Group projects are most fun—or at least tolerable—when everyone shares the workload, files are accessible to all, and communication is smooth.

If your group’s teamwork needs improvement, why not give the collaboration app Slack a try?

Beloved by tech companies and startups in the Silicon Valley, Slack’s collaborative capabilities have been proven useful for both large companies and the smallest of groups.

Every Slack project receives a unique URL based on its name. Group members can join via email invitations or through the URL directly. With Slack, all users receive their own profile for messaging other group members.

Group messaging occurs in channels. Channels are similar to chat threads for individual topics. This allows the team to effectively manage communication and search for conversations. Users can send private messages to other users too.

Team members can use the channels to share Microsoft Office files, zip files, PDFs, images and videos with other users.

Computer science and information technology majors, like me, often use Slack to share code. Within the chat function, codes are color-coded by programming language.

Voice calls and video calls are also available within Slack. This is especially useful for students who have privacy concerns and don’t want to share phone numbers. Also, an email address is only required when you sign up for Slack. Once someone has a Slack profile, other users can call or message that profile, ensuring the privacy of email addresses.

Slack also integrates with tools like Google Drive, Trello, Asana, GitHub and Dropbox.

The app can be used with Android and Apple products, web browsers, or standalone Windows apps. The interface is uniform across all the platforms and supports switching between multiple Slack projects with ease.

No matter what type of group project you are doing, I believe Slack will help your team complete your assignment objectives and earn good grades. If for some reason Slack doesn’t suit you, try Discord instead. It’s a favorite of the gaming community for voice and text chat.