Recently, Xact Data Discovery posted a new episode of its podcast series, First Chair, in which Mike Gutierrrez discussed data preservation and collection in Slack, the collaboration software. Here are some key points:

1. Use of the software has grown widely in the past five years, and Slack is now used by 65 of the Fortune 100.

2. Unlike many other collaboration applications and messaging services, Slack generally allows for unlimited storage of messages.

3. While email messages can't be edited, Slack messages can.

4. Slack does not include a built-in litigation hold function.

5. There are four subscriptions available:

a. The free subscription will only allow 10,000 messages to be stored.

b. A standard subscription will allow for unlimited message storage, but does not give you the ability to export messages with attachments.

c. The media plus subscription includes the corporate export option which allows for the export of all stored content, including attachments, but does not let an admin target specific data ranges to export.

d. The enterprise subscription allows for the use of third-party APIs to facilitate electronic discovery, but doesn't also include corporate export. Several APIs are in development. Currently Onna; Hanzo; Global Relay; and Smarsh have APIs for Slack.

6. Slack integrates with many different applications including Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive. Some data exchanged using Slack, including screen shares, may not be captured by a discovery API.

7. Data exported from Slack will be in be in separate JSON files for channels; users; integration logs; and folders.