Slack Goes After Email With 'Connect DM' -- Opening Up Chats With Folks Outside Your Company (thenextweb.com) 31
An anonymous reader shares a report: Slack is useful to connect with your teammates and avoid sending them emails for things that can be discussed quickly through a chat. However, to talk to a person from a client or partner organization whom you interact with regularly, you'd need to email them and maybe even schedule a meeting or call them to check a trivial detail. Now, Slack is solving that problem by introducing a new feature called Connect DMs that'll let you chat with someone from outside your organization through just a few clicks. This sounds like an email but in a chat format. In June, the company introduced Slack Connect, a way for multiple companies to have a joint slack channel. It said that over 56,000 organizations have been using this feature after the launch, and Slack Connect DM is the next step of that. The implementation is easy: you generate a link for starting Slack Connect DM and send it to your contact. Once they accept the invitation, you can chat with them directly in Slack. Plus, you will have control to revoke access at any time.
If it's a trivial detail (Score:5, Insightful)
Then I don't see the value to me in interrupting my current project RIGHT NOW just so you can ask me the question. Send it in an email, I'll see it during my scheduled check and will get the answer to you.
If it's not trivial, it's better for both of us to schedule a time when we can focus on it (and prepare beforehand) rather than "oh, yeah, I'll need to look into A and B before I can give you a definitive answer".
Not that it's any surprise, but - this is the analog of Facebook Messenger. It's a new tool whose only value is to replace already existing, mature, standards-based tools for the single purpose of keeping you inside some proprietary ecosystem.
Re:If it's a trivial detail (Score:4)
Then I don't see the value to me in interrupting my current project RIGHT NOW just so you can ask me the question. Send it in an email, I'll see it during my scheduled check and will get the answer to you.
Even if it's not trivial, my time is more valuable to me than yours. Send me an email; I'll either write back or call you as my schedule permits or suggest a time to talk so it can be scheduled. (Your emergency isn't necessarily my emergency.) I think this push to replace email with more immediate things comes from people with a texting mentality, wanting attention now. Email is a better, and more respectful, format that acknowledges you understand the other person's time is valuable.
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Indeed. Nothing worst than a phone call, which basically says "you must stop doing whatever you're doing right now and talk to me immediately". Even if you let it go to voice mail, some people hang up and call again, on the off chance that you'll reply a second call. Most people will of course answer, because calling twice in a row usually means a real emergency, life-or-death type of thing.
Texting is in-between email and phone calls, but it depends a lot on the person sending the first message. Some people
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You don't have to respond to a message immediately any more than you do an email, if you're busy then ignore the message until you have time. A message is just less formal and quicker to send (although this is due to the way clients are implemented rather than the underlying technology).
It's phonecalls which generate interruptions, as they demand your attention RIGHT NOW...
What greatly annoys me, is companies that insist on only having realtime communication platforms - especially for customer service, so y
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Extra steps? Great, now I need to buy a Fitbit just to reply to messages.
Worrisome. (Score:3)
Yeah, this sounds like a terrible idea.
Email is decentralized and an open standard. Sure, a given provider might have it's services centralized, but ultimately anyone could program their own email server.
I can choose whether I want to use gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail, or a huge number of tiny email providers, or just host my own email server. I have actual choices here. Sure, there's a measure of lockin once I make my choice, but I can choose.
This is NOT true for slack. Everything will be slack. You piss slack off and they decide to blacklist you? Fuck you, no communications for you.
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At one time, yes. Now however, if your email server is not one of the big providers, you will not be on the white list and will struggle to get through most spam filters. But at least with an open standard, you have a choice of providers (an oligopoly is better than a monopoly).
Re: Worrisome. (Score:2)
Not true. I'm running my own email server for ~15 years now. It's been essentially an out-of-the-debian-box exim4, and I eventually switched to a kind of vanilla postfix about 5 years back. No trouble worth speaking of, one or the other mail to blacklist providers to please unblock me when I occasionally fsck up my config and leave an open relay (happened to me twice I n 15 years).
I was also managing the IT, respectively the IT teams, for several small companies (yearly turnover in the lower millions). Same
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I run my own email server and have for a couple of decades. No issues with deliverability.
fuck outta here. (Score:2)
thanks for the AD!
You've got new e-mail! (Score:1)
Mess (Score:3)
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I am forced by ${WORKPLACE} to use Slack. I will not use the Slack client or a browser... just... no.
I use matterircd [github.com] which lets me use Slack from within an IRC client, the way the gods intended chat to work!
Re-Invent ALL the things! Badly. (Score:5, Funny)
Using 100GB of RAM to display 2kB of text. Slowly.
Because we are the NiH crowd! We're afraid if we're not bathing in framworks. If it isn't at least three platforms on top of each other, it doesn't exist!
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The UX of IRC combined with the efficiency of stand-alone JavaScript. What could go wrong?
Email key advantage. (Score:5, Insightful)
My Work We use Outlook 360, A Partner uses Google Suites, There are other partners using their Own Exchange Emails servers, others are Using Unix Sendmail.
I can send and receive emails using an Old Console Application like Pine or Elm, Or the latest GUI email clients.
The big advantage of Email is that is it is an Open Protocol Standard, Not tied to any organization, or centralized groups of servers. We are not stuck on any email service provider for our email, we can change them.
Slack chat means you need to work with Slack, if Slack goes out of business, or a major hack. You are stuck.
This is why Email with all its flaws is still around. While we have been switching Direct Messaging Clients every 5-6 years.
Re:Email key advantage. (Score:5, Insightful)
The big advantage of Email is that is it is an Open Protocol Standard, Not tied to any organization, or centralized groups of servers.
Well that may be an advantage to YOU, and to the people you are communicating with... but won't you spare a thought for those poor Slack executives and their VC backers?
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There is an open standard for messaging too - XMPP (aka jabber), but the big providers don't support it as they want to lock you in.
Errrm, ... No it doesn't. (Score:2)
E-Mail is a service from before the internet. It's like 60 years old or something. You could probably run it without much hassle on a handheld computer from the late 80ies. Despite being a shit protocol from the steam age of computing it is still around and in widespread use. And actually, believe it or not, for some very, very good reasons.
No effing way is some commercial proprietary web-centric sad-and-sorry IRC rippoff going to even get close to replacing email.
What does this have to do with email? (Score:2)
Chat threads are not the same thing as email.
Email is somewhat more formal and is less time-sensitive than chats.
Email is expected to express an entire though in one message; chats express thoughts bit by bit.
Email can be sent and received using whatever software you like, using whatever server you like, as long as they support standardized protocols.
So now I can chat with someone outside my group. Other chat systems like Skype and Teams can do this already. Slack is just trying to play catch-up with other
So... I get an email witha link in it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Slack?! (Score:2)
Are they still going? Jesus.
So, you generate a link? (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me get this straight... you generate a link, that you then send to your contact.
How do you send the link? Oh, right. Probably via email. So why not just email in the first place, FFS?
Fill out a support ticket. (Score:2)
Unless I am on-site at your customer location, engaged in doing a project on-site for you, then I won't be accepting any chat apps from you. Only if I am on such a perma-loan project to you, where effectively I'm your onsite contractor, will that do. Otherwise, you fill out a support ticket online, or call our support number and go through all the necessary motions to engage us, at the correct levels of response.
Emails are fine, if you're just asking a question... but if you are requesting service of any