About a year ago, my group at Redgate Software adopted Slack as a way of communicating with each other. Slack has become very popular with development teams, and is used extensively in many companies, including my own. At first I liked this tool, which allows some real time communications, but also some tagging and notifications if someone messages you. However, over time, I find it less useful. Perhaps the seven hour time difference accounts for some of that.

However plenty of people have found various ways to integrate Slack into their development process. Everything from build failures to successful deployments to mentions on Twitter. I'm not sure of the value of these myself, but I can understand that grabbing messages and centralizing them in a channel can provide value. Personally I still prefer to work through email, which gives me a nice, asynchronous, disconnected, comfortable tool.

The other day someone asked me if we would think about integrating parts of SQLServerCentral with Slack. I wasn't sure there was value, but then I thought, perhaps some people would like a channel with interesting or hot threads in the forums, or mentions of articles. Certainly many people like different mediums of communication, so why not Slack?

It wouldn't be for me, but I do wonder how many of you are using Slack and would want to to add in a new channel. Or a few channels. Maybe you'd like one with the Question of the Day and interesting notes from the discussion. Since Slack can work across companies and accounts, we certainly could open things up to you.

Let us know today what you think of Slack and would you like any integration with the tool. How would you use it?

Note: If you are looking for ideas for Slack integration, check out this piece from WPCurve.