote: post #203
halostatue wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved my company off Slack to Hipchat as the latter has more useful integrations for us, and does not have the same limitations (you are not limited to ten integrations on the free version of Hipchat) or the stupidly high price of Slack. There are parts we don’t like about Hipchat (the shortcuts for the emoticons are just weird ), but we are using it company-wide where Slack was just used by developers (and Hangout…

> the stupidly high price of Slack. really? $7 per active user per month? How little do you pay your staff? At the median wage, save an average of 90 seconds a day per person through better communication and it pays for itself. And it's pretty likely any team members using slack are at a 2-10x salary multiplier on that, a $100K engineer only needs to save 24 seconds a day...

Your strawman implies that his team would save time in Slack versus HipChat, but you ignored the justification he already gave about the integrations that are more useful to them edit and that the whole company was happy to go to HipChat. It's possible those integrations help them save the time that makes the difference, but having every user there would surely help.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#223

Post by truediger10 »

nithinr6 wrote: post #11
pkrumins wrote: post #7

Does anyone know how you can apply for a Slack Fund grant? I'd love to create a Browserling integration. Browserling (www.browserling.com) is a live interactive cross-browser testing service and this integration would let you embed a live browser directly in Slack. Use case: Let's say a user reports a bug in IE10 on Windows 7 in your webapp. You just use `/browserling windows7 ie10 URL` command in Slack and that will…

You can email them slackfund@slack.com

Have you or anyone you know gotten a response? Do you know what exactly you should send them?

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#224

Post by halostatue »

amatix wrote: post #203
halostatue wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved my company off Slack to Hipchat as the latter has more useful integrations for us, and does not have the same limitations (you are not limited to ten integrations on the free version of Hipchat) or the stupidly high price of Slack. There are parts we don’t like about Hipchat (the shortcuts for the emoticons are just weird ), but we are using it company-wide where Slack was just used by developers (and Hangout…

> the stupidly high price of Slack. really? $7 per active user per month? How little do you pay your staff? At the median wage, save an average of 90 seconds a day per person through better communication and it pays for itself. And it's pretty likely any team members using slack are at a 2-10x salary multiplier on that, a $100K engineer only needs to save 24 seconds a day...

If the choice was between $0 and $7, you might have a point. It isn’t.

As a company we are not short of options: Slack (the dev team liked it, but no one else used it and even a large part of the dev team didn’t use it), Google Hangouts (what everyone else used), Skype (no one here uses it), and now HipChat—which everyone in the company uses. This means that we weren’t choosing between $0 and $7, but:

• $0 (Slack) which provided something most people in the company didn’t use, and whose limitations we in the dev team hit fairly quickly (both 10k message chat history and the limited number of integrations).

• $0 (HipChat) which provides something most people in the company do use, and whose limitations we have only recently hit (the last six weeks) and are not currently bothering us (the limitation is just the 25k message chat history).

• $0 (Google Hangouts). Not really $0, but we already pay for it as part of GApps so it’s an incremental $0. The group chat functions suck, and there’s no integrations to speak of, but it is available.

• $2/mau (HipChat). Adds video/voice calls and screen sharing and unlimited chat history. We only need the chat history, and that isn’t bothering us.

• $7/mau (Slack). Just removes the 10 service integration limitation (which IIRC was 5 a few months ago) and the chat history and a few other features we don’t really care about but nothing to write home about. There’s also the $12/mau level and they are working on an Enterprise level.

There is absolutely nothing that Slack provides—except a bigger bill—that HipChat doesn’t provide as well for less. (And, even if Slack were better than HipChat, it isn’t 3x better. Sorry.)

This isn’t to say that Slack is a bad thing, just that it’s stupidly expensive and/or limited compared to other hosted options.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#225

Post by halostatue »

Ayaz wrote: post #130
halostatue wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved my company off Slack to Hipchat as the latter has more useful integrations for us, and does not have the same limitations (you are not limited to ten integrations on the free version of Hipchat) or the stupidly high price of Slack. There are parts we don’t like about Hipchat (the shortcuts for the emoticons are just weird ), but we are using it company-wide where Slack was just used by developers (and Hangout…

Would you mind giving some examples of what are more useful integrations for you that Slack does not support? I am curious because we--at work--have been using HipChat for around two years and have integrated HipChat into our processes, yet now that we are exploring and using Slack (for another project), we find the integrations and APIs so much better to work with.

The issue that I’ve had with Slack is more related to text like this from the New Relic integration:

This integration will allow you to receive updates in a Slack channel when an alert is triggered in New Relic. If you would like web, transaction, server, and mobile alerts to be posted in separate channels, you will need to set up separate integrations.

You can quickly hit the limit of ten integrations on the free service by having to set up a separate integration for each channel you want things to appear in. So…between GitHub, Bitbucket, Semaphore, a custom API integration, and a couple of others we ended up hitting the limit of 5 integrations (which is what the limit was as of May or June when we made the switch to HipChat; it’s double that now, but we’re starting to use even more tools, so it’s the same problem).

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#226

Post by Ayaz »

smt88 wrote: post #217
Ayaz wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have been using HipChat for the last two years for one of our two major products at work and have very recently moved to Slack for the other. While notifications on HipChat work most of the time, they are still very patchy. I personally use the Mac client, while others in my company use the web, Windows, and Linux clients and we've all been bitten by missed notifications on applications one too many times to actua…

I used HipChat on Windows, Mac, and Android for 1.5 years and never experienced any of that. My team didn't, either. Those issues must have started happening after I stopped using it. Maybe Atlassian hasn't prioritized HipChat after buying it.

They certainly appear to have been working on it, judging from the updates being released. I feel they have a long way to go, though.
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