We’re leaving Skype behind….
Recently our team made the switch from utilizing Skype for our inter-office communications. Skype has been a staple for BrandCo since the beginning. It was an amazingly reliable chat provider, but there comes a time when you need to start getting creative with what your team has at it’s fingertips.
However, over the past month or so, we have been testing out the use of a chat program called Slack 
within the development team. Slack is a messaging app for teams: everything in one place, instantly searchable. When needing to inform multiple members, or the whole office about certain things, we are able to notify an entire channel rather than having to make a new chat with everyone in it over and over. You are able to search your channels, pin important information. Not to mention, the team is loving the integration of a fun plugin called Giphy, providing endless amusement with randomized gifs inserted into our conversations.
There are so many added benefits to the messaging system such a Slack that we’re just barely even scratching the surface with our every day usage. While we have had fun implementing the Giphy attachment, we have also included the ability for Slack to keep us up to date on our Trello boards, as well. Trello is a collaboration tool that organized your projects into boards. We use this tool with many of our major processes here at BrandCo. But, the buck doesn’t stop there! Slack has over 80 integrations that you can implement into their system.
Always in motion, our members stay in contact outside of work, as well. Especially when trade show time is in action! The mobile application for Slack is sleek and easy to use. Unlike Skype, it isn’t power hungry and difficult to shut down (at least on my Android). The application for Slack is also available for download to desktop, as well as can be run web-based.
Last but not least, it’s SAFE! All the data that passes through our regular communications is secured by encryption (256-bit AES and TLS 1.2). Now, if you don’t know what that means, it simply means that if our Slack network was hacked, all of our information would look like a bunch of gobbledy-gook to the hackers and all our information remains OUR information.
All in all, it was rather bitter sweet to delete Skype from my phone and from the my Mac’s doc, but Slack is just another necessary innovation to add to our growing team. Another amazing new piece of technology to leverage our team work and growth off of.