Slack Prepares Analytics Tool To Compete With G Suite and Office 365 (computerworld.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Computerworld: Slack is building a new analytics tool to offer businesses greater insights into how their teams collaborate, part of the company's plans to make better use of the data created within its popular chatapp. "We are hoping to build a set of insights that help you understand not only how Slack is being used, but how your company is collaborating and functioning," said Jamie DeLanghe, head of Slack's Search, Learning and Intelligence (SLI) team... Slack's SLI division was created in 2016 to help make better use of the reams of information being created and stored as Slack adoption grows. The New York-based team is responsible for enhancing search functionality and developing the Slack "work graph," which ties together data on a users' behavior and interactions to enable more accurate recommendations.

The team is also tasked with building out Slack's analytics capabilities to highlight areas for improvement based on information about how teams work together. Analytics is something Slack's rivals are focused on, too: Google launched Work Insights to track adoption of its G Suite software and identify which teams are collaborating frequently using tools such as Hangouts Chat. And Microsoft has launched Workplace Analytics, which performs a similar function for its Office 365 tools.

Comments

Hope it fails

[Anonymous Coward]

Slack is so stupid. No better than the hundreds of chat apps that came before. Only difference is they fooled some dumb millennials who don't know tlany better.

"Competing"

[Anonymous Coward]

when your entire software stack consists of dog slow javascript.

Such competetive advantage.
Many upside.
Total USP.
Wow.

IRC to compete with G Suite and Office 365

[brian.stinar]

This is literally just IRC with some graphics, and additional easy-to-use integrations.

9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Re:IRC to compete with G Suite and Office 365

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Exactly. IRC was around long before Slack and it'll be around long after Slack is gone. I can't believe they're actually getting people to pay for IRC.

Re:IRC to compete with G Suite and Office 365

[KiloByte]

It doesn't matter if there are better alternatives, it matters how the person making the decision will benefit personally, any considerations for the company be damned. So IRC being technically better, available on all platforms, trivially bridgeable to any transport, and so on, doesn't matter as it fails the primary enterprise rule.

Re:IRC to compete with G Suite and Office 365

[Voyager529]

This is literally just IRC with some graphics, and additional easy-to-use integrations.

9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

I can't believe I'm about to defend Slack right now. I mean, I set up a MatterMost server at work and some friends and I use Rocketchat hosted on a RasPi at home because I'm rather big on self-hosted or gtfo, but I think we, the Slashdotters, trivialize the value in the graphics and integrations.

Yes, I'm sure the majority of us would think nothing of typing sudo apt-get install ircd-hybrid on a VM somewhere and configuring it. Then, we have to get all the end users to standardize on an IRC client. Accounting isn't going to approve a hundred licenses of mIRC. So, Quassel it is, so that we can keep a single set of documentation on it for both Windows and OSX users. Now we need the mobile clients, so AndIRC for the Android folk, and...Mutter, for iOS? So really, it's three sets of documentation, which involve end users having to use "/join" and "/quit" commands. Permissions for OPs are interesting and a bit awkward, and I'm sure management just LOVES the idea of having to learn it...but they decide to do so.

Now, we deal with notification hell. Slack famously published their notification logic. How do you implement that in IRC? That's per-client, no concept of priority messages unless users are tagged, and no concept of groups except for joined rooms, meaning multiple join commands or per-user join scripts generated by IT. Also, no message threading or replying, and as much as we may well hate it, stickers and emojis aren't viable. More usefully, in-line message embedding is nonexistent, save for hyperlinks to URLs, meaning that uploading images to an image host is a requirement to share a picture. Similarly, chat history is not generally stored server side in a user-accessible manner, to say nothing of searching. Some clients will store the history client-side, which is fine until it starts using up measurable amounts of storage on the devices, or the user gets a new phone and the cache doesn't transfer.

Then, we deal with good ol' fashioned security concerns. Port 6667 is commonly blocked on public wi-fi locations, so running on a nonstandard port is a de facto requirement. The server needs to allow only authenticated users, which is a relatively uncommon config for most IRC servers I've frequented (which tend to just use nickserv to reserve usernames), and run everything over SSL.

That setup then becomes the foray of IT, to ensure it keeps working at perfect uptime, with nobody to call and yell at if there are any issues.

And that's just off the top of my head.

Yes, I 100% agree that Slack brings very little originality to the table, and has far less flexibility than IRC, which can indeed be accessed on everything from an iPhone XS to a Commodore 64, and everything in between. However, I submit that IRC had a 15-year head start to achieve the same level of professional use that Slack achieved since 2013. Sure, plenty of it is marketing, along with the fact that pretty screenshots make sense to nontechnical people in accounting and the C-suite...but the fact that the setup steps for everybody are "download app, enter e-mail/password, start chatting", on every device they are likely to use...I submit that they managed to find the pain points which prevented businesses from adopting IRC and then solved it in exchange for money.

Re:IRC to compete with G Suite and Office 365

[antdude]

I'm old school and still prefer IRC over the GUI chat clients.

Re:IRC to compete with G Suite and Office 365

[Billly Gates]

Teams is not chat based?? Teams has groups and each group created automatically creates a SharePoint site as well as a OneDrive for business folder group with custom permissions with no IT department required. Teams also has Yammer and Skype integration as well.

I never used Slack but I assume it is similar and has lots of functionality.

IRC is not even close and it is 2018 and not 1998 as I have not went into an IRC chatroom in many years and I am surprised people still use it?!

Re:IRC to compete with G Suite and Office 365

[Billly Gates]

Can IIRC create custom SharePoint sites and groups with OneDrive for business with no IT department just like Teams then?

Re:IRC to compete with G Suite and Office 365

[KiloByte]

wat? That'd be a ridiculous layering violation. The core rule of writing reliable tools is: "do one thing and do it well". A communication medium needs a system for managing files about as much as a fish needs a bicycle.

What else would you propose, that an init system should include a web server and parse untrusted XML in it?

Re:IRC to compete with G Suite and Office 365

[Billly Gates]

Again Teams is not a chat program. It is a groupware app. On the backend when you create a group like Marketing it creates the SharePoint and One Drive for Business folders automatically so you can collaborate. I am not familiar with Slack at all but I would imagine has sharing options and custom group permissions as well.

It is not a violation if Teams or Slack is just a front end to a backend app such like a website. IIRC also is not as secure for corporate communications nor has the permissions. If you think about it it makes sense if you are medium sized business or a large one where you don't want IT involved to get stuff done where a cookie cutter template solution can go in.

Re:IRC to compete with G Suite and Office 365

[dromgodis]

This is literally just IRC with some graphics, and additional easy-to-use integrations.

"[5% of ] this is literally just IRC with [the remaining 95% being] some graphics, and additional easy-to-use integrations."

Apparently there is a great demand for some graphics and easy-to-use integration.

Sending silly memes and generally goofing around

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what slack is basically used. Don't need any frigging analytics for that.

Yet an even better Slack Tool . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Slack is building a new analytics tool to offer businesses greater insights into how their teams collaborate

Slack is building a new analytics tool to offer businesses greater insights into how their competitors operate

Actually

[Anonymous Coward]

No better than the hundreds of chat apps that came before

Actually, it's worse. Slack uses markdown, which is crippled right out the door as far as text formatting goes, missing many basic formatting capabilities; but they didn't stop there. They broke markdown's ability to embed inline images (and replaced it with a non-markdown mechanism), disallow both CSS and even basic HTML, and don't provide any means to replace the basics they left unavailable, never mind extend them. Need to actually inline an image with your text? Too bad. Need colored messages? Too bad. It's like being back in 1990 again. Except, you know, HTML could actually do those things then. As now. :/

Any company or server-savvy-person-having group is far better off using Rocket Chat for even better capabilities, without being permanently subject to the limits imposed by the Slack team. Plus, you have the source code, and you can contribute formatting upgrades to the project, so your tech people can both add the formatting capabilities you need and if you like, help everyone else out at the same time, instead of being stuck with an absolute minimalist communications format.

Ryver is the same way; too basic to bother with, broken, unfixable, unfixed.

It was a great day here when we discovered Rocket Chat. All the doors that had been closed at Slack and Ryver opened for us, and at the same time, the fees went away. There's no good reason for any tech savvy company to use these services today, unless they're just looking to burn funds while suffering with an inferior system.

Re:Actually

[Zontar The Mindless]

Corporate decision-makers are well aware of the issues to which you refer.

That's not the problem.

The problem is that such people regard those issues as desirable features.

Imagine my joy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet more meaningless measurements to report on!
Score one for the Slack idiots!

Don't remind me of slack!

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to use that pest at my last $EMPLOYER. In my opinion, it goes against the Geneva Convention against cruel treatment.

Good riddance.

Slack Is A Massive Time Sink

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, everybody thinks their mutitasking and adding some automation and getting so much more done. Blah, blah, blah.

Do you want to get things done? Issues resolved quickly? Pick up the phone and call.

It is fucking absurd how many times I see issues lingering fro days/weeks.. Yet, when I put my foot down and instruct people to pick up the fucking phone and get it resolved! It's done and gone in an hour or less.

Zontar, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem... mindless.

Corporate decision-makers are well aware of the issues to which you refer.

That's not the problem.

The problem is that such people regard those issues as desirable features.

lol no. corporate "decision-makers" on this sort of thing have no idea what "desirable features" are. they read shiny ads and make incredibly bad decisions, then the results fall like a rain of shit on everyone else. slack excels at serving up shiny bullshit by the truckload; your "decision-makers" simply eat it up. an actual informed decision maker would never choose slack, because it's money out the door for a service they could have in considerably more functional form, and 100% free at the same time.

The very act of choosing slack proves the "decision-maker" is an incompetent buffoon.

What about "private" conversations?

[OnceWas]

Getting past the Slack-hate... Slack's ubiquity once it's in place at a company eventually makes it the de-facto communications tool. People start using it for everything. Private conversations occur in direct message channels all the time.

"I'm interviewing at competitor X on Thursday."
"Director Y is incompetent."
"Staffer Z is kinda hot."

Besides the fact that people using Slack should always assume that someone's watching, or at least able to be watching, how does Slack's analytics treat one-on-one conversations?

Pokemon Go

[JackieBrown]

And how does this help coordinate raids? lol

Slack Prepares Analytics Tool To Compete

[elanie]

Slack is building another examination apparatus to offer organizations more noteworthy bits of knowledge into how their groups work together, some portion of the organizations intends to improve utilization of the information made inside its famous talk application. For handling these issue you can get Microsoft Office 365 Support by visiting https://www.msofficetechnicals...