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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

#41

Post by dijit »

capkutay wrote: post #31
EamonnMR wrote: post #15

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.

I can only speak about how my company uses Skype (which may differ since I don't know the ins-and-outs) but my conversations end up in my exchange inbox in a folder titled "Conversation History".

So at least, for me, Skype for business has this functionality.

Personal skype stores your chat history local to the device- I found that out recently when I was looking at my non-existent conversation history on my new phone.

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

#42

Post by rbanffy »

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.

One cool thing I did, a long time ago while working at an advertising agency, was to set up an internal NNTP server for discussions.

Sometimes I wish we had that again.

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

#43

Post by jacobwal »

fujiters wrote: post #36
jacobwal wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for sharing that, I'm a fan of threading as well but see a lot of Slack groups that operate as though it wasn't an option

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

#44

Post by jacobwal »

swsieber wrote: post #29
jacobwal wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for sharing your POV

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

#45

Post by gulperxcx »

davidbanham wrote: post #26
jacobwal wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compelli…

Sounds like you're describing a mailing-list

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

#46

Post by jacobwal »

davidbanham wrote: post #26
jacobwal wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compelli…

Thanks for sharing that. A few friends and I are trying to explore a product in this space, and what you said is pretty much what we've arrived at as well. If you have any other feedback you think we should keep in mind I'm all ears

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

#47

Post by paleotrope »

fujiters wrote: post #36
jacobwal wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Check out the chatty at shacknews.com The immediacy of irc with threading to keep things readable.

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

#48

Post by ImaCake »

bonesss wrote: post #39
ImaCake wrote: post #34

Can 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…

Thanks for taking the time to reply with a well-thought out response :)

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

#49

Post by rorygibson »

wingerlang wrote: post #33
jacobwal wrote: post #13

For 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.

I agree about Slack's search - it can be slow too.

(I actually had so much of a problem with this that I built my own enterprise search tool for my Slack, Trello and GDrive, and now I'm productizing it - https://getctx.io )

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

#50

Post by rorygibson »

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…

I kind of agree with this, but I took a slightly different path and built my own 'enterprise search' tool for my Slack, Trello and GDrive, and now I'm productizing it - https://getctx.io - so I'll always be thankful to Slack for giving me my idea :-)
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