The people make the C4DI. A terrific community of members who work together, collaborate together and have fun together. Since we opened the doors last July (has it been that long!?), we've been looking for ways for members to communicate better. Not everyone is in every day, so we needed an online solution where people can ask questions, post interesting links, add work projects they needed help with. A C4DI intranet I guess...
After tinkering with Yammer for a while (and to be honest, I just didn't click with it), I signed up for Slack over the weekend and have been very pleasantly surprised.
slack-apps
It has an excellent native OSX app as well apps for iPhone, iPad and Android. Channels are already working well:
Create open channels for the projects, groups and topics that the whole team shares.
Channels increase transparency by putting knowledge in everyone’s hands. Discoverability, complete history & search across all channels is built in.
Channels include messages, files & comments, inline images & video, rich link summaries and integration with the services you use everyday, like Twitter, Dropbox & Google Drive.
We've created suggestions, help, random, events and for sale. There are also private groups, direct messages and a host of integrations (Twitter and Screen Hero added so far).
One of the things that an app can live or die on is notifications and Slack has really looked at this: Flexible Notifications...
Slack will notify you of new activity on your mobile, desktop or via email Choose the number of notifications you want: all the way from “everything” to “just when someone wants my attention” Customize your own list of highlight words to trigger notifications.
The latter feature about trigger words is very useful.
So, we shall see. It's early days but I have high hopes!