Upgrade to Slack for Teams

Owned by Kostis Pristouris
Last updated: Jun 23, 2017
3 min read
Status

NOT STARTED

Stakeholders

Benjamin Wulff

Ali Khalili

Abi James

Klaas Andries de Graaf

Steffen Lohmann

Everyone

Outcome
Due date
Owner
Kostis Pristouris 

Background

The SlideWiki development team has been using the free plan for Slack extensively for some time now, and among other things we've come to the point that there are messages/discussions that may have importance, that we currently cannot really access due to limitations in the free plan. There have been discussions before about upgrading to a paid plan, but they were discarded. We would like to reopen them and invite every member of the dev team to detail why each of them thinks we should move to a paid plan. 

For a summary of what a paid plan offers please also refer to this slack page: https://slidewiki.slack.com/pricing. Our case will be only for the Standard plan. In the alternatives section we should list any idea we may have that could serve our needs without moving to a paid plan.

Pros

Main advantage: already using it, would like to recover old messages already there.

  • Unlimited searchable message archives:
    currently we have reached a point where we can't access old discussions

  • Custom User Groups to reach a team or department:
    this might allow for bringing non-developers (like trial partners) in closer coordination with developers

  • Group voice and video calls, Screen sharing:
    currently we are improvising with whatever we have available (skype, hangouts, gotomeeting) for breakout sessions between team members, it could prove useful to consolidate those in a single technology

  • Unlimited apps and service integrations
    We currently use a minimal set of apps/integrations, one reason is that we can't, as the limit is only 10.

  • 10GB file storage per team member



Cons

  • Pricing: according to Benjamin Wulff: there are currently 42 users signed up - cheapest option on Slack is 6.25 eur per month per user thus 42 x 6.25 = *262.5 per month*, *3150,- per year* (because if you choose to charge by month it goes up to 7.50 per person per month) 
  • Slack for education: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/206646877-Slack-for-Education
    Annual cost per team member, after the discount:
    $12.00 per year — Standard plan
    Kostis Pristouris: can't seem to find pricing in euros, or if European institutions are even eligible to this Roy Meissner: Ask them, like we asked Atlassian for a discount/free license

Alternatives

Need to investigate export/import slack data options as well:

https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201658943-Export-your-team-s-Slack-history

https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204897248-Guide-to-Slack-data-exports


Rocket Chat (alternative that also supports self-hosting)

See also https://rocket.chat/. Vinay mentioned this in slack #general:

Why not just host this on internal server? It won't take much time and efforts and a normal desktop can handle team chat.

Uni Bonn SDA group has been using Rocket Chat which is similar to Slack

Roy Meissner replied:

@vinay I think some bots were only able to post to the official slack, not any self hosted instances. E.g. Travis bot. But I'm not totally sure about it.

Vinay:

Hi @roymeissner, I didn't check fully and as I can't see which apps are currently our slack is using. But, Rocket Chat has been extremely popular in open source projects and in the industry. Heard about it from several noteworthy people so just a suggestion. It may be interesting to look at it in the decision process. It even provides hosted solution for 500 users at Euro 50/month

Features of Rocket Chat worth considering for a great open source chat software for teams:

  • Video conference built in
  • File sharing
  • Link preview
  • Integration with GitHub, GitLab, Confluence and many others.
  • Native apps for Windows, Linux, Mac
  • Mobile Apps for Android, iOS

My personal opinion, if SlideWiki is open source, then go for open source team chat to reflect the open source in true sense (own your chat messages then handing over to third party which might have other interests some day - better privacy). I think Rocket chat provides features that SlideWiki team needs.

Also see:

HipChat Edu as Part of our Atlassian Suite

  • Very tight integration with JIRA/Confluence

  • Travis bot available!

What makes Slack not just team chat?

The team has been using slack in ways more involved that just a team chat, in this section we might share use cases that have made Slack essential in comparison to the alternatives

  • Bot Integrations (Travis, Coverage, G-Drive, ....) and thus automation (E.g. Release on Github → Slack → Twitter/Google/Facebook post about it)
  • Quick Team file-sharing

Action items