| Follow @breale
Durham, NC
Brian Reale, CEO & Co-founder of ProcessMaker, has more than 20 years of experience managing high tech companies. Prior to founding ProcessMaker in 2000, Brian was the General Manager of Unete Telecomunicaciones Ltda., a long distance voice and data carrier in South America that he founded in 1997 and sold to a publicly traded US Telecom company in 2000. Brian also co-founded Spotless LLC, an entertainment technology company. Brian graduated magna cum laude from Duke University in 1993 and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in linguistics to perform research in Ecuador in 1994.
Authored Comments
The challenge for Slack competitors whether open source or closed source is going to be their ability to match the quantity and quality of integrations and the general richness of the ecosystem. People don't use SalesForce, for example, because it is better than other CRM solutions. Rather, they use it (this is our experience) because of the connector ecosystem.
Slack is now way ahead of the competition in this regard.
We switched from slack to hipchat (don't ask why). I found that I really missed a few really simple integrations like /gotomeeting. It was very nice to be able to shave off 20-30 seconds in the process of turning up a gotomeeting.
Even closer to home is our own experience creating a connector for Slack.
We recently integrated Slack with our workflow and microservices orchestration API - ProcessMaker I/O (http://processmaker.io). We have made it very easy to perform business workflows in Slack. The workflows can be started with slash commands like /purchase_request 20 computers. This workflow is then sent to a specific #channel for approval. An "accept" and "reject" button appear to the reviewer. Notifications are sent to the originator. All of this happens directly in slack in a very elegant way.
We did this for Slack because they are the leader. Like other integrations, you would miss out on this by using one of the open source alternatives to slack.
If you want to read more about workflow in slack you can read more here - https://blog.processmaker.io/slack-workflow/