
Slack Shared Channels - sunils34
https://slackhq.com/slack-shared-channels
======
polote
The issue with the channels are the same than communicating over slack:

You customers are feeling like they can ask any question and get an answer in
1 minute, and if you dont answer them straight away then they are unhappy.
Definitively not something I recommend

~~~
raulk
Don’t blame the tool for mismanaged expectations.

~~~
skyyler
If the tool is presented as an instant messenger, people often get upset when
responses aren't instant.

~~~
davnicwil
This is spot on. You should blame the tool for mismanaged expectations if the
tool inherently sets the expectations.

I'm just trying to imagine ways you could use slack and not set an expectation
of having someone online to chat to. Use a bot to resond with "we'll get back
to you when we can"? There's no option that doesn't feel like an incredibly
frustrating experience for the user.

~~~
skyyler
No matter how you look at it, if you can't reply in under a few minutes, you
shouldn't be presenting your support as a chat. Just use email.

~~~
fivre
Other support chat tools have solved this for quite some time with a queue and
display of estimated waiting time. You may not get an initial response
immediately, but once an agent becomes available they're assigned the chat and
do communicate synchronously.

In comparison, Slack has no way to indicate that an agent is already working
with someone else in another channel, nor any good way to assign a specific
owner--customer questions are dumped into a channel with X support agents as
members, one of whom will hopefully respond.

------
tomphoolery
Our whole company has relied on this for the past few months in order to
communicate with some of our clients, rather than invite them into our private
Slack. It's been wonderful.

~~~
nickfromseattle
How do you communicate about things related to the project, but doesn't need
to have the client involved in? Do you have a separate internal channel per
client?

~~~
merlincorey
My company has this, and I highly recommend it in general for security and
data loss prevention purposes.

Any channel that may have external to the company users must have `-ext` at
the end of the name and there should also be a non `-ext` channel for internal
discussion that relates.

This ends up working really well because the channels sort together next to
each other and you can tell very clearly from the name if you are talking
"publicly" or not.

~~~
jrockway
I feel like they should just have different themes for private and public
channels. That way, you know at a glance!

~~~
SEJeff
In the shared channels it says right above the text input: `foo is in this
channel` (with their logo) where `foo` is the name of the other company.

It makes it really obvious at a glance before you type into the textbox.

------
toddmorey
“New people coming into a project can readily access a project’s archive,
allowing them to ramp up swiftly.”

How many people have ramped up quickly by reading the chat history of a
channel? That’s not documentation—instead it’s like a really bad screenplay. I
hate digging through channel history as I join and kinda resent the
expectation that I’m supposed to do that.

~~~
cfors
Unfortunately Slack is where documentation goes to die. When I face a weird
internal issue the first thing I do is search:

> in:@<channel> <error>

You would be amazed at how much unofficially documented stuff is sitting in
Slack. It is unfortunate but paying attention to the right Slack channels at
work can be very important in understanding company strategies and decision
making, as well as random tidbits on architecture decisions.

Of course I would prefer official documentation but sometimes you gotta make
do.

~~~
xenadu02
The alternative in most cases is _no documentation at all_. It's not like
people would go spend two hours writing up documentation if Slack didn't
exist.

~~~
tim58
In large teams it's worth the reduction in 'code velocity' to have engineers
document what they are building.

I specifically make efforts, and encourage others to do the same, to keep most
documentation outside of slack. Do you have a question about a ticket? Ask it
in a comment not slack. Do you have a question about how our system works? Ask
it in the private Stack Overflow. Want to advertise a cool new internal
service we can use? Great tell everyone in slack, but also add it to
swaggerhub.

------
Operyl
It was beta before today? These channels have been a thing for forever, I
assumed it was already GA.

~~~
matdehaast
Had the same thought. We have had it at our company for almost a year and I
just thought it was a feature of Slack..

~~~
AdamJacobMuller
I have to wonder what "beta" or "moved out of beta" in this context means.

I suspect this announcement was just "oops we forgot to move this feature out
of beta, lets announce that its GA"

------
robbiemitchell
This is a handy time to mention that my employer makes a Slack app for shared
channels that provides support-like operational assistance and analytics.

We’ve helped a lot of companies, especially serious tech/infrastructure
companies, manage dozens of active channels with their most valuable
customers. They also use it with internal-facing “escalation” channels to
facilitate collaboration.

On the operational side it uses PagerDuty-like notifications, state
management, open convo reminders, and webhook integrations.

[https://frame.ai/frame-for-slack](https://frame.ai/frame-for-slack)

------
motakuk
I'm a Slack App developer ([http://amixr.io](http://amixr.io) incident
management), we have a client who added us to their Slack and it changed a
lot. Seeing how users collaborate with your app (and next to your app) gives
us a lot of insights.

Shared Channels could make such experience of sharing channels between bot
developers and users more common.

------
Jedd
It seems to me that a) this is an inherent and long-standing feature of
messaging systems that use open, free, and/or federated protocols, b) it
invites even more interruptions as you're blending policies of two or more
organisations, and lowest common denominator will likely 'win', c) you're
still stuck mapping any non-trivial issues raised in chat back onto a proper
tracking system.

The suggestion that your knowledge 'archive' is located in an off-site
subscription service that's not indexed with the rest of your institutional
knowledge systems, and likely with a poor signal:noise ratio, is worrisome. Do
some organisations actually work this way?

------
usr1106
Certainly this has its benefits. But how often does it happen that someone
types (especially pastes) something into the wrong channel erroneously? Not
that uncommon in my experience. That's much more dangerous if you have
business partners/customers in the same chat system. Sending a message to the
wrong email recipient is much less common in my experience.

~~~
tptacek
The people that use this feature would generally have two Slacks open anyways,
which already presents the same risk.

------
crtlaltdel
i have used shared channels to coordinate with outside contractors. not having
to add every single contractor as a guest to a channel was a major win for me.
each of their orgs already had a slack setup.

------
igornadj
Note both slack accounts have to be on the paid plan. This isn't mentioned
anywhere but makes it much less useful than they are presenting it to be.

~~~
biot
Third paragraph:

> It’s officially out of beta today and available for all paid plans.

------
donmatito
This feature is such a game-changer - I take the occasion to plug my own Slack
app Smooz[[https://www.smooz.io](https://www.smooz.io)] which does the same
thing, creating shared channels, even if it will probably be replaced by Slack
native feature when they extend it to free plans

When it came out, it was really a big deal for our users, so I can understand
why Slack worked so hard to add this feature. The engineering description is
fascinating. Also, while it's never fun to see your app being taken over by
the platform, I must stress that Slack API team was very fair and gave me a
heads-up far, far ahead of release

------
stormtv
I love using discord for my open-source projects as I feel that the individual
role and channel permissions are a little more powerful. I wish Slack adopted
this full customization permission ability into their software.

~~~
nickstinemates
Hard to imagine using Discord for open source projects, but this is likely all
marketing/branding association for me.

That said, I can see the appeal. Definitely one of my favorite pieces of
software these days.

~~~
jayflux
Rust and React are on Discord, you should check them out, seems to work pretty
well

------
ohnope
I imagine over the years Slack has really made a dent in Gmail's intra-
organization messaging rate. Now cross organization is getting swallowed. Does
Google care?

------
daniel_iversen
This feature is close to useless for me since the admin of the slack account
has to “connect” the two teams/domains/whatever - how does that enable free
and ad-hoc collaboration in a medium-to-large organisation??? I’m used to
tools like Dropbox, email, Asana, G-suite where you can mostly just
collaborate with whomever you want around the world. I think slack is missing
a huge opportunity by keeping it so locked down!

~~~
robbiemitchell
Keeping it locked down is how they keep enterprise security teams happy, and
selling to enterprises is how they make a lot of money.

~~~
daniel_iversen
..and that's how rogue use of other tools start and how "shadow IT" became a
thing :-) .. these super locked down systems become "security theatre" and
create a false sense of amazing data governance and buttoned up security.

------
justinhj
I think this is a great idea and I'm biased because I came up with the same
idea when brainstorming Slack new features in a job interview. One thing that
concerns me about it is the amount of confidential information that people
bandy about on their corporate Slack that could accidentally be leaked to a
shared channel. Is that something that comes in practice?

------
andylynch
This is new? I assumed Slack would already have had this for some time. What’s
their story around security and compliance? - it’s good to see another choice
emerging alongside Bloomberg/Eikon/Symphony for inter-firm chat but it’s hard
to justify having more than a couple of these on any given desktop.

------
rogerdonut
I like shared channels quite a bit and have been using them for several
months. Unfortunately it seems that "user groups" do not seem to work with
them yet. (i.e. add a group to a shared channel and the users are not auto-
joined)

------
arcdigital
Looks like they're finally available for enterprise grid customers too! Last
time I checked it was only for standard plans.

~~~
arusahni
Strange - I was using Shared Channels on an enterprise grid plan over a year
ago...

~~~
robbiemitchell
For a long time you could use them within a grid, but not between a grid and
the outside world.

------
shamir
We've been using this for months. Didn't realize that Slack hadn't officially
released this till now.

------
Yhippa
This seems like a security issue waiting to happen. My guess is these channels
will have to be highly monitored.

------
dbg31415
Aren’t these like a year old now? Feels like we’ve been using them forever.

------
tus88
> Using a shared channel, when the junior auditors start, they see a full
> history of prior work.

Well a full history of prior chat and giphy memes. Meanwhile I'll be reviewing
past Jira sprints.

------
reportgunner
WHERE IS THE DARK MODE SLACK ????!

~~~
ascorbic
[https://slackhq.com/dark-mode-for-slack-desktop](https://slackhq.com/dark-
mode-for-slack-desktop)

~~~
reportgunner
Cheers I honestly did not know. I opened a support ticket last month and I was
told that "it's coming" and they closed my ticket.

~~~
ascorbic
Yeah, it was released last week

