As developers on Atlassian, we are excited to have various options of chat tools for better collaboration in our team. We have used several platforms for our communication such as Skype, Google Suite, Slack and recently, Stride. Needless to say, Stride itself has surprised us by a big bunch of features: improvements, focus mode, lots of fixes and the best thing we appreciate using Stride is everything has been deeply built-in Jira Ecosystem. Yet, we're not planning on moving the whole team to Stride and leaving Slack soon. As being already connected and happy with Slack for multiple professional purposes, there are few reasons about Slack that make us choose to stay with this revolutionary chat tool:

1. Flexible building internal apps using Slack APIs

Even though lately, Stride has opened its APIs to all developers, which makes it easier for users to manage apps, but there are still various restrictions when it comes to building a friendly internal app using Stride APIs. Personally, the idea of Slack for us is more open as everyone can aggressively contribute to their Slack channels if they want. So, the #1 noteworthy benefit we found at Slack is its flexibility. One can fully customize their version of Slack as per business requirements, from themes, app integrations to selective notifications.

Plus, not only do the admins of the channel have authorities to modify, add more integration apps or link their Slack channels to other platforms, all team members can do so too. Slack also offers shortcuts, mentions based on keywords and threads, which, on one hand, keeps everyone focusing on their own tasks without being interrupted but on the other hand puts them in the loop quickly when necessary.

2. Improving our professional operations

Slack also provides users with some specific features that motivate our teams to work effectively, especially thanks to the unlimited integration with external apps from Google Suite notifications to BigBucket, Helpdesk, Jira etc. On pasting a Google Drive link in Slack chat, users can get a preview of the link, which literally facilitates our workflow and saves us from wasting time on unimportant things.

The advanced features of the friendly-integrated platform such as Slack had a huge performance benefit to our team. Regarding internal processes about working cross-functionally among teams and external flows when it comes to working with clients, Slack really helps us effectively manage tickets from our Customer Success team and facilitate the collaborative projects. With Slack, we built something quickly than we used to, and it significantly improves our productivity and enables us to utilize our resources.

3. Never forget to have fun as a techie

Motivation is an essential part to push progress forward, but it is also some kind of energy that keeps everyone in the team staying at the same page. There are chats, direct calls, conference videos to keep up with team members, yet sometimes ideas, intentions, and perceptions are often misunderstood. Emojis are an incredibly powerful communication strategy to kill office's frustration.

We do use some integrations just for fun, but we've found that Slack helps the most with the overall morale of the team. I have to say that Emoji has become our "Slack culture" and we can profusely create personalized emojis ourselves with fun pictures of our team members to "visualize" the jokes. We even bring them out to Facebook when chatting with each other, still using the Slack's codes.

Research by Maxwell Locke & Ritter has shown that 70% workers are not engaged at work. But the situation has been improved a lot since we set up Slack, our team has been incredibly engaged. We have tried several integration apps by some third-party developers, but honestly Slack provides us with the best fun ever.

Since starting moving to Jira instead of working on Trello, we have integrated our Slack channels with Jira by using this useful add-on Slack messages for Jira cloud. So we aren't planning to give up all these advanced features and creative fun of Slack yet.

Let me know about your favorite integrations for your Jira instance in the comments!

Original post @ https://medium.com/@Beenicon_app/why-slack-remains-to-be-our-teams-favourite-chat-tool-in-jira-cloud-ecosystem-c9506cae32ca