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Slack’s brand-new feature has an unexpectedly rich backstory

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Re: Slack’s brand-new feature has an unexpectedly rich backstory

#31

I wonder how this will work with slack orgs with short data retention policies. It wouldn't make sense to delete parts of a Canvas, as "Canvas docs are collaborative, and all their comments are just Slack threads." (from https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/20/23361717/slack-canvas-doc... )

Bear in mind that at this time, and for many years, data retention policies simply do not apply to uploaded files in a given channel (IIRC it does apply to global retention, but I'm not totally sure of the current behavior). There's a sensitive channel with a short retention period in a Slack for a company I do some consulting for and every few months I remind the admins that images/PDFs/etc that are uploaded to the channel are not purged and they should manually do it... but there's still stuff in there from 2016 if I do a search in:#channel for Files.

Re: Slack’s brand-new feature has an unexpectedly rich backstory

#32
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone should create a startup to track all that! /s

My friends and I have a running joke about the name "Mosiac". Every company I've worked for has had something called Mosiac and it's always a pain to interact with. Someone should make a startup called Mosiac for tracking information across many different tools.

It's been done (unsurprisingly): https://www.theaccessgroup.com/en-gb/products/mosaic/

Re: Slack’s brand-new feature has an unexpectedly rich backstory

#33
post #22
post #5

Yet another 'digital container' of disparate information to house your data and make it difficult for someone find it across an organisation. As someone who was working in a scale up I found that we had information spread across coda, wiki, markdown, tickets, collaborative whiteboards (Miro), git issues, google docs, coda, (insert random lastest cool SaaS that someone stumbled across one night and used the company ca…

It's not about the options, but the reward . What's the reward for creating good documentation? That's now describes the upper bound of time and effort people are willing to put in. Since there is no reward, people will put in the absolute minimum they need to and that's rational behavior .

But also "what is documentation?" You can have great customer-facing-product-docs and keep them up to date. You can have an internal process wiki that is mostely up to date. But what about the conversation over lunch/slack to change a product feature, that then becomes a story card, that gets mockup, that gets notes in the pr and comments in the code, that get ad-hoc slack conversations clarifying details. How many micro-decisions where made in that process? How many those _should_ be documented vs tossed away?

Re: Slack’s brand-new feature has an unexpectedly rich backstory

#34
post #26
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is great! I work at Slack, where we've been testing that functionality for a while, and I use it for one-on-ones with remote colleagues. Huddles become like Zoom calls, but with much more context.

Huddle needs much love. It is not a first class citizen. Not even full API support for it :(

what else does it need?

Re: Slack’s brand-new feature has an unexpectedly rich backstory

#35
> Using Slack’s workflow builder and integrations with other services,

It's going to be such a missed opportunity if this can't POST to external endpoints, just like the current Workflow stuff can't. (Sure you can use a bot, but you shouldn't have to!)

Re: Slack’s brand-new feature has an unexpectedly rich backstory

#36
post #33
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the options, but the reward . What's the reward for creating good documentation? That's now describes the upper bound of time and effort people are willing to put in. Since there is no reward, people will put in the absolute minimum they need to and that's rational behavior .

But also "what is documentation?" You can have great customer-facing-product-docs and keep them up to date. You can have an internal process wiki that is mostely up to date. But what about the conversation over lunch/slack to change a product feature, that then becomes a story card, that gets mockup, that gets notes in the pr and comments in the code, that get ad-hoc slack conversations clarifying details. How many m…

Long ago Mozilla started making all such decisions on mailing lists, because the meetings at water coolers never get documented, and because you can't meet a colleague who lives 10,000 miles away over a water cooler (or at least not very often).

Re: Slack’s brand-new feature has an unexpectedly rich backstory

#37
post #5

Yet another 'digital container' of disparate information to house your data and make it difficult for someone find it across an organisation. As someone who was working in a scale up I found that we had information spread across coda, wiki, markdown, tickets, collaborative whiteboards (Miro), git issues, google docs, coda, (insert random lastest cool SaaS that someone stumbled across one night and used the company ca…

Interestingly enough, it seems that information living across so many different tools has become enough of a problem that startups are trying to tackle that issue.

Glean (https://www.glean.com/) for example is building a "Google for work"

Re: Slack’s brand-new feature has an unexpectedly rich backstory

#40
post #11

Best news in that article was a brief reference to video calls coming to huddles. Been finding huddles really useful but sometimes a quick chat moves onto a more full on discussion and most of the time now we move over to zoom for that so we can talk face to face. Being able to turn on video for these huddles will be great.

I really dislike huddles. For one I can never find where a huddle is at least with a call its pops a window up. I am consistently asked "can you join the huddle" only to reply "we'll where is it".

Other little things annoy me like the huddle is a tiny square at the bottom left which makes finding the mute button harder.

If someone shares their screen I now have to click a button to open it giving me the call window.

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