Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/ Take Control of Slack Basics: Chapter 12, Start a Slack Team Glenn Fleishman This article is a pre-release chapter in the upcoming 'Take Control of Slack Basics,' by Glenn Fleishman, scheduled for public release later in 2016. Apart from [1]Chapter 1, Introducing Slack, [2]Chapter 2, Get Started with Slack, and [3]Chapter 12, Start a Slack Team, these chapters are available only to [4]TidBITS members; see [5]'Take Control of Slack Basics' Serialized in TidBITS for details. __________________________________________________________________ Chapter 12: Start a Slack Team Congratulations! You've finished reading [6]Take Control of Slack Basics! You should now be able to use a wide variety of Slack features and interact successfully with Slack team members. As a special bonus, this series of chapters ends with the first chapter of the companion book I'm writing, [7]Take Control of Slack Admin. If you're interested in setting up and running your own Slack team, this book will get your team off to a smooth start and help you both technically and with establishing your new community online. It also includes training materials in the form of a downloadable handout and slide deck. Remember, anyone can start a Slack team for free! This chapter dives into the details you need to start a Slack team and walks you through the initial registration process. It also looks carefully at the differences between free and paid teams. Skunkworks'¦ or Not If you want to set up Slack in an organization where you work, I recommend checking that it's okay with management first. If you're organization has an information technology (IT) department, that department almost certainly has to be involved with your use of Slack and may even need to 'own' the Slack team to make sure it complies with security and monitoring policies. Of course, Slack has slid into many companies, even large ones, by people setting it up and getting permission later. You know best how your organization responds to that sort of initiative. Register Your Team Slack needs to know a few basic things about your team, which you enter as part of registering it. Although all these items and choices can be changed later, you may want to consider them before you dive into the registration form: * Owner: Usually, this is you. Because you are registering the team, you will become the Primary Owner. Only the Primary Owner has permission to delete a team. (Teams can have additional owners who have nearly as much power as the primary, and I'll explain how to add them to your team later.) * Owner email address: You can use your normal email address, but consider whether you should be use a specific address that can stay with the Slack team even if you leave the group. * Team name: The team name appears in various places, including in a user's list of teams that they belong to and at the top of the main sidebar in the Slack app, when a user has that team active. As you can imagine, it's hard to find something short and sweet for a team name if your company or group name doesn't suffice'or is already taken. * Team subdomain name: This name, which I recommend you keep short, appears prefixed to .slack.com to form the URL that team members visit in order to interact with the team in the Web app. Also, each message in Slack has a unique URL and users will at times see those URLs. Something short and recognizable is good. The team name and team subdomain name do not have to match. * Your Slack username in the team: Because you'll be setting an example for team members as they join, you may want to set up username guidelines'and follow them with your own username. * Free or paid? All teams start free. You can convert a team to paid right away or at any time later. For details on the differences, skip ahead to [8]Pick Free or Paid. * Team icon: Slack will give you a default icon with a large letter on it, the letter being the first letter in your team name. This icon appears in a few places in Slack, including the left-hand Teams sidebar in the desktop and Web apps. You can upload your own icon, if you prefer. Also, before you begin, you may wish to review Slack's [9]Terms of Service and [10]Privacy Policy. Slack and Privacy Because a team's messages and files are stored on Slack's servers, privacy is an obvious issue. In its [11]privacy policy, Slack states explicitly: 'Slack is the custodian of data on behalf of the teams that use Slack. We don't own team communication data. Teams own their data.' That's a great place to start. The flip side is that a team owner does, in fact, own the messages'but Slack is on the side of members by default. No one can see direct message conversations or the contents of private channels unless they're part of those interactions, with one exception. Paid teams at the Plus level, currently the most expensive level, can enable [12]compliance exports, which may be required in some industries or for legal reasons. Compliance exports let team owners export everything in a Slack team, including messages in private channels and conversations. If you enable compliance exports, every user is notified, and only messages posted to the team after that point are included in the export. Users who join after that point are notified when they join the team. Slack doesn't take this override of privacy, even for a business, lightly. It notes, 'We've included protections to ensure that Compliance Exports are used appropriately.' Hidden Messages After an opinion Web site ran an article during the election cycle attacking the veracity of one of its own reporters, an internal battle broke out in the group's Slack team. Staffers who opposed the editors' actions sent screen captures from Slack to news outlets. At the time, I joked on Twitter to Slack's CEO, Stewart Butterfield, that Slack could use steganography to allow team admins to track down the source of such leaks. Steganography is a general term for hiding information inside of something that doesn't appear to contain a secret. In the olden days, that could be a telegram in which the first letter of every word spelled out a message. In modern times, a pattern of what seems like noise can be introduced to a digital image and then recovered by software that knows how to analyze it. With Slack, the company could conceivably put a background pattern in each client that would uniquely identify a user and a team when a screen capture was taken. While it was a joke, Butterfield said publicly that Slack doesn't do that and has no plans to do that. Now that you've assembled the information that you'll be giving Slack as you set up your team, here's how to create a team: 1. Go to [13]slack.com. 2. In the field at the bottom of the page, enter the email address you want to use to log in as the team's owner and click Create a New Team (Figure 1). Figure 1: Start by providing your email address. Figure 1: Start by providing your email address. 3. Next, pick a name. This name is shown everywhere a user sees a reference to the team (Figure 2, left). (You can change it later, so don't worry too much about it.) Figure 2: Name your Slack team (left); the Web site for a team has a unique subdomain (right). Figure 2: Name your Slack team (left); the Web site for a team has a unique subdomain (right). 4. Enter the subdomain name for what will effectively be your team's own Web site (Figure 2, right). After you type a name, Slack will inform you if it's in use; a green checkmark appears on an available choice. (You can change the URL later.) 5. Enter your name and username, and click Next. 6. Slack displays a confirmation page that lists all the details you've entered. If you need to change anything now, click its Edit button. If it all looks good, click the Create My New Slack Team button. 7. Slack asks you about sending invitations. It's fine to add users now, if you know what you are doing, but you might prefer to wait. I talk more about types of users and invitations later in Take Control of Slack Admin. Either add users or just click Skip for Now. The Slack Web app now takes you to the same view that any new member of the team would see. In the sidebar, the two default Slack channels, #general and #random, are available, and under Direct Messages, Slackbot is selected. (Slackbot is Slack's built-in bot; every user has their own private direct messaging conversation with Slackbot.) 8. Check your email. You should have a message from Slack asking you to set up a password to go with your new Slack account. Follow the directions in the message to create your password. Finding Team Preferences Now that your team has been created, you can manage it in Slack's Web app. If you still have the app open from the steps just above, to reach the Slack configuration options, click the team name near the upper left and choose a settings-related item from the lower portion of the menu, such as Team Settings. The URL to your Team Settings page is https://team-name.slack.com/admin/settings. You might also like to bookmark https://team-name.slack.com/home. You can access additional settings from the sidebar, viewable by clicking the Menu button at the upper left. In particular, under Administration, notice Billing, Team Settings, and Manage Your Team. Pick Free or Paid Slack has a generous free tier, which may be sufficiently capable to meet the needs of social groups and many work-related groups. Tip: Qualifying non-profits get access to Slack's Standard plan at no cost, while qualifying educational institutions pay 85 percent of the commercial price. For details, read the Slack help documents, [14]Slack for Nonprofits and [15]Slack for Education. Slack isn't cheap for everyone else, however. Slack currently offers two paid tiers: If you pay annually, Standard costs $80 per year for each user, while Plus costs $150. In a modest team with 15 members that's $1200 per year for Standard or $2250 for Plus. Those costs might be reasonable for a small organization, but consider a business that needs 200 accounts, the cost for which adds up to $16,000 per year for Standard or $30,000 for Plus. Some organizations I know that have no central office or a large number of remote workers say that Slack is their single biggest expense. What You Get with Plus Slack's Plus plan provides all the features of the Standard plan that are listed in the [16]Pricing Guide, along with: * 10 GB of storage per user, up from 5 GB * SAML-based single sign-on (SSO), which is useful for integration with a greater array of corporate directory services * Compliance exports of all message history, discussed earlier in [17]Slack and Privacy * Support for external message and archival solutions * 99.99% guaranteed uptime service level agreement (SLA) * 24/7 support with 4-hour response time * User provisioning and deprovisioning * Real-time active directory sync with OneLogin, Okta, and Ping In all likelihood, these features are primarily of interest to larger, more technically adept organizations that depend on Slack. You can always start with a Standard plan and upgrade to Plus, or even to an Enterprise plan that's slated to be unveiled later in 2016. Happily, while many business-oriented software systems require purchasing per-user subscriptions in certain quantities, like 100- or 1000-user increments, Slack charges only for active users, which it continuously measures against the yardstick of whether a member has accessed Slack in the previous 14 days. If they haven't, that user is switched to inactive status for billing purposes, and that member's cost is pro-rated'automatically. The reverse happens when someone starts using Slack again. Free and paid teams differ in several ways: * Free teams are limited to a chronological history of 10,000 messages. Older messages are neither displayed nor appear in searches, but they're not deleted. Paid tiers have access to 100 percent of everything ever posted (if you upgrade from a free team to a paid team, all the old messages become accessible). * Free teams can store a total of 5 GB of attached files for the entire team. Standard teams get a 5 GB allocation per user; with Plus, it's 10 GB per user. * Only paid teams can opt to have all messages (public and private) deleted a set period of time after they're posted (from a day to several years), retain a log of all edits and deletions, and export all messages, including private ones. * Free teams can add only ten integrations; paid teams have no limits. * In paid teams, you can more easily compartmentalize user access by having guest users: these users can be single-channel or multi-channel. Paid teams get five single-channel guests per paying full member or multi-channel guest. * Paid teams can add user groups, so a bunch of people can be addressed at once through a group @mention, like @editorial. * On any team, free or paid, users can opt to sign in with two-factor authentication (2FA). On a paid team, 2FA can be required. * With a paid team, you can set up single sign-on (SSO). SSO is used in small and large organizations alike to integrate a directory service (often based on LDAP), which centralizes a user's account across everything they do as part of the organization. SSOs let that central directory also log them in to other services, including those not hosted in-house, like Slack. Standard teams can let someone with a Google account use that to authenticate to the team, or can use Google's paid Google Apps for Domains to connect the group's users there with Slack. Plus teams gain enterprise-level SSO, with Slack supporting directory services that comply with the industry-standard SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language). To start the process of paying for your team, go to https://team-name.slack.com/home. Click the Menu button to open the sidebar and choose Billing. Downgrading from Paid to Free You can downgrade a team from paid to free, just as you can upgrade from free to paid. Slack notes that a downgraded team's messages above 10,000 are retained (just as with free teams), but you'll have to pick which integrations to disable above the ten allowed for teams, and which files to delete beyond the 5 GB limit for the entire team. Multi-channel guests can be deleted or converted into full-access members, while single-channel guests are removed. To make the switch, go to https://team-name.slack.com/home. Click the Menu button to open the sidebar and choose Billing. Now, open the Overview tab and choose the option that best meets your needs from the Change Your Plan pop-up menu. Keep Going We expect to publish the rest of [18]Take Control of Slack Admin in late May, along with [19]Take Control of Slack Basics. The ebooks will be available separately or in a bundle from the Take Control Web site. Topics in [20]Take Control of Slack Admin will include settings to tweak before you invite users, various methods of inviting users, thinking about channels and integrations from an admin's point of view, and maintaining harmony in your team. The book will also come with a downloadable slide deck and handout that you can use when teaching your team about Slack. We hope that publishing the entire draft of [21]Take Control of Slack Basics plus this first chapter of [22]Take Control of Slack Admin has helped you start using Slack more comfortably. Here at TidBITS, we've found it a useful and pleasant hub for centralizing communications. Read More: [23]About | [24]Chapter 1 | [25]Chapter 2 | [26]Chapter 3 | [27]Chapter 4 | [28]Chapter 5 | [29]Chapter 6 | [30]Chapter 7 | [31]Chapter 8 | [32]Chapter 9 | [33]Chapter 10 | [34]Chapter 11 | [35]Chapter 12 References 1. http://tidbits.com/article/16321 2. http://tidbits.com/article/16322 3. http://tidbits.com/article/16506 4. http://tidbits.com/member_benefits.html 5. http://tidbits.com/article/16318 6. http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/slack-basics?pt=INTERNAL 7. http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/slack-admin?pt=INTERNAL 8. http://tidbits.com/article/16506#PickFreeorPaid 9. https://slack.com/terms-of-service 10. https://slack.com/privacy-policy 11. https://slack.com/privacy-policy 12. https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204897248-Understanding-Slack-data-exports 13. https://slack.com/ 14. https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204368833 15. https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204368833 16. https://slackbits.slack.com/pricing 17. http://tidbits.com/article/16506#SlackandPrivacy 18. http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/slack-admin?pt=INTERNAL 19. http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/slack-basics?pt=INTERNAL 20. http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/slack-admin?pt=INTERNAL 21. http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/slack-basics?pt=INTERNAL 22. http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/slack-admin?pt=INTERNAL 23. http://tidbits.com/article/16318 24. http://tidbits.com/article/16321 25. http://tidbits.com/article/16322 26. http://tidbits.com/article/16343 27. http://tidbits.com/article/16364 28. http://tidbits.com/article/16385 29. http://tidbits.com/article/16408 30. http://tidbits.com/article/16425 31. http://tidbits.com/article/16449 32. http://tidbits.com/article/16466 33. http://tidbits.com/article/16484 34. http://tidbits.com/article/16505 35. http://tidbits.com/article/16506 .