If you haven’t been living under a rock or locked in an underground bunker since Y2K, you’ve heard of Slack.
More than likely, you’re a user. This incredible product has seen exponential growth as companies of all sizes have adopted it as their communication platform of choice.
However, we at Sococo thought it could be even better, so we embarked on a project to integrate our platform with Slack.
Sococo fans know that this digital workplace addresses the challenge of not having everyone in the same physical place all the time. Whether you have a different office location, are out of the office on a frequent basis, use flexible working or are even a remote worker, it no longer matters. Sococo equips teams of all types and sizes with the capabilities to dynamically and spontaneously engage with your colleagues, when you need to, as it they were sitting right next to you.
Here’s a view of our open seating map concept.
We have just released the early adopter version of our Sococo Slack integrated solution into the wild. We were pretty sure we were on the right track, but we wanted to hear what Slack users thought about it, so we went out and asked them.
We were blown away by the response. Over 350 people responded to us and here’s just a snapshot of what they told us:
“Slack is perfect for receiving notifications and messages from people and systems. Sococo is perfect for visibility into a distributed office and team. Sococo also gives a intuitive way to communicate with real-time interaction (screensharing) and holding meetings for Agile development. Merging Slack’s chats into the Sococo system would allow a ChatOps level of integration for business and development to meet, understand, resolve and act on events from services or others.”
“Both work really well with visual thinkers. The channels in slack and the visibility of the rooms in sococo are just a natural fit.”
“Slack is effective at managing asynchronous collaboration, Sococo for synchronous. Each has its particular uses and benefits. Tying them together allows ad hoc meetings to launch from within the asynchronous flow as necessary to benefit the team — “hey, rather than emailing/texting back and forth, let’s all get on a quick call/video conference/etc. and hash out this issue….”
“I think that a Sococo Slack integration would be the best of both worlds with Sococo’s on the fly screen sharing, audio and video chat, and ease of availability notification, but with Slack’s file sharing, group/subject chats, chat history, and archive search. I would LOVE to see this integration soon! #sococoandslack4lyfe”
Slack and Sococo users have both confirmed it — this integration is going to make their favorite solutions even better — and it is going to help them in the following ways:
- Deeper accessibility to colleagues leads to stronger connections, as well as more efficient and effective teamwork.
- Productivity increase by enabling teams to self-organize, create spontaneous meetings, join other meetings and dynamically access their colleagues.
- Deliver essential information that you need when you need it via persistent chat conversations, the ability to search and full integration with other tools and resources.
- Optimized ease of working as a result of a unified collaboration and communication platform.
We are continuing to gather feedback and suggestions for further ways to improve as we iterate through the various phases of the integration. The first phase focused on mapping individual users between the two platforms and the /sococo command to start meetings in Sococo from Slack. Our next release will focus more on group activities and deliver room to channel mapping, so we’re excited to hear what you think about it.
