Slack wants to kill office email
Office email tends to lead to overstuffed inboxes and unproductive days -- 80 percent of it is a waste of time anyway.
To improve the way offices communicate, Flickr cofounders have developed a new tool that they hope will kill off internal office emails once and for all. Slack basically functions as a platform for all of your company's online communications while simultaneously being an archive of your company's history, with all conversations saved and searchable. Fast Company explains how it works:
Slack presents as a main window for chatting flanked by a bar on the left offering various ways of being in touch; topmost is a list of “channels,” or topics. A channel is highlighted in white when you’ve missed out on some of the chatting going on in that channel; a red number is displayed beside a channel if someone has mentioned you by name. Scroll down on the left bar and there are other ways of being in touch, including Direct Message or private groups. It’s ordered top to bottom from the least intrusive ways to communicate to the most intrusive ways to communicate.
Plus, you don't have to ditch of your file-sharing systems like Google Docs or Dropbox, Slack integrates with those too.
It's not the first company to try and bring an end to internal email. There are sites that try to bring an experience similar to Facebook (Yammer) or Reddit (Honey) to internal communications. However, the fact that Slack was developed by Flickr cofounders seems to be helping give Slack some initial credibility. In the first 24 hours after launching last week, Slack had 8,000 companies sign up to give the tool a try.
Read more: Fast Company
Related on SmartPlanet:
- 7 tips for managing your email
- Tired of office email? Here’s a Reddit-like alternative
- Should your company ban internal email?
- Email still tops social media for online marketing, study says
- There are 174,400 e-mails in my inbox right now
- How to be more productive at work
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com