Hey everyone!
If you’ve been working from home this year, I bet you’ve relied on some form of messaging system to communicate with the rest of your team…?
I’m just wondering what system everyone has been using? And what your fave things/ features are within them?
We have been using Slack - does anyone know any cool slack hacks they can share?
We are massive users of Slack.
The most overused shortcut is /giphy to the point we have banned gifs on some channels 
We ask Slackbot to remind us of our company wide meetings on a Friday.
A lot of people integrate with Outlook to display their status of in a meeting but it’s a little basic.
For development, the integration with BitBucket is great. Being able to nudge reviewers on pull requests is ideal.
We also have some alerts built into our product platform our customers use, so we have database, production, and pre-production alerts to catch issues before they are reported by customers.
There are automatic messages when regression tests pass or fail.
For internal calls, it’s our calling / meeting platform of choice, but customers use Zoom with us.
Finally, we have a few external channels, either for board members to connect to the team or for some customers with their own channel.
Ok, I am definitely not using it to its full potential. There are so many cool things that you’re doing with it that I had no idea about haha.
I must admit I do love a good gif, but yeah there is definitely a time and a place for them.
Ooo we don’t have this - sounds useful. Going to explore this one for sure 
Have seen a few bits in the news this week about them too 
Yes I saw that. 
We’ve been using Microsoft Teams. It f*cking sucks. It does too many things, and does none of them well.
Totally agree. Although we run on o365 for the most part, that will change soon. We have only one meeting a fortnight internally that uses it (preference of organiser) but some customers also love it… we always offer to switch to Zoom and most take it up.
We use a combo of things.
Work: ArmorText for Confidential (Bulk Electric System Cyber System Information, BCSI) and Zoom for conference calls. We used to use Microsoft Teams, but it’s just not as good or reliable.
Personal: Signal for everything I can, always verifying the “safety number” (crypto fingerprint). Family uses Skype for regular extended family video calls (looks great on the TV with an Xbox connected and Kinect camera). Google’s Meetings for informal hobby club meetings during 'Rona.
Zoom is EXCELLENT. We only use it when an outside vendor or consultant uses it, but boy, do I actually enjoy Zoom based meetings lol. It’s just such a superior platform (minus the unfortunate security issues with Zoom bombing lol). Holding meetings on Microsoft Teams feels like the 2020 version of the year 2000 chat programs. Aggravating for no reason. The best thing about the Teams program is the use of artificial backgrounds for participants. 
Teams isn’t well enough thought out. I take a lot of screenshots during these calls and activating a screenshot always causes the call controls to be shown which cover the presenters screen or multiple people if a few are shown, and you can’t move said call controls. Annoying!
Thankfully my new job doesn’t require me to be on so many calls but it is still a pain.
Haha love this!
Would you say you prefer Zoom meetings to in-person meetings? (when we could actually do those haha)
Not for me! In person was always better and if it was a new partner I was visiting, I would ask for some swag
I still hope once this is over we will be able to have meetings in person again.
I am DEFINITELY all about Zoom these days. Even used them for the Family Holidays gathering. 
Zoom has been great for family holiday gatherings! I wasn’t able to go back to see my family this Christmas so I ate my Christmas dinner at the same time as them over zoom haha 
But yeah for work purposes, I think I’m with you @jase - fewer tech issues to worry about and more focus on actually speaking to someone haha
There is something to be said about travelling to meet a customer. It shows importance and care too