👏 🏻Great (if somewhat inevitable) move from the Slack team! But it's not going to replace Skype for me (and many other people) until there's a seamless way to include external people in those calls...
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@mr_ed There was an exodus away from Skype when they were acquired by MSFT. Did you not get the memo? 😋
@mr_ed I totally agree with you Ed. When Google open sourced WebRTC (the technology behind Screenhero) I heard everywhere around the world announcing "Skype is dead" ... this was back in 2012! I think calls on Slack is a GREAT feature and the least you can ask to a collaborative platform. However, I don't see 1:1 calls (in the free plan) kill massively Hangouts and Skype. In enterprises, people will still use MS Lync or other WebRTC client solutions like BlueJeans. Ottspott.co offers Slack teams the ability to get external calls from regular phones and allows also to call mobile and landlines with slash commands. A perfect fit with Calls on Slack :-)
@stillupmysleeve@mr_ed Frank, when Slack will offer free group audio/video conf, + mobile I agree Skype and Hangouts will suffer. For the moment 1:1 is great but having to pay for what you have for free with Skype and Hangouts will keep a lot of teams away.
Very excited about this. Especially the video chat that is coming soon!!!
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Great to see voice calls totally integrated into this platform. Appear.in has been a great stand in in the mean time, but native will always have benefits that appear.in couldn't offer.
Excited to try this out.
p.s. What's next? Video on Slack? VR on Slack? Scratch and sniff on Slack?
Is this the roll out of the Screen Hero acquisition? I truly miss Screen Hero and cannot wait for it to be integrated into slack. It was hands down the best way to screen share and pair on code problems. https://screenhero.com/
@ludobos yeah we use appear.in too but it's annoying for external parties - in case they don't use Chrome and then can't screenshare or something. Love how quick it is to get going though - that's the usp
So, just played with this and it's pretty amazing. The level of friction-free here is pretty impressive -- I hit call and our entire team was on this within just a few seconds. We usually spend a ton of time messing around with Hangouts or Skype, but this was just like *bam* you're in the room. Blown away -- now hanging out for video calling .
What'll be interesting to see is how this eats Slack's competitors. Why use Hangouts, GoToMeeting or Skype when you can just click a button and not launch another app?
@bentossell If Slack sets up a searchable directory like Skype did, it might be possible :) There is an option on the Slack call screen for sharing a link. This might allow to invite people outside your team.
Great move ! At ottspott.co we provide phone numbers for Slack teams that have no phone number for their business. For us this means that it will be much easier to get calls inside the teams and transfer external calls between teams and team members. Meaning you can now definitely throw away your old school cloud telephony solutions. Can't wait to start using Calls on Slack !
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