Slack vs. EN Work Chat

[adamdwright 43]

Downloaded 'Slack' yesterday, an app that went public this past February (2014) and already has a valuation of over a billion. 

See this for reference/context: http://www.cnbc.com/id/102138343#.

 

Has anyone experimented with it?  Would love to hear your thoughts.  I've only been toying w/ Slack for a day or so, but here are my thoughts regarding when I think I'll use EN Work Chat vs. when I think I'll use Slack --

 

EN WORK CHAT --

Share notes from a call that happened.

Share a written work (outline, synopsis, short story, etc).

Share meeting notes.

No desire to engage in small talk with colleagues... only feel like it's there for me to 'share' a written work / notes " ".

 

 

SLACK -- 

Discuss a project's next steps w/ team or colleague.

Desire to engage in office gossip / small talk / sharing funny pictures, etc.

More social-feeling than EN work-chat, which has more of a work or die feel.

 

Conclusion: I don't feel like one app replaces the other, and I'll enjoy using both.

 

Would love others' thoughts...

[gazumped 11,709]

Don't quite see what all the fuss is about with EN Chat or Slack - I already have half a dozen different chat routes from social media down to Skype - which also makes 'phone calls to those fortunate people who don't sit in front of a screen all day.  And a sizeable chunk of my life involves folk who work on the phone,  not on a keyboard.  I'll probably use it if I have to as in someone says "Let's chat! - I use xxx!".  To which my answer is inevitably - "I guess now I do too..."  After which the app gathers dust in a corner until the next time..

[Frank.dg 1,385]

I wonder if Slack will get around to using the Evernote API to integrate, like it does with Dropbox, Google drive and hundreds of other apps. Now that would go against the Work Chat grain. I wonder if Evernote would ever showcase them in the Evernote App Center if there were an integration. 

[chirmer 567]

Unf I love Slack. It's really nailed how to have a conversation with coworkers online. I use Skype for one side project and I DESPISE IT. The Mac app is buggy, and if you're in 12-15 group chats like I was, it's just unmanageable. Slack totally nails this, and its integrations are wonderful. I do find that it's a pain to not have Evernote integrated, but we tend to still discuss over Slack versus use Work Chat. I think if Slack hadn't become a thing, we'd definitely use Work Chat... but Slack is the king in the market and it renders a lot of what Work Chat does as useless. IMHO, of course.

[sp99drac9r 5]

Our team started using Slack recently and I'm with @chirmer, it's an amazing collaboration tool. I've also been a heavy Evernote user for a long time, so I often find myself really wishing that the Evernote/Slack integration were there. 

 

So many startups are out there pushing work chat, and somehow Slack has managed to nail it. Existence proof that even in a very crowded field, there's room for a truly excellent design to dominate. 

 

I'm afraid the EN work chat didn't hit the mark. Instead of wading into the workforce chat space, I wish they had fixed some of the fundamental flaws with their note sharing model and brought it up to par with the equivalents from Dropbox and Google Drive. 

[Frank Meeuwsen 9]

By coincedence I started working on a project in Slack and one in Work Chat. I have to be honest, Slack is killing it. Work Chat is too cumbersome to work with. Especially when working with text-edits, an article in progress, banners, video. To first find some way of giving comments on notes and documents and then trying to find the right notes at the right time. It is strange you can't add a Work Chat note to a notebook or tag-collection. That way I have to constantly think in a meeting: Is it in workchat or in my notebooks?

In Slack, chat and collaboration feels more natural and straightforward. It misses the robust document/filing system from Evernote but somehow, it just works more naturally. The search in chat and the way channels, private groups and integrations with third parties work is just great.

What happened today: When I was on the road I got two notifications on my iPhone. One from Work Chat and one from Slack. The Slack notification gave me a followup which was just there in the Slack app, like you expect. But with Work Chat, the notifcation opened the iOS app and it first had to synchronize before it would show up. But it didn't. Maybe it was a bad network, but I couldn't get the Work Chat messages until I got home. Ofcourse, this may be a technical issue beyond Evernote's control, I understand. But from an average consumer/businessworker standpoint, this breaks trust in the notification and the way Evernote works. That's bad. 

 

I'd love to see a next iteration of Work Chat or at least a better collaboration between Slack and Evernote, other that the possibilities from Zapier.com and IFTTT.com. Or maybe Evernote should make decisions in focus for their own products...

[ahmed younes 2]

you know guys after trying this Slack .. really i wish that evernote buy it one day it will be universal workplace .. 

i was using trello long time ago and it was good but not ideal for business waste time .. and the developer seems busy to focus on it . 

 

Main advantages of Slack like services is to provide daily essential chat we already do for example : 

Whatsapp , which is not recorded unsearchable only for announcement and general chat between co-workers .

Emails , which already overwhelmed with tons of mails and there is no space for chatting on mail . 

 

so providing chat service with ability to share docs on it and everything there is searchable !! 

 

its Awesome !!

 

Regards 

[chinarut 29]

hey everyone!  glad I stumbled into this thread - just starting to evaluate Slack again (yes I've been slackin! lol)

 

First, for the record, I have a particular perspective of "note-driven chats" that Work Chat implements - I don't think Work Chat is just meant for vanilla "chatter"

 

My biggest gripe of both platforms is the lack of threaded conversations - good news is apparently the feature is up the pipe and given the design decisions that need to be made, it's no surprise it's taking them a long time to implement (many of us know the mess Google Wave was and I've had mixed results with Rizzoma, a successor that does a better job at tasks and plays around with the notion of "conversation maps" (but misses the mark usability-wise))

 

Has anyone made any head way simulating sharing notes in Slack like the way it works in Work Chat?

 

I found a IFTTT integration and the issue is it shares *every* note - it would be nice if it were triggered by a tag perhaps.

 

Anyone find a way to easily share selective notes in Slack?

 

I, too, look forward to a formal integration allowing me to attach notes to my Slack channels

[Norm_R 0]

Our small company has been using Work Chat as an integrated part of our processes.  We are bought into using Evernote Business and I feel have some serious power users in our organization.  EN Work Chat has been a little clunky, but we've been using it more and more and it's been effective.  Now, with what seems like the imminent demise of EN Work Chat, we are exploring using Slack.  I'm glad to see all of the useful comments in this thread.  Does anyone know what Evernote's plan is going forward for integrating chat with 3rd Party Apps like Slack?  It would be helpful to share a note or notebook in Slack and then spawn the note or notebook in the EN native app on our desktop (OS) and apps (iOS and Android).

[phils 220]

First off, I would not assume "the imminent demise of Work Chat".  I'm guessing you're saying that based on the comment that their CEO made in his recent interview.  I don't have any specific info, but I would just caution against drawing any big conclusions based on one comment in an interview.

That being said, I also think it's fair to assume that they are looking into how they might play with Slack and other chat apps.  However, they have a policy of not discussing future plans, so there's really no way to answer your question as to what they're planning in this area.