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What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter

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Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter

#21

Post by xorxarle »

thinkmassive wrote: post #3
tyingq wrote: post #2

I'm somewhat lucky in that Jabber is popular, but optional, in my workplace. So I can get away with never logging into it. I'm sure, though, there's some price I pay for opting out of the idea. Personally, the idea that anyone is arbitrarily welcome to interrupt your chosen way to work is silly.

Chat allows you to read and respond at your own convenience. If you’re not using chat, and someone is hoping for a response faster than email, they’re likely to interrupt you in a way that’s far more disruptive than chat, like walking up in person or calling on the phone.

Didn't even think of that. I still find instant messaging to be disruptive to my own work, but you're right: People would just find me and get up in my business if I couldn't dismiss them with a flick of the wrist.

Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter

#22

Post by RandallBrown »

The very best office collaboration tool I've used was a self hosted copy of Reddit that was hooked into our ActiveDirectory for authentication.

We didn't have it too long before I left that company, so I'm not sure how it turned out, but it was pretty excellent for discussing things.

Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter

#23

Post by jacobwal »

RandallBrown wrote: post #22

The very best office collaboration tool I've used was a self hosted copy of Reddit that was hooked into our ActiveDirectory for authentication. We didn't have it too long before I left that company, so I'm not sure how it turned out, but it was pretty excellent for discussing things.

that sounds really cool. What was great about it?

Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter

#24

Post by davidbanham »

EamonnMR wrote: post #15

Slack's "pay to search archives" feature is really ingenious. What content will people pay for? Content that they created!

I've actually come to regard Slack Archives as a negative feature.

I work with a lot of different companies. They almost universally have Slack instances that get used for discussion. One time I was working with a client who was too tight to actually pay for their Slack instance so it had amnesia.

For a while I was really grouchy about it. Then one day I was thinking along the lines of "Ah this is such a PITA. I've just had this good discussion about these requirements in Slack but because it's not a paid instance it'll vanish in a few days. Grr I'll have to take this information and put it somewhere else. I guess I'll stick it in a design document in the project's wiki. This is such an inconven... wait. Huh. That's vastly better than leaving it floating somewhere in Slack. Oh."

And in that moment, I was enlightened. Paying for Slack actually makes it a worse tool.

Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter

#25

Post by jacobwal »

davidbanham wrote: post #24
EamonnMR wrote: post #15

Slack's "pay to search archives" feature is really ingenious. What content will people pay for? Content that they created!

I've actually come to regard Slack Archives as a negative feature. I work with a lot of different companies. They almost universally have Slack instances that get used for discussion. One time I was working with a client who was too tight to actually pay for their Slack instance so it had amnesia. For a while I was really grouchy about it. Then one day I was thinking along the lines of "Ah this is such a PITA. I've j…

would you use something that made it easy for you to save stuff from Slack in another place where it wasn't floating around? Like how you can star something for yourself, but instead you could star something so that your entire team could see that this was an important message?

Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter

#26

Post by davidbanham »

jacobwal wrote: post #25
davidbanham wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually come to regard Slack Archives as a negative feature. I work with a lot of different companies. They almost universally have Slack instances that get used for discussion. One time I was working with a client who was too tight to actually pay for their Slack instance so it had amnesia. For a while I was really grouchy about it. Then one day I was thinking along the lines of "Ah this is such a PITA. I've j…

would you use something that made it easy for you to save stuff from Slack in another place where it wasn't floating around? Like how you can star something for yourself, but instead you could star something so that your entire team could see that this was an important message?

I might. I think the value for me would hinge on how easy it was to contextualise the information.

Like if it was just a big list of "Stuff people have starred in Slack" I would not use it.

If it was a repository of information categorised by project and subject, maybe with a little blurb of info to give me a summary of it, then under all that a link to the source material if I still needed it, that might be compelling.

Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter

#27

Post by abalone »

tl;dr it talks exclusively about the benefits of ambient awareness and nothing of the cost. No discussion whatsoever of the distraction tax of listening in on all those cross-department threads.

Turns out one of the authors is a paid consultant who has a vested interest in pumping corporate social tools.[1]

[1] “Paul Leonardo is the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at UC Santa Barbara and consults with companies about how to use social media and other technologies more effectively.”

Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter

#28

Post by zrb05293 »

thinkmassive wrote: post #3
tyingq wrote: post #2

I'm somewhat lucky in that Jabber is popular, but optional, in my workplace. So I can get away with never logging into it. I'm sure, though, there's some price I pay for opting out of the idea. Personally, the idea that anyone is arbitrarily welcome to interrupt your chosen way to work is silly.

Chat allows you to read and respond at your own convenience. If you’re not using chat, and someone is hoping for a response faster than email, they’re likely to interrupt you in a way that’s far more disruptive than chat, like walking up in person or calling on the phone.

I usually remain logged out of our Corp chat (Sametime) AND keep my phone unplugged. If you want me but can’t be bothered to stop by or send an email, then it’s probably not worth my time.

Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter

#29

Post by swsieber »

jacobwal wrote: post #23
RandallBrown wrote: post #22

The very best office collaboration tool I've used was a self hosted copy of Reddit that was hooked into our ActiveDirectory for authentication. We didn't have it too long before I left that company, so I'm not sure how it turned out, but it was pretty excellent for discussing things.

that sounds really cool. What was great about it?

Well, I only have experience with chat apps, but I think it's the advantages of chat (rooms/subs basically for teas + private messages), but without the expectation of immediate feedback. Also probably great searchability.

Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter

#30

Post by coldacid »

xorxarle wrote: post #20

I'm not sure how effective or distributed the best knowledgebase softwares are (ours is OneNote and it isn't working IMO), but I think having the knowledge at your fingertips would be far less distracting than a minimum of two people occupying each other's mental resources long enough to exchange IP. Then what if people leave and take the IP with them. Have there been studies specifically measuring distractability or…

OneNote is probably not working as KB software for you because it's not meant to be that. Consider it as a personal scrapbook with pages you might show to other people, and get a proper KB platform.
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