 I get a lot of questions about what we use for workplace messaging, and primarily that revolves around Slack. If you're not familiar with Slack, it's a, well, I'm going to call it very much like IRC for those of you that are older and you ever used IRC, which of course I still use IRC because, well, that's where my Linux friends are. So it was really easy to adopt a finger with IRC world. If you're not, this will kind of get you an idea of how it works. But Slack is a messaging platform and I pulled up the pricing for it. We use the free tier. I won't lie. I wouldn't mind if they had a tier in between, but we don't use it enough that I care about the paid features. So like the paid features are unlimited apps, smarter unlimited search, group calls and screening, group account and shared channels, completely things we don't use, things we do use. Well, we don't even use the calling, 10 app immigration to think we have one, and search up to 10,000 messages. I don't know that we have, well, you may have over 10,000 there now because we've used it for so long, but Slack we use as a real-time messaging platform, not a archival of messages. Now, maybe for your company, you want to use it for archive. That's why they have these paid tiers here. I wouldn't mind give them a few dollars a month. That wouldn't bother me, but it doesn't make sense for me to take all of my staff and put them all on a 667 a month plan for not using any of the added-on features. We've been using the free one for a while. Now I know there's a bunch of different things out there. Microsoft released their teams. We use nothing Microsoft, so that doesn't make any sense to us to get the teams. I'm not a three-office 365 fans. We supply it and support it for our clients, but we don't use it at all ourselves, not a fan of the software. Another alternative is out there, someone's probably saying, but there's a couple open source ones like Rocket Chat. I've tried several open source ones, including Rocket Chat, and they're disappointing because when it comes, I tried them within the last six months. Maybe they've dramatically improved and haven't gotten around to looking at it again. I like open source, open source, self-hosted alternatives. My problem comes down to the app. Internally, worked fine. Web interface, worked fine. Bad part of it, it worked awful on the phone and we use Slack constantly on our phones because we're not always at a desk and we're not always sometimes we're at a client. It's very important for inter-office communications. It's very helpful to the workflow in our business. It's very difficult if those messages don't arrive in a timely fashion to people's phones or they can't message from their phones to the group to get information they may need because they're on site at a job or when something comes up. So that being said, I'm going to cover Slack and yes, I also know that Google has an alternative that they're launching. As much as I like Google and I wear a G Suite company, I am dubious on how I feel about Google and their history with chat programs because they're they don't have a clear road map. Matter of fact, it says it's released and says I don't have it right now. So I'm also confused. I was going to do a demo on it. They said they released it, but it says I have to sign up and call them for it, apparently, even though I have a G Suite. So anyways, so I'm aware that Google has a competitor for Slack. Slack's what we've just been using for a long time. We'll probably keep using it for a while until something compels me to switch. Now, one of the things I will talk a little bit about real quick though is there is a absolute ton of apps. This is one of the things about Slack. Being first to market for an interoffice chat system that became big and very well adopted in the enterprise meant there was a lot of apps because all the developers jumped on it. And I mean a whole lot. There is just so many different integrations you have here for analytics, communication, and all these are different tools. Tons of bots for automation and scripting. So you can say, if it sees this, do this type things, launching meetings, Skype calls, MailChimp, marketing. If you name it, man, there's probably a plugin for it, which is really cool. They even have Slack integrations for things like IRC as well as we can pull over here. So if you look at MISech, the channel, the way this ties in, one of them is an IRC plugin. Now, unfortunately, some of that's getting deprecated. They're changing some of the protocols because they used on the back end an XMMP protocol and an IRC hook. So they're not supporting that. This does make me question a little bit where Slack's going. And what these are for was people who have third party integration set up. So you could just automatically use open protocols like XMPP and have your server talk to your particular Slack channel. I have a few development friends that use this. If they get any notices, they have a channel set up in Slack. You don't need an app for this while they will in the future. And what it would allow them to do is if there's a server notice that comes on for like they manage a hosting company, all the server notices and load notices can come into Slack. And it's a two-way street. They can actually initiate some diagnostics and query the servers with a back and forth. So I know they're changing some of the protocols to that, but there's some apps to fill in for that. But this is something else you can do. I mean, you can even get GitHub updates. Like I said, the app list is amazing. This is part of the reason people are very popular Slack. We actually don't use all these apps. Now, like I said, we're using a free tier, which gives you 10 for free. And we don't really have a whole lot of app integration, because mostly this is about communication for us. But if you want to dive deep into Slack, you can get real extensive of it. Now, here's Slack itself. And I'm going to have to blur some of this because we have client names there. And I'm always protective of not having clients names or cell phone numbers, which we can only get in there. And now, but I can at least kind of just give you an overview of how we use Slack. So we're in Slack. And right now I'm in, I'll go into my channel. And you can just paste information. Actually, I can probably show you what's in general right now. Let me look. Okay, I only got a blur at the top here. This is kind of what you may see in our daily thing. So it does say that someone approved a quote, little things that are in here that we got cards that came in, notices from people, little things. That's the best way to describe it. Then on the side here, I know I've got these blurred as well. But what's in here is all the different sub projects. So if we're working on a project that requires a lot of messaging back and forth, we create a channel for that project. And this allows us to kind of like, okay, all the little notices related to it, like parts coming in for an order that goes into like our wearing jobs one. So let me go down here. And it'll just be whether or not parts came in. And now this allows Corey, if he's on site, for example, when he's out of place, he's like, hey, I ran out of this. He can just throw a message in there about something he may need. And it becomes very simple. While my guys are on site, they're all in that Slack channel. And they can just throw the message in there. And the way you set up the channels is each person has their own channels they subscribe to. So you can add people to a channel. They probably have at least one channel that I'm not in. I discovered one of them. I don't mind they do this at random because I don't need to be in all of them. Because if not, I get notices for every channel I'm in. But what the staff can do is create their own channel, work on a project in there. I can see it if I want you. I can just turn off notifications for that channel. If I want to see part of it, but not have all of it in there. This makes it really handy to do a couple of our use cases though. And I can actually show you our random. And some of the use case here is allowing people to be very friendly in there. And we post memes in random. Nothing that's safe for work. That's why I can show you guys this. It's stupid things about Windows Update. This, I don't know, little things that we find amusing. Someone said this was a Ford Mustang. I know it's stupid. Here's a Windows Update one that was in here. You know, it's, these are the fun. This actually got a crack up out of this metal detector. And of course, the puns that go on there. Now you may notice, because I'm letting you see everything here, that I have Red Panda Express and Tom Lawrence Tech. I let people choose their names because part of our policy, and we know who these people are because we don't have a huge office, but making, allowing my staff to personalize this is also very helpful to letting them use it. So it kind of makes it a part of the environment we keep in here is easy, friendly, and allowing us to post the memes in here means that we spend more time in Slack communicating with each other versus other message. This gives us an easy way to consolidate all the data in one place. We can easily get notices. And this is an example that happens a lot. We get random voicemails where people don't think to leave their full name other than Bob calling, let Kyle know the thing works. And Kyle documents his job, but Kyle worked on several things during a day. So when a voicemail comes in after hours or before hours, with that, I will type Bob called said the thing to let you know the thing works. And Kyle go, oh, that's Bob so-and-so at such-and-such company. This is where Slack's really helpful for this. So when we get a voicemail or a message comes in because randomly they'll send it to me an email instead of to Kyle. People do weird things. If you work in IT at all, you know that. There's no consistency to the way humans behave. So those messages might end up in Slack so we can keep a workflow of what's going on without having to tie it to the specific project. And Kyle knows he could put to bed whatever open things he had related to that phone call. So it's really handy. It's also handy for things like when we dispatch our staff on places. Perfect example was yesterday. One job turned into three jobs. So Steve happened to be out at one location, another customer called while he was out. And we knew right where Steve was because we, you know, we were like, okay, we know he's here. He needs a thing. So we just go ahead and send him to the next job or like literally just down the streets of job and another one popped and it was right down the street from there. They were all within a mile of each other. So we just threw the message in Slack. Steve sees the messages. So instead of coming back to the shop, he looks at Slack messages when he's done with the job and goes to the next one. Same examples happen a lot where someone's on site and they go, hey, this computer needs something I don't have, you know, when they're on site and go, I need this part. If someone's in the area, they can jump in and say, oh, I got this part. Or we'll say, hey, we got someone heading that way. It kind of creates that ambient awareness. We post a lot of kind of what we're all doing even if we're doing it not specifically related to each other. This helps that ambient awareness of how things end up being related to each other. So it's kind of a really simple tool to use. It's free to sign up. I really like it and creating those different channels for things. We even have like a parts order channel. So if we just kind of think we want something we want to know what the others think of it, we go throw it in a parts order channel and say, like, hey, we think we need some more of these tools or that tool or this thing or that thing. And then we kind of can look at it. I'll review it because I can't have the final say on what new things we may purchase. But it becomes very handy for managing those things. It's not about inventory control for someone saying, but don't you have an inventory control system? Yeah, that's different than, hey, we've seen these type of adapters. Do you think we should have them in there? That's more of what the parts order is. Or it's specifically links. And that happens a lot. Last thing I'll show you is actually how you post in Slack. So I'm posting directly to my channel here. And so I can post things. This is a Google Drive one. So we were rewriting our Wi-Fi management part of our website. So here is the verbiage for this. And I can just click it, open it. I can actually add a comment directly to it because we use the Google Drive integration. There's a calendar integration option. This is what allows you to post code snippets. So if you go here, instead of just posting, so I'll post this as a test. And it's suffice about test wrong. So there's what it looks like to test something. People can just add a reaction, start a thread off of it. So you can actually thread into this. Blah. There's the first reply, another reply. And then you can break out the replies as you can see them coming over here. So it does support threading. So you can have like a conversation fork off of something or even right here. So if I jumped in a code comment and we do this a lot, people ask for a code comment for something or we're looking at how like we needed to send some, we are setting up our pages and we need some referral links. I just go ahead and go here and texture code snippet. And let me just pull another piece of code here. Some bash shell, give it a name, great snippet. And now you can do this. Now they can even edit this like a code snippet. And update it. It thinks it's in Perl, close enough, it's bash. But it so it automatically realizes some of it. It's not a full IDE, of course, but it kind of gets you the idea for how things work. It has the option to wrap things in there, save the changes. Yes, to scare the changes. And same thing, we can start adding comments to it. And you can see how this tears out for doing that. It's also kind of fun. You can set your little profile pictures. I pretend to know what's going on is my status with the little guy, because my way from no cheating, my status is always a need an adult. Like I said, we keep it fun. We keep it entertaining to keep us and actually move my face. You can see it says, yeah. And you can choose your little chat icons and things like that. In a meeting, need an adult, working remotely. It's got a lot of status options. So for bigger teams, maybe those become really relevant for us. We're a smaller team, so it's pretty straightforward, the statuses that we have on there. But this kind of gives you an idea for how Slack works. It's really simple. It's simplistic. It gets the job done for us. It's a great tool. The free tier is what we use. It's just an easy way for people to communicate. The phone app works just as well as this. So as immediate as I'm posting here, I'm getting notices that are coming in Slack for any of the jobs that come up or anything that my guys message. So that part works really, really well. So that is the big things. Like I said, I like the open source ones. I've tested them, but the phone apps forum were terrible. They just didn't send. They didn't receive very well. They were really, really inconsistent. And we've come to rely on this and because we're used to consistency. When we send a message, boom, the message's there. There's no delay. There's no wait. From the time we send it, it's second slider on their phone and the app doesn't consume some ton of bandwidth or battery. As a matter of fact, the app's really lightweight because we're mostly sending text on here. So it works great for all that. But this is part of our workflow. And like I said, people ask, how do you do in our office communications? Slack is our kind of go-to and it probably will be for a while. Google's got their thing coming out. I don't know where they're going with it. We'll see. I'm not holding my breath that Google's going to come up with a concise chat thing. But we'll wait and see. We'll see how that comes out because we already have G Suite. So it would be an easy no brainer for us to use it. But so far, Slack is pretty good. Does the trick for us. Go ahead and play with it. You can sign up for free. Like I said, see if you guys like it at your company. Thanks. Oh, if you like to come here, like, subscribe. We got affiliate links below if you want to help us out on a few things. And a Patreon.