Today we will be going over an application called slack. Slack is a great application for businesses to keep employees connected with all of the information they need. Typically, emails are messy, unorganized, and oftentimes missed when there is a large number of emails in a day. Slack collaborates teams into organized channels that are easy to understand. Slack can be broken down into 4 basic categories, this will include workspace, channels you're in, people you have direct messaged, and the chat window. We will break everything down in this video.
Let's get started. First head over to the slack website. You can also download the iOS app as well as the android app to stay connected through your mobile device. In later videos, I will show you how to use the app on an android device. When you are on the website click on try for free on the top right or press sign up with Google if this is a google account. I will select sign up with google. Next on the pop up select the appropriate email you want to use. Next will be a pop-up asking about creating a workspace. You can also decide here if you want to receive emails from slack, I will turn this off. Select create a workspace. Once created, I will simply add my business name here. Click next. Here you can select an item your currently working on in your business. Currently, we are working on a few eCommerce stores so I will add this here as an example. I will add E-Commerce store 1. In this step, you can invite coworkers who are working on this project. I will add my other example email here. Depending on your browser, you can download this app for windows as it will display this popup in the next window typically. I will select not now and continue to browser for now.
You will now be on the slack homepage. Let’s briefly go over this. On the top right where it displays the logo from your google account, click on this logo. Here you can change your active status profile settings and preferences. Click on status and you can change if you are available to other options. There is a top search bar where you can search your workspace, this will be handy later on when there are a lot of employees on your slack workspace. On the left side will display your workspace name on the very top, clicking the name of your workspace gives you more options. You can change your plan, invite people, create channels, and much more. Clicking browse slack gives you great features, here you can check all missed DM’s, browse files, and more. Under this will be your channels section. This is where you create basically groups of your company. For this example, I will use my business Lamirande Studios. With this being a marketing agency, it’s fairly simple to create. Much larger businesses may have to expand these channels further. To create channels, simply press add channels and create a new channel. Even here slack recommends creating channels around topics. Let’s first add management, you can write a detailed description about each channel, you can also select make this private, let’s do that for this channel. This will hide this channel from everyone else on this workspace unless they are invited. The next pop-up will ask if you want to add people to this channel, select skip for now, or add people as you wish. The next channel I will create is marketing. We will keep this one public. Next will be administration, public also. Next will be accounting, let’s make this one private and finally creating. This channel will be public as well.
Once your channels are created, you can click on any channel to add people later on. Let’s go over a couple of other useful tips for organization. Right, click any channel we just created, doing so will give other options. You can change notifications to when someone @ mentions you. If you’re unfamiliar with this, it is basically writing @usernamehere, this will only send you a notification when someone does this. Next, you can star channels. Once this is clicked it will create another group of channels called starred. This can be great if you have a lot of channels in your business.
You can also have conversations directly with team members with Dm’s or direct messages. You can add additional teammates here as well. Let’s send a direct message to our other user on here. Once the message is sent, you can hover over this message for additional functionality. You can add emojis to messages and reply in a thread. If you have used Reddit or forums in the past you would be familiar with this type of message and comment. It basically adds additional sub comments to the comment someone had left previously.
You can also add files directly into your slack channel. You can do this by simply clicking the paperclip on the bottom right corner where you send messages. Here you can add files directly from your computer. Let’s add a sample PDF from our computer to see how this works. Go to the proper folder where you have this file, click and press open. The file will now upload. This can be really handy especially when integrating third-party applications like dropbox or google drive. Once this file is here everyone can now access this file and edit it as long as they have access. In this example video, we will add google drive. On the left side menu under slack connect click more, now click on apps. Here is where you can integrate all of your applications. Let’s press add google drive, it will now move to a new window. This will now ask for a number of personal steps for you to verify. Now click on the Google Drive email of your choice. We can now click back on our channel, you will see google drive added to the bottom left on the side menu. If we now go to attach a file as we did earlier we see the option for google drive. Click this and you will be redirected to your google drive files related to your account. Click on any file and upload. Now all users who you give permission to access files can now edit and see this directly in slack. This is extremely handy when dealing with projects that are constantly changing. When a message is sent you may be asked to give everyone access to this document. Select the drop-down and the appropriate permissions related to this file. This is just the basics of Slack. There are so many possibilities to customize this and make it extremely productive for yourself and your team.