A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Why Slack can be a communication tool engineers want?

Why Slack can be a communication tool engineers want?
Oleg
Oleg
9 April, 2015 | 2 min for reading

slack-image

Communication is an important element of our work. We live in an extremely connected world. To communicate with people you work on the same team and between teams can be a critical factor to make project successful. I’ve been learning Slack for the last few weeks. Slack is online communication platform that is catching lot of attention for the last time. It is a startup with more than $1B valuation. Take a look on it over the weekend. It is polished and provides very slick UI.

My experience with Slack made me think about collaboration in engineering teams. It has some connection to old discussions about “social PLM”. However, social PLM idea was doomed. I can mention few reasons why it happened – it provided bad experience for communication, it wasn’t open and didn’t provide an easy way to publish data.

slack-integrations

Things changed for the last few years, Engineering software is getting better in terms of user experience, but openness and integration are two things that not changing much. Look over collaboration tools provided by PLM vendors and you will see limited number of integration capabilities. It is still very closed world, it is hard to push data in and out. Moreover, it is very difficult to integrate with tools engineers are using these days.

Opposite to that Slack impressed me with the number of integrations and openness. If you think about online digital environment, it basically integrates with everything. Navigate to the following link and take a look on a number of integrations. However, community-built integrations list is every more impressive. It is basically integrates to any language, framework or too.

What is my conclusion? There is a clear need for engineers to communicate. However, think how many social platforms do we need? My hunch- we don’t need many. But we need one… a good one. We need one for engineers to communicate between themselves and outside world. So, the competition for this single communication tool will be tough. In my view, integration will be one of the most critical elements. Imagine great communication and collaboration platform that hard to integrate with. It will fail exactly in the same way as previous “social PLM” initiatives failed. So, there is a chance engineers will like Slack. This is a lesson to learn for PLM vendors. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
10 March, 2017

Digital transformation is a new trend and manufacturing companies are exploring how to become leaders in a new digital society...

21 October, 2010

I’ve been attending SPTech Boston Conference today. Navigate your browser on this link. You can get some information there. Microsoft...

31 August, 2018

I attended Solid Edge University Boston event earlier this week. Magnificent Boston Marriott Long Wharf hotel with meeting room exposed...

28 March, 2022

Dear friends, I’m super excited. Later this week, I will be attending the first in-person PLM event for a little...

3 November, 2012

Cloud is trending, and PLM vendors are starting to take some advantages of the cloud solutions and infrastructure. The most-recent...

20 February, 2019

PLM for SMB is a long time dream of PLM minded community. Check articles online to see it is actually...

16 April, 2010

Cloud is trending topic these days. During the last few months we had chance to see quite many examples of...

3 January, 2021

The year 2021 is finally here. I’ve been taking some time off, to think about what we learned in 2020...

15 April, 2009

I’d like to get back to Excel discussion. I think that Excel is a really good application. And I don’t...

Blogroll

To the top