Slack A small review of excellent service.

Some time ago, after the magic pendal called Tolstoy Summer Camp, I began to saw my startup.

At first, my team had two developers and a designer. Then one developer left to cut his project. Then another developer appeared. And everything would be fine, but I was crazy about the fact that I could not find simple and clear means of doing business in such small companies as mine.

I tried a lot of Basecamp, Asana, Redmine, Trello, Megaplan and others, a lot of messengers in various combinations with online file dumps like Dropbox and GoogleDrive - I didn't like anything. "Well, not this is all, not that!"



Once Yandex invited the participants of the first camp to meet with the participants of the second. Well then talked with the guys. It was a very mutually beneficial meeting. And after the “official part”, we went with the “veterans” to a nearby bar and continued communication. It was then that they showed me the Slack service. At first, I did not understand his chips - “that I, the IRC did not see what?”. But after a couple of days, I realized that I had found my love solution to all my problems.



Finally, the start-up startup (read, free) teamwork solution, where the minimum distance between participants is 520 kilometers, was a combination of Slack + Trello + G.Drive + GitHub services. Moreover, everything revolves around Slack.

')

Briefly about the service:



This is such a teammate for teamwork. Moreover, it positively differs from any skype and vibers with wonderful features, such as:

• For each topic, you can create a separate chat.
• Links to resources and pictures themselves are loaded and displayed with cool snippets, approximately as in FB.
• Freeloaders give five gigabytes of space for files to share.
• There is integration with a large number of external services. For example, you can set up an alert in Slack in two minutes that some cards have changed or new ones have been added to Trello. Moreover, from different boards to different Chyatiki.
• There are clients for Android and iOS. Unlike unlawful Skype, the Slack client does not freeze my phone in four hours.
• The entire message archive is available anytime, anywhere.
• Search the entire archive of messages, plus the text inside the saved PDF
• And so on...

The team members also did not immediately understand why this is cool, but now it has become clear to everyone that this is more convenient.

Each team member receives notification only of those messages that are addressed specifically to him. At the same time, archives of messages are available in all channels and can always be re-read.



For example, we can discuss with the Android-programmer in the chat about the Android-client any questions, during the discussion of which there is a question to the developer of the server part. And you can just call him to take part in the discussion - "@ bald, how are things going with the storage of user profiles?". He receives a call specifically to himself, can read the history of our correspondence and clearly answer "things are fine, when will you format the format?".



At the same time, I made a separate chat, which I called #meetingminutes, where I briefly write everything that we agreed upon as a result of such discussions. Thus, we do not need to re-read the message history to remember what decisions were made.



In addition to Slack, we actively use Trello.



I made several boards for each line of work. Then, in just a couple of minutes, I configured the integration in Slack so that the changes on the cards from different boards in Trello appeared in the right chats. Now you do not need to check Trello to find out about the changes. They come straight to work chat. Very comfortably. For the movement of dependent tasks - simply indispensable.



I’m not going to talk about the means of storing files, except that Slack can notify you when new files appear, for example, at G.Drive.



Just a couple of minutes is configured, for example, monitoring anything. Although likes on Facebook count.



And also Slack is given to everyone who registers a team with a referral link one hundred dollars into an account to pay for future expenses, as well as me, but only if the registered team switches to paid rates. You do not think that I for plus in karma wrote so much text. And I solemnly pledge to start paying Slack as soon as I start making money myself.



For those who do not organically digest referral links, here is a direct one: slack.com



Use on health.