This post has been migrated and imported into different systems over the years, I have not had a chance to format this post manually so it may be hard to read but I have left it here as a reference.

If you didn’t already know, Slack is this awesome piece of software which lets you message, share files with and now call other members of your team and you can use it for free if you are unsure about it’s benefits. After Slack aquired Screenhero they began integrating Screenhero’s features into slack. Voice calling is the first of those features and hopefully we will see video and screensharing services coming to Slack in the near future. Voice calling is available in DM conversations for free, paid teams can use the calling feature in channels. So let’s take a look at how it works.

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To start a call simply go to the conversation or channel which you would like to start a call for and click the phone icon at the top of the screen. Members of that channel or conversation will see the notification as a message in the slack channel. If you are starting the call with a single person they will see it as a call and can answer it via slack as a normal phone call.

(image removed)Once a call has started you can invite more users by clicking the “+” sign in the top right corner. As someone is talking other users can show their reactions by simpy clicking emojis. This may seem a bit silly at first but is a pretty good way to show approval or disapproval of someone who is speaking without interrupting them. Simply click the smiley to bring up the available emojis, clicking on one of these will display the amoji on top of your profile picture inside the call. In the top left corner you have a share button to invite users who are not part of the team to the call. You could post this in an email or perhaps on twitter if you would like to allow for a more public conversation.

I love what Slack has done, simple improvements that may become standard practice in future chat applications and I can’t wait to see what they will do with video calls and screen sharing. And as I mentioned before, you can try Slack for free for an unlimited time.