[ethbro]

The benefit I've found is in cross-team communication.

Specifically of the "I need to reach out to this team I don't know about their product" variety.

A) If they interact with Slack, I can search previous answers

B) It promotes a culture of openness. Huge benefit in some orgs! We talk about our projects, warts and all, in public channels. If all your org channels are private, you're definitely Doing It Wrong

C) It's far more scalable than ticketing. Issues can be resolved in three lines of text, rather than ticket creation, queue, assignment, closing, etc.

As an above commenter noted though, you can and should push back on expectations of constant availability. Slack is asynchronous, not for initiating hi-pri issues.

[Jedd]

> Slack is asynchronous.

You are describing a proprietary, expensive, intrusive, demanding rewrite of SMTP.

[StavrosK]

I very much like Zulip, it's open source and much closer to email, even culturally. It encourages long-form replies and messages with subjects, so it requires at least a tiny amount of thought before you start talking to someone. I think it's a great cross between Slack and email.

[ethbro]

Just looked at it.

What keeps Zulip threads from exploding in practice? Either on the UI or usage side?

E.g. How to I keep from going from "One channel with a hundred unread messages" to "One channel with twenty unread threads"?

Also, what features exist when a thread diverges from the original topic?

E.g. We were talking about the "afternoon lunch" at the "annual meeting", and then someone mentioned their favorite restaurants in the area, and now people are replying to both?

Organization seems more like a usage problem than a technology problem. Or at least one that I can't see manual categorization solving.

[tabbott]

The point is that it's a lot faster to process 20 unread threads with 100 messages than 100 unread messages, because they're nicely grouped. E.g. you can skip reading the 30 messages in the thread about "afternoon lunch", without having to look at those messages (as you would with slack if you wanted to find out that the 'annual meeting' announcement happened).

For diverging topics, you can easily edit the topics of the messages that are a diversion to be a new topic. This helps a huge amount when you have new users who haven't learned the convention of creating a new topic when bringing up something unrelated, since anyone can clean it up in a few seconds.

[ebiester]

The protocol isn't the issue.

It's like SMTP, if nearly every conversation went to list-all and our email clients were designed to intelligently allow us to choose what sub-section of the thousands of messages a day are important to us.

Or, like we already knew, it's an expensive, intrusive, proprietary upgrade of IRC.

[ethbro]

This is the Slack vs Jabber/XMPP debate. Pro and cons for each side.

But Slack is certainly easier to install and use (by being centralized).

[grogenaut]

Don't forget mailman + elastic search.

[Agathos]

> It's far more scalable than ticketing. Issues can be resolved in three lines of text, rather than ticket creation, queue, assignment, closing, etc.

My experience has been that it goes on for thirty or three hundred lines of problem report -> steps to reproduce -> troubleshooting -> proposed solution -> etc. Two days later someone else gets pulled in so they look at a Jira ticket with an empty description and zero comments...

[ethbro]

It's a balance.

At some point, a channel should be created for the issue (if long lived) or Slack conversations transplanted onto a ticket.

On the other hand, I've had an equal number of times where ticket formalism led to a misunderstanding, someone on another team taking an incorrect action, and a couple weeks to get resolved.

Work that could have been saved with 10 minutes of direct communication.

Or the dreaded hot potato ticket that out of misunderstanding / laziness gets reassigned to different teams, until a week passes without any actual work done.

So, I guess the optimal solution is to know what each tool is good and bad at, and let those guide actions and policies.