Slack is a digital workplace that connects us to our colleagues, external partners and systems, allowing us to feel connected no matter where we are working from.
The fundamental pillar of Slack is a Slack channel. Instead of endless email chains, Slack organises conversations around a topic, project or team in a channel. This provides everyone with a shared view into the work being done, so teams can stay in sync and new members have full context when they join.
We use an Enterprise Grid version of Slack, which means we have access to more features and control of specific settings that we can set for the organisation.
For more information on access see: How users get access to Slack (York Wiki).
The best way to use Slack is through the desktop app, which you can install from the software center on any managed University laptop or on unmanaged devices from Slack. The benefits to using the Slack app include only having to log in once, better user experience and not missing messages.
Once downloaded you will need to sign into the University of York Grid using your University of York Google account:
Once you’ve logged in to Slack you’ll be added to a few public channels by default.
Keep an eye out for a message from Slackbot which will take you through the basics of using Slack and help you get your profile and settings set up.
Records of Slack messages may be subject to a Freedom of Information or Subject Access request. You should be particularly careful when discussing details relating to other individuals.
You can receive help with issues and troubleshooting from the Digital Tools team in by logging your problem in the #help-slack channel within Slack.
The easiest way to check if Slack is down is to use their Slack system status page which is external to the Slack system and always available.
Sometimes Slack stops working for a few minutes - in this case it doesn't usually get flagged by Slack on their system page and we won't communicate it internally. We recommend reloading Slack after a few minutes (Ctrl+R in the desktop app).
If Slack has a major incident, we will log it on the IT Service Status page and depending on the issue, update as much as possible within the #help-slack channel.