Right at the end of the latest livestream about UT/VR/Blueprints I heard Dana mention an “update from our Slack channel…” and I assume she was talking about http://slack.com.
Interesting tool by a company called Tiny Speck. I have a lot of respect for them because of their prior project Glitch. They went from making a heavily social browser-based MMO to a productivity tool for business. A strange transition, but ultimately both were about getting people to interact so there is some crossover.
I’m curious if anyone from Epic (or anyone else for that matter!) can comment on if/how they use Slack. I used it for a bit with our development team but ultimately stopped because it created Yet Another Communication Channel. If you use it to completely replace internal email and messaging I think it could be awesome, but I imagine most companies aren’t agile enough to make that jump.
We actually do use Slack, we have been experimenting with it because lots of us work in different places, and it helps get things going irt. Not sure if we’ll stay with it, but so far we really like it.
I like the ability of it to notify me of key words. So I can set a key word and then I get an email notification anytime there are others talking about that.
It hasn’t replaced email by any means, but it has been super useful on projects where folks are distributed all over (be it all over the building or all over the world in some cases.) The smaller and more focused the group/project the better results I have seen with it.
I could see a small dedicated group moving away from email altogether with it, but yes, there is a leap to get there if you have relied primarily on email for so long. This is something that has definitely come a few times in discussions, and I think will continue to pop-up. =)