Slack's "pay to search archives" feature is really ingenious. What content will people pay for? Content that they created!
Does skype allow this? I can barely find new conversations in skype let alone look for old ones.
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
#32Slack'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…
I'm wondering, as well, if no archival leads to freer discussion with less fear of saying something stupid that will live forever. And if that's worth anything. Maybe it depends too on whether Slack is used strictly as an impartial way to coordinate professional communication, or if it is also social and informal, which the parent article has some interesting points in favor of.
Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
#33For those who use Slack at work: Do you often use old conversations that your teammates have had to solve problems? Do you search Slack to find it? I've never been in a large Slack team and I'm curious how many people actually do that.
Occasionally, the search isn't great in my opinion. But I've sure found things from the past there. But unless you were personally involved in the discussion (so that you know what to search and look for) I'd assume it is impossible. Too much noise.
Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
#34Can anyone explain how these tools are better than email? They seem to just be email in a messenger format, which changes the expectations. But you could do the same to email with the right UI.
EDIT: excuse my ignorance, I don't have much experience using these tools.
Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
#35The 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.
Ha, I remember using pligg ( I think that's how it was called) which was a digg clone. We really nice too.
Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
#36The 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?
Not OP, but threading. So many collaboration tools I've worked with are indistinguishable from the comment section of a blog or newspaper. The vast majority of the comments are useless, with people arguing over ridiculous things, but there's no natural segregation of useful comments and useless, so all you can do is scroll about hope to encounter something worth while.
Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
#37Can anyone explain how these tools are better than email? They seem to just be email in a messenger format, which changes the expectations. But you could do the same to email with the right UI. EDIT: excuse my ignorance, I don't have much experience using these tools.
Of course - in theory - you can turn email into a chat tool. But they do have pretty different norms of how they work.
Having said that, they aren't very natural substitutes at all. In Slack etc, the natural element of dialog is a single sentence or less. In email the natural element is a paragraph or at least a couple of sentences.
In email it is normal to select who you are sending an email to, and the recipient chooses how to organize the messages. In chat it is typical in channels organized by the sender and recipients choose to join or not.
There are many other differences too.
Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
#38Can anyone explain how these tools are better than email? They seem to just be email in a messenger format, which changes the expectations. But you could do the same to email with the right UI. EDIT: excuse my ignorance, I don't have much experience using these tools.
They're not. They promote knee-jerk reactions and just-in-time decision making. I see some value in Slack interactive message buttons for BPM approvals but that's about it. Don't get me started on Chatops.
Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
#39Can anyone explain how these tools are better than email? They seem to just be email in a messenger format, which changes the expectations. But you could do the same to email with the right UI. EDIT: excuse my ignorance, I don't have much experience using these tools.
> Can anyone explain how these tools are better than email?
Communication tools exist along multiple axes of effort, permanence, content-bandwidth, and discoverability.
A conversation takes little effort, is high content-bandwidth (body language, tone, whiteboarding, pointing, etc), but is impossible to discover for others and is impermanent. A formal specification is more permanent, and more discoverable, but has a bit less content-bandwidth and is a high effort activity. Old school SMSs are low-effort and permanent, but not discoverable and prone to confusion because of low content-bandwidth.
Email is kinda 'middle of the tree' all round. It's primary failing for the Entperise is the point-to-point nature of discussion (removing the ability for third parties to discover it). This can be mitigated with use of appropriate groups or tools (internal mailing lists, Sharepoint-ish blobs), but that's a challenge in and of itself...
So how is Slack better than Email? It's better in the way my cheese knife is better than my bread knife. And Slack is as much a threat to email as my cheese knife is to my bread knife... They are complimentary tools that address slightly different needs on a related spectrum, and will be painful if misapplied to the wrong problems. I can cut cheese with a bread knife, I can cut bread with a cheese knife. I can make Slack my total communication system, I can pretend that email is enough ;)
Right tool for the job, don't do dumb things, and if you can't figure out how immature use of a pling-pling-pling-pling-pling chat system is gonna wreck your day-to-day work experience... ... I assume we have worked together before and you were in charge of choosing the internal communication system...
Re: What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter
#40I'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.
OneNote works pretty well as a glorified wiki in small groups.
Naturally, these days, if that's what you need why not get a proper wiki going? I do know for some MS shops the pre-paid OneNote licenses make it a tempting substitute.