Slack is a relatively new product in the market that has had some seriously amazing growth. The Team Communication app has not only broken into the market, it has taken it by storm.
What Is Slack?
Slack is a team communication app at its core. What at first glance appears to be a simple chat room, or chat app is really much more more. From adding integration with other apps, to making special channel;s to discuss items that might not need to be in the general chat, Slack is your app.
Channels:
Slack has the ability to let is users add channels to their account. Those channels are basically smaller chat rooms that can be used to discuss certain parts of a project, or a channel that can alert you when GitHub is updated. All in all it is a very powerful tool that lets DevOps and Engineers use the same application in different ways.
Application Integration:
One fo the things Slack does best, is allow people to integrate their apps with it. The Slack API is open and available for anyone to use. I found a lot of use when I was working with Google Drive and GitHub. Slack would let me know when a new document was sent to me in Drive, or if a new version was pushed via Git. Otherwise if the people forget to tell me I could go days without knowing. A small list of apps that currently integrate are
- Google Drive
- Jira
- GitHub
- Jenkins
You can check out most of the other app integrations HERE
Conclusion:
I really love Slack. I think it is one of the best tools to help teams collaborate on projects, and really get things working. Now if only I could find some people to use it more with me instead of my one or two friends that I code for fun with.