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

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.