Effective communication within a team is a key point when working on projects. The amount of services and solutions to chose from is massive and of course almost all of them claim to be the ones that solves all communication problems.

We have tried many service within the last couple years. While we have been happy with them for a small set of things they did really well, we were always missing something. When moving most communication into the ticket tracker, communications were easy to drift apart and hard to be found again. When using IM services often the 1-on-1 communications where fine, but group discussions were hard to manage and/or impossible to search through.

A while ago I have heard about this new team communication tool Slack, started by the co-founder of Flickr. Its premise is that it changes the way teams communicate and can make emails obsolete.

“Yeah, sure!”, I dismissed it at first. The scar Google Wave left still hurts sometimes.

Better not being ignorant I wanted to try it anyway. It was immediately attractive to everybody in the office primarily due to it’s ease of use. Anybody can create channels for discussions with just two clicks. While testing other services in past it was quite difficult to get people interested and convince them to join. The simplicity of Slack however didn’t need much – everybody wanted to join as soon as possible from their own. Now Slack covers most of our internal communication.

So Slack covers 1-on-1 and team communication in a flexible way. But what about other components of a project? What about issue tracking for software development, for example?

Slack comes with a long list of services that can be integrated. In our case we activated – again, rather easily – connections to our issue tracker and a few other services. Whenever changes are made to a ticket they also get posted to the defined channels. We easily take it from there to have discussions.

Since we have started using Slack I feel the team became much closer than ever before. Asking a colleague or even starting a discussion is just a click away. And the integrations make it the universal one place to go. No matter where we are, thanks to Apps for iOS and Android that are available in addition to the desktop Apps and web interface. And when we need to access information from past conversations it is just a simple search away.

But probably the most important of all: Slack supports Emojis and animated GIFs out of the box.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6zVzWU95Sw[/youtube]