Best practices to set up your workspace’s channels in Slack 💬
Understanding how to organize your Slack channels.
🎯 Channels in Slack help you organize your daily work and are one of Slack’s core features. They bring clarity and more visibility around everyone’s roles and responsibilities, which in turn helps you get work done more efficiently and in a faster manner.
Ways to start a conversation in Slack 🦜
There are multiple ways to start a conversation in Slack:
- Sending a DM (Direct Message) to just one person at a time.
- Creating a private channel in Slack.
- Creating a public Channel in Slack or
- Creating a group DM (maximum up to 9 group members)
In case there is a need for the conversation to be kept private, either use Direct Message for 1:1 communication or create a private channel where only invited members talks on their topic of discussion.
By Default, #general and #random are the two public channels provided out of the box by Slack. You can create more as needed by the business. e.g.
- Channel for a new project should start usually as #project, #project-development-work, #project-website-dev
- Channel names for the team’s work usually start as #team-sales, #team-service, #team-support, etc.
Channel Naming conventions and guidelines✅
Not a full list of guidelines, but apply to most of the projects.
Use channel prefixes to give a meaningful name: #account-abc-corp, #project-dreamforce-2022, #team-sales-cloud
- Good channel prefix habits help predict others to guess channel names so that they can search, join and collaborate on that channel.
- Contact your Slack admin to create a project-specific list of #prefixes so that all workspace members follow the same list of guidelines.
- External channels usually should start with #ext_
- If working with other companies, use prefixes like #client- or #accounts-ext- or may include the name of the client org as well eg. client-abc-sales-team
- Remember for now 80 characters is the max length of a channel name.
- Always pin a message to a channel for any important instructions, be it a file, important instructions, or guidelines to new members.
- In case the team size is growing, you can create multiple channels with main topics, like #devteam-abc-corp, #support-team-abc-corp, etc
- Max number of channels: There is no limit on how many channels we can create, but it is always advisable to keep meaningful channels and avoid redundancy if two or more channels talk on the same topic.
- You can star ⭐a channel or conversation to keep it handy and easily accessible on the top left of the slack workspace.
- Sometimes, it's okay to have some social channels as well like #fun-fridays, #music-concerts, and #gamers-zone where employees can join and have some fun out of their busy work schedules.
How Sections help organize Slack Channel 📐
Sections are a paid feature in Slack. Not available on Free versions.
- In the left sidebar of the Slack workspace, users can create Sections to keep their starred channels or conversations organized.
- Right to Channels, click 3 dots and then ‘Create a Section.
- 🆕 Give the new section a name and click Create.
- And then drag and drop your favorite channels under the newly created section ‘My Favourite Channels’ and stay focussed ⚡👨💻
Slack Connect: collaborate with outside organizations 📤
Again a paid feature, not available on free plans.
- Slack Connect helps you connect your Slack workspace with external companies and their workspaces, be it vendors, partners, or external consultants.
- Keep both sides focussed and organized.
- Members join with an invite-only or via links, but the Slack admin can set up even those joining links to be approved by the admin or automatically get approved as per company policies.
- Channel created with Slack connect can involve names of both side companies or either side. eg. abc-xyz-collaboration-marketing
- A common naming convention guideline can be developed by both parties.
- As with channel names, public and private settings for shared channels are independent, so they can be set as public on both sides, private on both sides or public on one side and private on the other.
In short, Channels bring it all people together and start your daily conversations.🥳🎉🤟
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