Introduction

Slack fills an awkward gap in modern business and social-team communications by combining informal chat, private messaging, file transfer, and a collective memory of what’s taken place.

It lets you create a public focus around a topic—a dedicated conversation space called a channel—as well as create purely private discussions as needed. You can upload images, add formatted text, and link in third-party cloud services.

Using Slack can sometimes feel a little like a group text chat, but with nested discussions (threads), channel and workspace-wide search, and integration of third-party apps, it’s far more powerful and useful. It excels as a single repository of the wisdom (and data) of a group.

Other tools and ecosystems exist that manage part of that ball of wax or cover the same territory and more—often adding “wiki” features for collaborative editing and website publishing for internal projects. But Slack’s particular set of choices, including a robust free tier of service and support across major platforms and the web, seems to have fit the need best for many millions of people.

Or at least, it fit best in the opinions of the hundreds of thousands of folks who chose Slack for a personal, professional, or social purpose, and set it up and asked millions of other people to join.

Therein lies the rub for many Slack users: we didn’t choose to use Slack, but we’re required to in order to participate in the interactions necessary for a full-time job, a contract position, a sports team, or a high-school “friends of the band” parental support group.

This book is for a few different kinds of people:

• If Slack is a requirement for your workplace, nonprofit group, or other organization, I want to help you learn enough to take the frustration out of it.

• If you use Slack already and want to get more out of it, this book will guide you to more efficient and more sophisticated use and control.

• Finally, if you’re interested in or tempted by Slack, this book will help you get started.

Many more Slack groups rely on the company’s free tier than any of Slack’s paid subscription offerings. The free tier has a number of limitations, but it’s quite remarkable in its own right. In this book, I always highlight differences between what you will find if you’re in a workspace that isn’t paying to use Slack and one that is, including what’s available at the several tiers of paid subscriptions.