Slack is a popular online collaboration platform that is widely used by professionals from different fields. It allows instant messaging, voice and video conferencing, file sharing, integration with applications and more.
Slack provides customized solutions for Customer Support, Engineering, IT, Human Resources, Marketing, Project Management, Sales and Task Management. Slack not only connects people and teams but also allows integration of tools and services.
Slack implements a client server model, where the server is hosted by Slack and provided under different pricing options. Slack provides client apps for Windows, Linux and Mac Os. It also has apps for Android and Iphone.
Slack provides a Free Plan, Standard Plan, Plus Plan and Enterprise Grid plan. Slack provides accessing using workspace. A workspace is basically a Slack account with a unique name. Each workspace has its own unique URL. For example if we create a workspace called chat, we get the URL chat.slack.com. From this URL, we can change the workspace settings and also access the web based Slack client.
An open source alternative to Slack is Rocket Chat, which allows hosting the server for free.
Slack provides integrations with numerous tools and services. The integrations basically allow external tools and services to automatically post messages to Slack channels. They also allow messages posted using Slack clients to be sent to external tools and services.
Slack can be integrated with WordPress in different ways. For example, the BuddySlack WordPress plugin allows automatically posting user activities to Slack channels. The BuddySlack plugin is easy to configure. We need to first create an incoming WebHook for our Slack WorkSpace. The incoming WebHook has a channel to which the user activities are posted. It also has a URL, which we need to copy and paste to the plugin configuration. After that all user activities related to BuddyPress should be automatically posted to the Slack channel.
Hybrid.Chat is a separate service that provides ChatBots and API integrations. The service allows creating ChatBots using a simple three step wizard. The wizard provides HTML/JavaScript code which creates a Chat widget.
The Hybrid.Chat WordPress plugin provides a Chat widget. The widget allows website users to chat. The Chat widget may be integrated with Slack. This allows the website visitors to chat with users on a Slack channel. The messages entered by the website user appear in a Slack channel. Replies may be posted using a Slack client.
Slack is a useful online collaboration platform that is easy to use and integrate. It connects people and also enables integration of tools and services.