Cool Tech Tools: Boost Team Collaboration with Slack

Slack is a relatively new collaboration tool that is designed to cut down on emails among team members and boost productivity.  It provides messaging by topic or channel so that threads of communication can be streamlined and accessed easily.

Slack is a searchable messaging portal that allows document sharing from a team member’s computer or integrated apps such as Google Drive, DropBox and more.  Slack has 300,000 paid accounts and 1.1 million active users per day.  There is a free option.

Once all your team members are in Slack, they can create channels and have conversations within the channels.  Channels can be organized in any way you want, such as by:

• Departments
• Projects
• Clients
• Locations
• Trips
• Office talk

Channels can be made public within your team or private.

You can also direct-message anyone else in the group so two or more team members can have a private talk. Conversations can be followed on any device – computer, tablet, and phone.

You can add documents to the message stream so team members can review and make comments.  These documents can come from your local computer or one of the 900 integrated apps.  And the messages are searchable to boost efficiency.

If you’re looking for a tool that reduces the number of emails across team members, try out Slack at slack.com.