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Slack Shared Channels

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Re: Slack Shared Channels

#41

Post by mooreds »

tomphoolery wrote: post #4

Our whole company has relied on this for the past few months in order to communicate with some of our clients, rather than invite them into our private Slack. It's been wonderful.

We have a shared channel too. It's great for times when you want to pull a client or a vendor into your slack for long term. You do want to be careful about getting pulled into slack (see this post and discussion from a week or so ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20895853 ).

There's actually another use case where a vendor provides a bot and wants users of the bot to be easily able to file help requests. We wrote an app for that and outlined our thinking here: https://www.transposit.com/blog/2019.09.17-amazon-slack-shar...

Re: Slack Shared Channels

#42

Post by toddmorey »

“New people coming into a project can readily access a project’s archive, allowing them to ramp up swiftly.”

How many people have ramped up quickly by reading the chat history of a channel? That’s not documentation—instead it’s like a really bad screenplay. I hate digging through channel history as I join and kinda resent the expectation that I’m supposed to do that.

Re: Slack Shared Channels

#43

Post by Jedd »

It seems to me that a) this is an inherent and long-standing feature of messaging systems that use open, free, and/or federated protocols, b) it invites even more interruptions as you're blending policies of two or more organisations, and lowest common denominator will likely 'win', c) you're still stuck mapping any non-trivial issues raised in chat back onto a proper tracking system.

The suggestion that your knowledge 'archive' is located in an off-site subscription service that's not indexed with the rest of your institutional knowledge systems, and likely with a poor signal:noise ratio, is worrisome. Do some organisations actually work this way?

Re: Slack Shared Channels

#44

Post by ohnope »

I imagine over the years Slack has really made a dent in Gmail's intra-organization messaging rate. Now cross organization is getting swallowed. Does Google care?

Re: Slack Shared Channels

#45

Post by jon-wood »

nickfromseattle wrote: post #13
tomphoolery wrote: post #4

Our whole company has relied on this for the past few months in order to communicate with some of our clients, rather than invite them into our private Slack. It's been wonderful.

How do you communicate about things related to the project, but doesn't need to have the client involved in? Do you have a separate internal channel per client?

We do the same as other people replying, we’ve got a few shared channels with a major client, and alongside that internal channels related to work for them. You do have to be careful you’re in the right channel before letting rip about that one person at the other end everyone dislikes, but otherwise it works fine.

Re: Slack Shared Channels

#46

Post by jon-wood »

jrockway wrote: post #37
merlincorey wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company has this, and I highly recommend it in general for security and data loss prevention purposes. Any channel that may have external to the company users must have `-ext` at the end of the name and there should also be a non `-ext` channel for internal discussion that relates. This ends up working really well because the channels sort together next to each other and you can tell very clearly from the name if…

I feel like they should just have different themes for private and public channels. That way, you know at a glance!

That would be amazing. I’m tempted to switch back to in-browser Slack just so I can write a Chrome extension to do this.

Re: Slack Shared Channels

#47

Post by daniel_iversen »

This feature is close to useless for me since the admin of the slack account has to “connect” the two teams/domains/whatever - how does that enable free and ad-hoc collaboration in a medium-to-large organisation??? I’m used to tools like Dropbox, email, Asana, G-suite where you can mostly just collaborate with whomever you want around the world. I think slack is missing a huge opportunity by keeping it so locked down!

Re: Slack Shared Channels

#48

Post by cwyers »

polote wrote: post #8

The issue with the channels are the same than communicating over slack: You customers are feeling like they can ask any question and get an answer in 1 minute, and if you dont answer them straight away then they are unhappy. Definitively not something I recommend

I don't think I've experienced either side of this. I've never seen people who otherwise have reasonable expectations of response time go crazy because of Slack. And I have never, ever seen someone with unreasonable expectations of response time behave well just because it's e-mail. Especially since e-mail has been put onto smartphones, I don't really see a whole lot of difference in how people behave based on the size of the text box.

Re: Slack Shared Channels

#49

Post by simtel20 »

toddmorey wrote: post #42

“New people coming into a project can readily access a project’s archive, allowing them to ramp up swiftly.” How many people have ramped up quickly by reading the chat history of a channel? That’s not documentation—instead it’s like a really bad screenplay. I hate digging through channel history as I join and kinda resent the expectation that I’m supposed to do that.

However, simply having important pinned items, and the ability for colleagues to provide stable links to backchat is a useful part of making history of a company accessible.

Re: Slack Shared Channels

#50

Post by robbiemitchell »

daniel_iversen wrote: post #47

This feature is close to useless for me since the admin of the slack account has to “connect” the two teams/domains/whatever - how does that enable free and ad-hoc collaboration in a medium-to-large organisation??? I’m used to tools like Dropbox, email, Asana, G-suite where you can mostly just collaborate with whomever you want around the world. I think slack is missing a huge opportunity by keeping it so locked down…

Keeping it locked down is how they keep enterprise security teams happy, and selling to enterprises is how they make a lot of money.
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