Slack (software) facts for kids
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| Original author(s) | Stewart Butterfield, Eric Costello, Cal Henderson, and Serguei Mourachov |
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| Developer(s) | Slack Technologies (Salesforce) |
| Initial release | August 2013 |
| Written in | Electron (C++, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Redux, etc.), Hack (backend) |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android |
| Available in | 12 languages |
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List of languages
Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), English (UK), English (US), French (France), German (Germany), Italian (Italy), Japanese (Japan), Korean (South Korea), Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (Latin America), Spanish (Spain)
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| Type | Collaborative software |
| License | Proprietary |
Slack is a cloud-based team communication platform developed by Slack Technologies, which has been owned by Salesforce since 2020. Slack uses a freemium model. Slack's primary userbase is businesses, and has functionalities primarily for businesses.
History
Slack originated as an internal communication tool used within Stewart Butterfield's company, Tiny Speck, during their work on the development of Glitch, an online video game. These communication tools were initially built around the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol and included scripts designed to automate and organize file exchanges among their development team. By October 2012, Stewart Butterfield realized that Glitch was not going to bring necessary profits. As a result, he decided to change the direction of his company and repurpose the communication tools they had developed into a new product.
In 2012, Butterfield decided to name their upcoming product "Slack," which he said was derived from the phrase "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge," replacing the previous codename "linefeed".
In August 2013, Slack was launched to the public and continued to maintain compatibility with IRC, reflecting its origin. Additionally, it was also compatible with XMPP messaging protocols. However, in May 2018, the company chose to close down these corresponding gateways due to limitations inherent to those protocols.
On July 26, 2018, Slack acquired HipChat and Stride from Atlassian, with plans to shut down both services in February 2019 and migrate their users to Slack.
In June 2019, Slack went public through a direct public offering to reach a market value of $19.5 billion.
In July 2020, Slack acquired Rimeto, a startup specializing in employee directories and profiles, with plans to rename the service and operate it as a standalone app. Almost a year later, in June 2021, its functionality launched as an optional feature within Slack named "Slack Atlas".
On December 1, 2020, Slack and Salesforce announced an agreement for Salesforce to acquire the company for approximately $27.7 billion, marking one of the most significant tech acquisitions at that time. The acquisition was completed on July 21, 2021.
On December 5, 2022, Salesforce announced that Butterfield was leaving Slack and would be succeeded by Lidiane Jones, an executive vice president at Salesforce. On November 13, 2023, Salesforce executive Denise Dresser was appointed to replace Jones, who was in turn replacing Whitney Wolfe Herd as Bumble CEO.
Incidents
In March 2015, Slack announced it had been hacked for over four days in February 2015 and that some data associated with user accounts had been compromised, including email addresses, usernames, hashed passwords, phone numbers, and Skype IDs. In response to the attacks, Slack added two-factor authentication to its service.
On January 4, 2021, Slack suffered a significant outage that lasted several hours. From 10 AM ET until 3 PM ET, users could not log in, send or receive messages, place or answer calls, or use Slack connections. After 3 PM, most of the core features became operational, except for push notifications, email, and third-party integrations including Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar.
In 2022, Slack suffered widely reported outages on February 22, March 9 and July 26. On 31 December 2022, Slack announced that its private GitHub repositories had been compromised during the previous weeks, using stolen security tokens.
Features
Slack offers many IRC-style features, including persistent chat rooms known as channels, which are organized by topic, as well as private groups and direct messaging functionalities. All content, including files, conversations, and people, is searchable within Slack. Users can express their reactions in the form of emojis to any message. Message history on Slack is limited to messages from last 90 days on the free plan.
Slack allows for communities, groups, or teams to join a "workspace" via a specific URL or invitation sent by a team admin or owner. A workspace can contain both public and private channels, with public channels being accessible to all members of the workspace. Both public and private channels can be converted interchangeably.
Direct messages enable users to engage in private one-on-one or group conversations with up to nine participants. Group direct message can be converted into a private channel.
Slack integrates with many third-party services and supports community-built integrations, including Google Drive, Trello, Dropbox, Box, Heroku, IBM Bluemix, Crashlytics, GitHub, Runscope, Zendesk, and Zapier. In July 2015, Slack launched an integration with Google Calendar. Later, in December of the same year, a searchable directory was introduced consisting of over 150 integrations that users can install. In addition to these integrations, Slack offers users the ability to incorporate and customize chatbots known as "Slackbots." These chatbots can be configured to send notifications, reminders, or provide tailored responses to specific phrases, among other functions. Furthermore, Slack provides an application programming interface that enables users to develop applications and automate various processes, including sending notifications based on input, generating alerts for specific conditions, creating internal support tickets, and more.
In March 2018, Slack partnered with Workday, a financial and human capital management firm. This integration allows employees to access co-worker information, organizational charts, benefits, feedback, and time-off requests within Slack.
In March 2022, Slack introduced a new voice conference feature known as "Huddles". Within a Huddle, users have the capability to mute or unmute themselves, share their screens, draw on a shared screen, and invite others to the call. In June 2022, Huddles received the additional functionality of video calls. Huddles are restricted to only two participants on free tiers, while paid plans offer the capacity for up to 50 participants.
In March 2023, Salesforce announced the partnership with OpenAI to launch a ChatGPT integration for Slack and can be used for summarizing conversations, answering questions, or drafting replies.
Slack provides mobile apps for iOS and Android in addition to their web browser client and desktop clients for MacOS, Windows, and Linux (beta). Slack is also available for the Apple Watch, allowing users to send direct messages, see mentions, and make simple replies.
Business model
Slack is a freemium product whose main paid features are the ability to search more than 90 days' archived messages and add unlimited apps and integrations. They also claim support for an unlimited number of users. When freeCodeCamp attempted to switch its community of over 8,000 users to Slack in 2015, however, they experienced many technical issues and were advised by Slack support to limit their channels to "no more than 1,000 users (ideally more like 500)." That specific limit no longer applied by January 2017.
Growth
In August 2013, 8,000 customers signed up for the service within 24 hours of its launch. In February 2015, the company reported that approximately 10,000 new daily active users had signed up each week, and had more than 135,000 paying customers spread across 60,000 teams. By April 2015, those numbers had grown to 200,000 paid subscribers and a total of 750,000 daily active users. Late in 2015, Slack passed more than a million daily active users. As of May 2018[update], Slack had over 8 million daily users, 3 million of whom had paid accounts. At the time of its S-1 filing for IPO, dated April 26, 2019, Slack reported more than 10 million daily active users from more than 600,000 organizations, located in more than 150 countries.
In 2019, it was estimated that employees at large firms were sending over 200 Slack messages per week on average. From 2013 to 2019 the amount of time spent on work email had declined, which was attributed to the proliferation of Slack and its competitors Workplace (launched by Facebook in 2016), Microsoft Teams (launched 2017) and Google Hangouts Chat and Meet (launched in 2018).
See also
In Spanish: Slack (software) para niños
- List of collaborative software
