Slack Shared Channels

The issue with the channels are the same than communicating over slack:<p>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

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&#x27;s been wonderful.

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

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

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.<p>We’ve helped a lot of companies, especially serious tech&#x2F;infrastructure companies, manage dozens of active channels with their most valuable customers. They also use it with internal-facing “escalation” channels to facilitate collaboration.<p>On the operational side it uses PagerDuty-like notifications, state management, open convo reminders, and webhook integrations.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;frame.ai&#x2F;frame-for-slack" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;frame.ai&#x2F;frame-for-slack</a>

I&#x27;m a Slack App developer (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;amixr.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;amixr.io</a> 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.<p>Shared Channels could make such experience of sharing channels between bot developers and users more common.

It seems to me that a) this is an inherent and long-standing feature of messaging systems that use open, free, and&#x2F;or federated protocols, b) it invites even more interruptions as you&#x27;re blending policies of two or more organisations, and lowest common denominator will likely &#x27;win&#x27;, c) you&#x27;re still stuck mapping any non-trivial issues raised in chat back onto a proper tracking system.<p>The suggestion that your knowledge &#x27;archive&#x27; is located in an off-site subscription service that&#x27;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?

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&#x27;s much more dangerous if you have business partners&#x2F;customers in the same chat system. Sending a message to the wrong email recipient is much less common in my experience.

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.

Note both slack accounts have to be on the paid plan. This isn&#x27;t mentioned anywhere but makes it much less useful than they are presenting it to be.

This feature is such a game-changer - I take the occasion to plug my own Slack app Smooz[<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smooz.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smooz.io</a>] 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<p>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&#x27;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

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.

I imagine over the years Slack has really made a dent in Gmail&#x27;s intra-organization messaging rate. Now cross organization is getting swallowed. Does Google care?

This feature is close to useless for me since the admin of the slack account has to “connect” the two teams&#x2F;domains&#x2F;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!

I think this is a great idea and I&#x27;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?

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&#x2F;Eikon&#x2F;Symphony for inter-firm chat but it’s hard to justify having more than a couple of these on any given desktop.

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

Looks like they&#x27;re finally available for enterprise grid customers too! Last time I checked it was only for standard plans.

We&#x27;ve been using this for months. Didn&#x27;t realize that Slack hadn&#x27;t officially released this till now.

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

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

&gt; Using a shared channel, when the junior auditors start, they see a full history of prior work.<p>Well a full history of prior chat and giphy memes. Meanwhile I&#x27;ll be reviewing past Jira sprints.

WHERE IS THE DARK MODE SLACK ????!