I prefer Slack over email... coming from using Outlook for 20+ years in a corporate environment, slack is light years beyond email in rich communication.
I'm trying to think of 1 single thing email does better than slack in a corporate communication.
Is slack perfect? Absolutely not. I don't care that I can't use any client I want or any back end administration costs or hurdles. As a user, there is no comparison.
Real time chat environments are not conducive to long form communication. I've never been a part of an organization that does long form communication well on slack. You can call it a boundary issue - it doesn't really matter how you categorize the problem, it's definitely a change from email.
Regarding #4, I can't turn off my online/offline indicator, I can only go online or offline. I can't even set the time it takes to go idle. These are intentionally not configurable in slack. I have no desire to have a real time status indicator in the tool I use to communicate with coworkers.
I absolutely loathe it but I respect that many like it. Personally I think Zullip or Discourse are a better solutions since they provides similar interface to Slack but still have email integration so people like me who prefer email can use that.
The thing I hate the most is that people expect to only use Slack for everything, even where it doesn't make sense. So they will miss notifications for Notion, Google Doc, Calendar, Github, because they don't have proper email notifications set up. The plugins for Slack are nowhere near as good as email notifications as they just get drowned out in the noise.
And with all communication taking place in Slack, remembering what was decided on with a certain issue becomes impossible because finding anything on Slack is impossible.
But no better than email again. You just get notified if you have a email or not [depending on the client you're forced to use]. I have many email rules that just filter out nonsense from github, google and others so my inbox stays clean.
> But no better than email again. You just get notified if you have a email or not [depending on the client you're forced to use]. I have many email rules that just filter out nonsense from github, google and others so my inbox stays clean.
I guess I find them useful because that way I get all my notifications across all channels in one spot if you set them up properly. Github and google docs also allow you to reply directly within the email, so I don't even need to open up website.
In Slack the way it was setup was global, so I got notified for any update even if it didn't concern me.
I'm trying to think of 1 single thing email does better than slack in a corporate communication.
Is slack perfect? Absolutely not. I don't care that I can't use any client I want or any back end administration costs or hurdles. As a user, there is no comparison.