Slack, the real-time collaboration application, fosters collaboration across team networks. Teams of all sizes and forms are using it for sharing data and delivering high value services. Undervaluing its potential usages can be a big mistake and organizations can miss out on valuable business opportunities. Its mound of benefits can be further increased if it is supercharged with strong integration layer and connected with other apps. This is how smart companies are using it for mission critical projects and improving internal communication & processes.
It is an important tool to enable flows and higher level of service interactions with partners. It supports integration with over 100 applications. You can pull out customer centric data inside Slack, extract information (ticket priority, customer location, invoices, etc.) and define triggers for support.
What is Slack?
Slack has a spectacular origin. It was envisioned by Tiny Speck, which created a flash-based online game known as Glitch. The game capsized and developers decided to refactor it as Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a chat process to facilitate communication on a server networking model. The team reengineered the web-based multiplayer game into a corporate messaging service called Slack, an acronym for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge. By 2013, Slack started running in private beta. Soon it garnered plenty of attention for its potential to kill email based communication.
In June 2015, the web based platform was supporting over 1.1 million users, 3, 00,000 paid seats. Simultaneously, there were challenges to climb. Over 30 million messages flowing via integrations with other services started pushing its IT to the limits. Slack’s founders planned to replace the bare-metal IT infrastructure with cloud based IT environment for greater speed, scalability, and innovation.
The organization turned to Amazon Webservices Infrastructure (AWS) for computing tasks, file uploads, and workload balance across services to achieve a growth of multibillion-dollar valuation. The cloud advantage enabled Slack to push innovative products and services with increased speed, availability, and connectivity.
With AWS elements, Slack had taken shape as a useful web based tool for enabling asynchronous communication between team members on different systems. The primary reason behind its increased adoption is its ability to streamline collaboration. It bundles a powerful search engine that lets you quickly navigate and search chats, messages, and text.
It deciphers the true meaning out of the communication and tells its context. For example, if a user pastes a link then it expands the information for them. Gives a thumbnail to explain a picture. You can even show Spotify playlist, play Youtube videos from the chat list.
Slack and Onboarding
Simple and painless onboarding is another primary reasons behind growing Slack adoption. Unlike complex group messaging or collaboration services, its interface has been specifically designed for smoother onboarding. Slack interface focuses around channels for real time, or asynchronous communication. Developers can sign up in simple steps, add team members and kick start conversations with them.
Need for Slack Integration
Slack integration with other applications bolsters business operations and drives innovation across the organization. Teams can create a centralized messaging hub which makes all communication happening at one place. From one search box, teams can quickly search mails or texts and share them with their partner networks. The collaboration spectrum can be leveraged for supporting business communication technologies on various environments. Find out how Slack integration can help your IT and business move forward collaboratively:
Slack + Salesforce: It is a powerful combination which can be used to organize conversations, topics, projects, etc. Teams can search the required information and directly message it to the team. The past conversations and files can be archived and prioritised as per the opportunities. The conversation channel can be streamlined to share search results as per the conversation channel.
Slack + Google Hangouts: Users can integrate Slack with Google Hangouts to sync data flows like video conferencing, calls and chat and make team conversations faster. Slack users can create Hangouts and invite other team members on a specific issue. On a single interface, teams sitting at different locations can share their project related insights.
Slack + GitHub: This is an excellent combination for project teams working on open source and private projects. Teams can quickly collaborate, review, and use code library and reuse it for projects. Users can track Git repositories from slack and select channels to get live code updates. The integration can be further customized to link repositories to a channel and get event notifications. Developers can bring out commits, pull requests, and issues from Git repositories to Slack.
Slack + MailChimp: Marketing teams can use this pair to carry out campaigns with perfection. This integration can help users to receive updates of a marketing campaign and share the status with teams. Teams can instantly check campaign status, authenticate and monitor it from Slack.
Slack + Asana: Asana is a powerful project management tool for sharing project related tasks with team. If integrated with Slack, Asana can enable deeper conversations for setting reminders without breaking workflows. This combination can help teams in adding projects, fixing bugs, taking care of maintenance issues, and keeping a record of them.
Slack + Dropbox: Dropbox is a cloud based file hosting service. Slack integration with Dropbox allows team members to seamlessly share and access files. Multiple teams can collaborate, share, and download their own copy of file from Dropbox. The link attached in Slack chatbox can create a preview of the file and give a clear idea about the file sharing context.
Slack + Groove: Groove is a support tool built for customers that also offers team based collaboration tools for teams. It is also an email killer like Slack. Groove integration with Slack can help in creating notifications for assigning tickets to a team(s), responding to a ticket, and preparing notes on a ticket.
Adeptia’s web-based integration platform leverages a no code approach for application integration. It allows users to handle IT requests, order fulfillment approvals, business approvals right from Slack. Business users can create transparent and automated workflows for efficient Slack integration.