Having used IRC for more than 20 years and Jabber-based services and about 20 other chat services over the years, messaging has a role to fill. There are really good reasons why Lync is used heavily in organizations as it is far more efficient than email, but social platforms are used because email is a closed node system where information that has needs to have a life beyond the closed node linked individuals and it is rare projects or groups don’t expand beyond that. Having used all these services, Slack stands out as chat done well, but like this piece points out, it does a lot more too that fixes serious organization pain points.

A couple years back working with a top tier Forture 500 they had over 20 plug-in for Outlook that were available. Many people had 10 to 12, but the number they kept finding was optimal was 4 or 5 (depending on what plug-ins were used to gether). It is like this at a lot of organizations. The helpdesk tickets from the mess of plug-ins and email issues, not getting to knowledge needed beyond the closed nodes of email are massive in most organizations. I know many organizations that have IT happy to support Lync and other chat services as they have vastly lower proportion of helpdesk tickets related to them.

That said, I’m happy to look at what you have, as I know places that are locked in contracts for or two or more years and can’t look at options other than email (although they have heavy cloud-based platform use already that non-IT have approved to get work done).