Messengers are becoming more and more popular, as they provide instant communication, are simple way to get and share information. Nowadays it’s hard to imagine a team work without such a messenger, where colleagues can share news, work together, solve issues, discuss problems, share files etc. And sooner or later the question arises: what program can implement all the desired functions for communication in team work. Our team also faced such a dilemma. And we’ve chosen Telegram.
Perhaps it will be surprising to someone that we’ve chosen Telegram, which positions itself as a general messaging program, for sharing information within a group. Frankly speaking, at first time it was strange for me too). But after we had tried Slack, Rocket.Chat, and we weren’t fine with none of them, we decided to try Telegram just for fun. I remember, one of my colleagues said that there were cool stickers, why not try it – so our acquaintance with this messenger began in this way. The first thing that amazed us is the speed of delivery of messages: In Telegram messages come instantly on any device unlike Slack, which lately has been loading very slowly. The second thing that surprised us is wide customization options. Telegram has a lot of ready-made bots of scheduling, integration with a variety of products, and you can easily write your bot (thanks to their API which makes it easy to do).
Nowadays there are so many different streams of information that you need to keep everything in one place, and Telegram copes with it perfectly (it does not matter what you save: e-mails, important notifications or just information for self-development).
Besides working channels, I also have news channels, bots for management, finance, and tracking time. I use Telegram even for writing notes, ideas because you don’t have to spend time switching from one service to another. In addition, various channels facilitate work, for example, the channel for costs and income. And the main advantage is that such a wide range of opportunities is provided by one program! Of course, many will say that it is not a good idea to mix personal life and work, but I think you can find a balance, and when something important happens at work, you will find out about it instantly, even though it may not be a working chat. It helps me to be online in fact 16 hours a day and not miss something important.
A separate topic is, of course, channels. They are convenient for me, becouse I can post news without trash, as often happens in a group). We’ve created a public channel for books, public and private channels for news of our group and channels for development in different directions.
We’ve integrated Trello, GitLab into Telegram that help keep up with notifications. And it took only a couple of minutes!
Lots of robots are created by enthusiasts on the platform of Telegram. Increasingly, among them there are bots that facilitate the work with large broadband services, starting with GitHub, Gitlab (notify you about changes in the repository in real time) and finishing with the Nova Poshta (helps track a parcel and find out more information about it). There are already bots controlling other bots. With the advent of a global API update for creating bots, the arsenal of ways of interaction with them has expanded significantly.
In addition, the capabilities of some of bots are quite enough to replace some applications of the same direction.
It seems that the creators of Telegram strive to make it like a Swiss knife, combining in it functions of the command line, blog and social network.
