Our organization learned and evolved during the pandemic. To move quickly and efficiently, while engaging life-changers across the district, we need a digital, social, and mobile-friendly platform to share, collaborate, and listen. In order to take our cross-district collaboration to the next level, we are consolidating messaging tools to Google Chat, the most widely used collaboration and messaging tool in our District.
Slack has been a tremendous tool for our central office support teams to communicate across departments and directly with our principals. But as a district, we have been managing four different tools and paying extra for Slack after the company adjusted its pricing structure. This move saves about $60,000 per year.
A legal review into our records retention revealed we needed to consolidate messaging tools in order to meet open records requests and ensure transparency. While records were being maintained to compliance, managing requests and collecting data in a timely manner has been a challenge with so many different tools.
Effective July 1, 2021, we will move district-managed and created channels from Slack to Google Chat.
Please download the mobile app (Apple and Android). You will be able to access the chat tool with your Gmail, on the Google Chat website, or by downloading the Google Chat desktop application. Because the tool works with our Google Workspace accounts, you should only have one option for logging in, mirroring the process for Gmail. We will be bringing the same processes and information from Slack to Chat, so the transition should be seamless once you download the new applications.
You will also have access to your data in Slack until the end of October, but we will remove the ability to publish new messages in some of our most widely used channels effective July 1. The technology team will provide details regarding the retirement of Teams in future communication to users.
This decision did not come lightly. We have Google Chat, Microsoft Teams, Skype Messenger, and Slack used in our district. Microsoft is retiring Skype Messenger, and our district usage was highest for Google Chat when compared to Slack and Teams. Also, we continue to expand our district-wide usage of the Google Workspace tools, which tightly integrate with Chat.
If you have any questions, please contact Corey Ryan.
