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Conversations in

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Slack are organized into channels. Channels are chat rooms with many useful features. You’ll use channels to hold most of your conversations with other users. They can be organized around anything — teams, projects, or even locations — and you can create as many as you need.

There are three kinds of channels: public channelsprivate

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channels, and direct (1-on-1) messages.

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Public channels

Public

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channels are for conversations that are open to all users of

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our workspace, including those from the external community who may have accounts. Public channels channel can be joined by

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any staff member who has an account

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Anything posted to a public channel is browsable and searchable by all members, except for Guests (non-staff members) of your Slack workspace.

Currently, we have the following public channels:

  • #general - a read-only general channel for

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  • any organization wide announcements
  • #random - a

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  • channel for any

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  • cross staff water-cooler discussions on anything at all
  • #ask-the-techteam - an open channel for any member of staff to ask any technical or tooling questions to the technical services team

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New users can join any public channel and read all the information previously shared by other users.

By default only administrators can create public channels. If you require a public channel creating please raise a JIRA Service Request through DevOps Support.

Private groups

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Private channels

They're for discussions that shouldn't be open to your entire workspace. You have to be invited to join a private channel to view it in Slack. A private channel has a  lock icon next to its name.

Private channels are closed channels. They are visible only to their members. Use private groups for subjects that are sensitive, confidential, or limited to a specific group

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By default only SNOMED International Staff can create new private groups.

Private groups can be joined by invitation only. By default, only administrators, room owners, and moderators can invite others to private rooms.

Direct Messages

Direct Messages (DMs) are private, 1-on-1 conversation between team members. You can think of a DM as a private

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channel with only two members.

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By default only SNOMED International Staff can initiate Direct Messages.

In DMs you can also make the conversations 'Off The Record' (OTR), which will ensure that the messages are encrypted.

You can use OTR only in direct chat (1-on-1) and also both sides must be online. When you want to start OTR conversation, click on the key symbol on the right side and then START OTR. After your request is confirmed by other side, all your subsequent messages are encrypted.

In Channel Functionality

Once you are in a channel, on the right side of page you will see the toolbar, and please click on the buttons to see what they do, from information about the channel, searching all messages and users in the channel. However, some useful buttons to be aware of are the following:

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Channel Functionality

Stars

Use stars to mark important items in Slack and help keep them top of mind. Any messages or files you mark with a star are added to your Starred Items for easy reference. Starring a channel or direct message will bump it to the top of your channel list.

Find more information here - https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201331016-Star-channels-messages-or-files 

Pins

Important messages and files can be pinned to the details pane in any channel or direct message, including group messages, for easy reference. Find more information here - https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/205239997-Pin-messages-or-files

Making Calls

Within Slack, you can make a voice or video call using Zoom directly with any member of your workspace. This can be done in two ways:


  1. Click the phone icon at the top right.
  2. type /zoom in the message box

If you have not previously linked your zoom account to your Slack account, you will be asked to do so and follow the simple instructions.

Channel Notification Preferences

You can set channel-specific notification preferences, in addition to desktop and mobile. After all, some channels are certainly more important than others!

For every channel, you can choose the type of activity Slack notifies you about: 

  • All new messages
  • Mentions of your name and any of your keywords
  • Nothing at all. (You'll see a badge in the channel list if you get a direct message or a teammate mentions you or your keywords.)

More information on how to do this can be found here - https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201649323-Set-channel-notification-preferences

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Favorite Channels

To help you organize and prioritize your communications, we recommend you favorite (or star) channels, private groups, and DMs. Starring helps you to avoid noise and to focus on what’s important to you. To favorite a channel, click on the star icon in the upper left hand corner of the message area (next to the

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Example of a starred channelImage Removed

Then the star becomes yellow:

Example of a starred channelImage Removed

and that channel appears under the list of Favorites in the left-hand pane:

Example of a starred channelImage Removed

Joining channels

Find existing channels by clicking on the More channels...Image Removed button on the left-hand pane. Then click on a channel to preview its contents. If you want to join it, click on the JOINImage Removed button.

Hiding and leaving channels

There are two notions of leaving a channel:

  1. To hide a channel is to remain a member of the channel but to remove it from your list of channels on the left-hand pane.
  2. To leave a channel is to remove it from your list of channels and to leave the channel (i.e., no longer be a member of the channel).

To leave a channel, enter the command /leave in the message window. Alternatively, hover your mouse over the channel in the list of channels on the left-hand side and click on the right-pointing arrowImage Removed button. On the mobile app, pull from the left-hand side to see the list of open channels, hold down on the channel to bring up the buttons, and click on the right-pointing arrowImage Removed button.

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channel name).