Slack for Mac

Slack offers a powerful and flexible group-messaging service that lets teams chat, host calls, and share files across platforms.

In Slack, you can use Channels to organize conversations around specific teams or projects, making it easy to access all related discussions. Slack Connect enhances this functionality by allowing secure collaboration with external partners directly within the platform. For moments when text isn't sufficient, Huddles and Clips offer voice and video communication options. The Messaging feature keeps teams connected through direct and group chats, ensuring that everyone is on the same page. Slack for Enterprise caters to large organizations, providing scalable solutions that meet the demands of extensive operations.

Slack excels in project management with tools like Canvas and Lists, which help visualize tasks and ideas. Search and File Sharing functionalities streamline the process of finding documents and past communications. Integrations with over 2,600 external services, including Google Drive and Office 365, extend Slack's capabilities, allowing for a more connected workflow.

Slack's ability to integrate with a wide range of applications enhances its utility for teams. The Workflow Builder feature enables the automation of routine tasks without any coding, freeing up time for more critical work. Slack Sales Elevate integrates directly with Salesforce, allowing users to manage their sales engagements and gain insights from Salesforce accounts without leaving Slack. The combination of Salesforce and Slack integrations ensures that sales teams are well-aligned and can act quickly by accessing real-time data within their conversations. Additionally, Slack AI optimizes workplace efficiency by providing AI-driven summaries of channels, enhancing search functions, and automating note-taking.

Pros

• Communicate with your team: Slack is a shared communication area where you can organize and keep track of conversations, create public and private channels for specific topics or teams, and direct message colleagues. You can pin items in a channel, share files, and set a retention policy for messages.
• Notifications: You can set channel notifications, so you can be alerted to new messages, just those mentioning you, or using a keyword you've designated. You can mute a channel, ignore general @channel messages, or have different notification settings for desktop and mobile. You can also format your messages -- using basic text and paragraph styles, including code blocks -- and add emoji. And finally, you can disable notifications automatically, so you don't get alerts in the middle of the night.
• When text isn't enough: You can make voice and video calls to teammates right in Slack. Select a channel or person, and click the "Start a call" phone icon. In addition to voice or video chat, you can share your screen from the call. With a free account, you can make one-to-ones. With a paid account, you can include 15 people on a call.
• Searchable: Slack indexes every discussion and document, so you can easily search for discussions for Microsoft Word or Google Docs files, for example.
• Add apps: If Slack doesn't do something you need, you can add third-party apps into your workspace. Apps range from those for calendaring and list-keeping to making digital payments and adding GIFs to messages.
• Slackbot: The Slackbot assistant alerts you when you're mentioned in a channel, can help remind you of events, and answer simple questions about how Slack works, such as how to invite people to a channel.
• Broad availability: Along with its web app, Slack has apps for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone platforms.

Cons

• A bit pricey: Slack has a free version designed for small teams. But for a larger enterprise setting, you are looking at $80 to $150 per person per year to take advantage of everything Slack offers. Hipchat from Atlassian, for example, is less than half that cost per user.

Slack's team-collaboration service offers just about everything you'd want in group messaging, from public and private channels and notifications to voice and video chat. Slack makes it almost effortless to collaborate with colleagues, but you pay for its ease of use.

• Slack is now a little faster, thanks to a few small but important changes.Admins now have a more stable mechanism to stay in control of when and how the app updates.