[Alex Webber]

James,

While I cannot speak from the standpoint of having an entire team using Slack, I created a group for our programming team, composed of 18 students and mentors. We have been using it for over a year, and have been very impresed.

Slack's free plan is amazing for the price. We can have unlimited members, channels, and the file and photo sharing works nice. I recommend if this is the course that you choose to consider, to make a google drive account, most teams have one already. You can copy the share link of the file, and it will share it with everyone in the channel to make sharing files easier.

Slack has some of the best customer service that I have encountered with, our team is using it to replace Skype and Google Hangouts. Slack has plans to add voice integration sometime in 2016. Administrators can set-up bots, allowing a bot to remind the channel or everyone when there is a meeting, or important event! There are so many integrations to make slack even better.

If you choose slack, you will need to consider the difference between Private Groups and Channels. Channels can have lots of spam, and everyone can see those messages. Private Groups are only visible by those in it.

One of my goals for 2017 is to hopefully push towards Slack when I have more leverage. It is an amazing tool, and replaces Skype, GroupME, Kik, and Texting. We still have a teamspeak server for voice.

EDIT: After reading, one of our programmers made a bot to log how much time people get on Slack. But yes, getting people to get on slack is a challenge, just like checking your email.

Let me know if you have any more questions!