Slack Guidelines

This document will outline NPGs preferred use of Slack as well as provide links to various How-To documents and videos to help educate Slack users.

Slack URL: npgco.slack.com

Client Downloads

You can download the slack client to any device company or personal.  Clients are available for Windows 7/8/10, Apple OSX, iOS, Android

Download here: https://slack.com/download 

Important Channels

There are a couple of important channels that all NPG Slack users are automatically part of. These channels are used for mass communication of critical issues or company-wide announcements. 

Announcements
This is a global channel that all users are members of. This channel is used to send important messages to all Slack users at the same time. Posting in this channel is limited to certain members.

Outages
IT and Engineering use this channel to announce status updates for outages and service interruptions. It is important to note that this is not an appropriate channel to report outages. If you are experiencing an issue it is still preferred that you open a ticket. 

You can open a ticket by sending an email to help@npgco.com or by logging in to go.npgco.com/help and clicking the blue “Submit a ticket” button.

General Use Guidelines

Etiquette

• Be Polite
• Take sidebar conversations in a channel to a direct message when it becomes appropriate.  Just like in the real world, when you’re in a group, it’s polite to pull someone aside if you want to carry on a similar but different conversation than the group.
• A thumbs up or smile emoji on a comment is a quick way to acknowledge you read (and or acknowledge) a message without having to comment
• Be respectful of people’s time.  When starting a DM session with someone, ask them if they have a moment.  We can’t see each other, so we don’t know each other’s circumstances.

Video Tutorials

We also highly recommend you check out these short video tutorials to make the most out of Slack. 

Communicating with Channels

Messaging in Slack

Notifications in Slack

Company or Department Channels
We recommend creating a general discussion channel for your location, or department. We would also recommend that each location/department have a team member who is dedicated to Slack administration, who will create and manage these channels. This will prevent duplicate channels from being created and keep team communication together. 

For more information about how to create and manage channels please see the following links.

https://slack.com/help/articles/201402297-Create-a-channel

https://slack.com/help/articles/201980108-Add-people-to-a-channel

General Posting
When posting messages in a channel, especially public channels, it is important to be conscious of the other members of that channel. If you have a message that is directed towards one person in particular, consider sending that person a private message instead.  

Direct Messages
You may already be familiar with sending a direct message to one person but you can also send direct messages to multiple people at the same time, creating a private group chat without the need to create a new channel. 

For more information about how to send a direct message please see the following link. https://slack.com/help/articles/212281468-What-is-a-direct-message

Public VS Private Channels
Channels in Slack are either public or private. Public channels can be viewed by any NPG Slack member. Private channels are exactly that, private, and only available to members of the channel. Any user can join a public channel but will have to be invited to private channels. 

For information on how to invite someone to a channel see the following link.

https://slack.com/help/articles/201980108-Add-people-to-a-channel

File Sharing
Although it is possible to send files to other Slack users, please be aware that these files are only temporarily stored in Slack. For this reason, Slack should not be used for any sort of long term file storage.