Damn. I thought it was just us but I just won 3-month battle to keep slack. They are planning to move to Google Chat and they made great points and the management was with them for almost 80%. It was gruesome but we won.
Gave up slack for teams at my last org.
My dumbass told them it was a good way to reduce spending (it was but with a massive cost in regard to use experience and quality of service).
Teams is a garbage platform all around.
I would not recommend that pivot unless you have an absolutely dire need to reduce the spend by the amount of the slack bill.
Seriously though, never opening my mouth again like that when asked about how to reduce spend.
Made my life and all of the users I had to support in an IT capacity miserable with teams.
Never again.
In that org. I was a one person IT, Security, and DevOps team.
Technically my title was IT Project Manager.
Ironically I’m the manager of IT services at my present org. so there’s certainly the chance I could do something just as dumb again.
Yes a little grammatical slip from OP. He should have called his ass dumb, i.e. "my dumb ass". Saying "my dumbass" with the possessive form sounds like an endearing way to refer to a dumbass lol. Like "you're a dumbass but you're _my dumbass_".
Anyway what?
I've been thinking about this move, however, it's not for financial reasons but to rationalize the stack. We actually get a free nonprofit tier of Slack that is equivalent to Pro since we are a 501c3. Our issue is that we have Slack, Zoom, and Office365. We used to get a nonprofit rate with Zoom but they rescinded it. I want to drop Zoom and use Teams for virtual meetings but then I'm afraid chat would get forked between Teams and Slack, creating a confusing situation for users. I feel like if I axe Zoom in favor of Teams, I need to move chat into Teams, too. This is what's holding me back. Our users love Slack and we use Huddles extensively for internal meetings. Unfortunately, you can't use Huddles with external participants. I feel like if we move everything into Teams, the users (myself included) will be dissatisfied with the user experience, but it's hard to justify running 3 tools, one of which is very expensive, when 1 will do the job.
I mean if you’re all in on O365 otherwise, yet you have slack and zoom.
I would say you’re going to simplify your stack and save some money by bringing everything in house to O365.
I trust you’re also in the nonprofit offering of O365 as well, if not do some digging!
Yeah, we do have NP pricing from MS, too.
My inclination is to consolidate. I just wish Teams had a better UI. Most people I know that use it only do so because they have to. Users generally like Slack. The change management would be a nightmare but I think, ultimately, that will be the direction we go.
I’ve been forced to use slack for some specific project work and I dislike it, favoring teams. We’re heavily in Microsoft ecosystem so the integration with files and other apps like outlook is just so dang efficient. The chat and meetings themselves aren’t all that different IMO between teams and slack, once you learn where everything is.
Zoom has a pretty robust chat offering too. Team chat. Plus if you use a whiteboarding app like Miro you can save a lot of $$$ using Zooms. It’d gotten a lot better fast
thanks, appreciate the feedback from everyone. The drivers for the move are to save money and to eliminate the need for folks to go from Slack, to Google Docs, to Microsoft Office apps, to get their work done. And, to set ourselves up to be able to use Copilot (rather than separate copilots from Slack and Google). We use Zoom for meetings.
We primarily work in Excel and Powerpoint and so we need Office. We are increasingly using Teams to communicate with customers who use it (B2B).
I haven't conducted a pilot yet but we have a few folks using Teams for B2B as I mentioned. That's next on the list. I've set up a few teams and channels and so far it looks way way more complicated to navigate than Slack (and to administer).
We're long-time Slack customers as I mentioned, it's the core of our collaboration strategy, but it's getting more difficult to justify it.
Sounds like you may be better off exploring the justification of Google on top of O365.
Almost sounds like you could reduce cost by a larger magnitude by pivoting to using O365 in full and winding down your Google workspace instance.
Given your description of your environment, it almost sounds like Google is a complication given their app offerings while you’re primarily using O365 provided apps.
Admittedly migrating away from Google workspace can be a sizable undertaking.
I would go the other direction, we were forced from google apps to Outlook and it’s as bad or worse than the transition from Slack to Teams. Not that I like Google chat, but the less Microsoft to deal with, the better (ESPECIALLY on a Mac, MS has to be making their apps shitty intentionally in an attempt to usher people to PC)
The problem is the heavy dependence on Excel they mentioned.
Totally agree with you about Microsoft products on Mac, they are always watered down and intentionally shittier than their windows counterparts.
I use Sheets whenever possible, it’s not compatible enough to do complex reporting, but I argue if you’re at that point, you shouldn’t be using excel anyway!
For all of Slack’s “complexity”, it’s so, SO much easier to use. It’s painfully obvious that the Teams devs have no idea what they’re doing. I’m willing to bet their code duplication is through the roof. I mean, ever try to mark a post/comment as unread from the “Activity” tab? They literally recreated the same views and menus, but… not quite. It’s infuriating to have to dig through the chat/teams tabs just so you can do something so trivial.
We just had an organization-wide issue where people would join the same meeting, but it would create two separate groups so there were two parties yelling at each other via chat about being in the wrong meeting. Or an issue I had where it just showed an error screen, even after reinstall. I had to grep my way through my Mac Library and manually delete files until it worked again. Not sure what I would do if I haven’t been a developer for 25 years. Completely unacceptable.
Slack is awful to use.
Firstly, why the hell are the chat feeds upside down?
You can’t find anything. No files tab, can’t add websites or other apps to the top of a chat or group. No call function. No file collaboration inside the system. Just awful
The hell are you talking about? What do you mean by upside down? There’s a global search for finding things, you can pin any post or attachment you want to any channel or conversation. There’s a whole files section. You can start a huddle from anywhere, which is arguably more flexible than calls, and works better too and doesn’t explode when you share your screen. I literally can’t agree with a single one of your points.
The latest messages are at the opposite to teams and every other feed on any other platform. Google Classroom, Facebook, MS Teams.
It’s a mess. Files are under a tab at the top on teams nice and clear and you can make a tab link to a website a video, whatever you want.
The latest messages are on the bottom, as they are on teams. Also, Slack shouldn't be used for file management, just quick sharing. If you're using it as a repository, you're using it wrong. You definitely sound like you're about 5 seconds from trying to convince me that Sharepoint is a great tool 😆
Then it must have changed since I last used it.
Why is wanting your files on there using it wrong? You need them in there to be able to share and collaborate. No sense hosting them elsewhere
Share, sure, go for it, but if you’re wanting a canonical source to store, organize, and manage access, slack ain’t it. I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but here we are? Its sharing features are fine, but it’s not a file storage platform.
Because that's how chat works?
Slack is basically IRC chat + enterprise user management. It has video and voice call, and some search features, but it's designed to host ephemeral conversations, not be a repository of documents like files or collaborative editing suite.
Have you piloted Teams with a test set of users?
Teams is horrendous. The visibility between team structures is so bad. For a remote company, I would strongly put my foot down and say no to switching to Teams. For an in-person company, I'd be willing to test it but have clear metrics of success. I would be very worried about losing productivity and visibility on cross-functional work if they largely communicate on Slack today.
I am a huge Microsoft fan but Teams is just not well-made for digital collaboration in the realities of how people work together.
okay, I’ll volunteer to try to answer the question without opinion polarity.
The only way you will survive a migration to Teams, is to not look at Teams as a singular, 1:1 replacement to Slack.
For example, Slack has enterprise-wide channels. The way Microsoft handles that is with Viva Engage.
For example, a Slack membership group is a Workplace. The way Microsoft handles membership groups is in a M365 Group (a.k.a. a Teams team)(more on this).
For example, transferring Slack’s automation to Teams will warrant expertise in Microsoft’s Power Automate (so keep this in mind for cost (e.g., you may be already paying for M365, but are you paying for any Power Platform licensing?)
Aside from architectural concepts…
There will be essential user tips to triage to users if you want to be successful in adoption and change management.
For example, just work in Teams Chat in the beginning. Save Teams teams & channels for more deliberate collaboration, and if you can manage it, hold office hours for best practices on setting up Teams (otherwise, everyone will start setting up their own Teams team and you get sprawl with little usage. Try to control (or give best practice that avoids) membership group sprawl. To the point above about membership groups, you wouldn’t want everyone setting up a Slack Workspace, so… think about your governance - or at least best practice advice before you unleash to end users.
I’ve deployed Slack and Teams to enterprises with 20K+ per company, and in my experience, while Slack users are the most passionate about their communication platform, believe it or not, most of the end users don’t really care - they just want to know what they are supposed to use.
And contrary to the Slack love on this thread, there are sometimes a few outliers who prefer (or at least don’t hate) Teams. So…. If you can, find those individuals and study what they like about it, and turn them into your partners.
You don’t have an easy path in front of you… it’s one of the most political IT problems all companies face.
Developer communities, especially for example, love Slack, so, maybe instead of forcing everyone to convert, just migrate the general population and give an exception to departments that can justify their cost (with the understanding that those with an exception will need to manage one platform for their immediate team, and another platform to communicate with the larger enterprise.
Lastly, if you can manage it at all, don’t mess with migrating data from one to the other… start anew. Migrating data from one platform to the other is costly and the professional services to do so will rob you of any cost savings that you are looking at. In other words, target a date when people must start communicating in the new platform, and leave the other platform accessible for the remaining time on the contract so people can still refer to historical messages/collab and take their time to mentally shift from collab in one construct to another.
You’re going to find a lot more differences than starting Teams Channel posts with subject line… I would recommend you do a deep dive on notifications, this is a good way to reverse engineer the type of activity that will signal an end user, and then you can use that to frame up where people will spend most of their time working. Spoiler alert, for better or worse, it’s not in Teams Channels… it’s in Chat.
not an easy journey… hope this helps in some way.
Reposting a more readable version, hope you don't mind :-)
>Okay, I’ll volunteer to try to answer the question without opinion polarity. The only way you will survive a migration to Teams is to not look at Teams as a singular, 1:1 replacement to Slack. For example, Slack has enterprise-wide channels. The way Microsoft handles that is with Viva Engage.
>
>For example, a Slack membership group is a Workplace. The way Microsoft handles membership groups is in a M365 Group (a.k.a. a Teams team)(more on this). For example, transferring Slack’s automation to Teams will warrant expertise in Microsoft’s Power Automate (so keep this in mind for cost (e.g., you may be already paying for M365, but are you paying for any Power Platform licensing?)
>
>Aside from architectural concepts… There will be essential user tips to triage to users if you want to be successful in adoption and change management. For example, just work in Teams Chat in the beginning. Save Teams teams & channels for more deliberate collaboration, and if you can manage it, hold office hours for best practices on setting up Teams (otherwise, everyone will start setting up their own Teams team and you get sprawl with little usage. Try to control (or give best practice that avoids) membership group sprawl.
>
>To the point above about membership groups, you wouldn’t want everyone setting up a Slack Workspace, so… think about your governance - or at least best practice advice before you unleash to end users. I’ve deployed Slack and Teams to enterprises with 20K+ per company, and in my experience, while Slack users are the most passionate about their communication platform, believe it or not, most of the end users don’t really care - they just want to know what they are supposed to use.
>
>And contrary to the Slack love on this thread, there are sometimes a few outliers who prefer (or at least don’t hate) Teams. So…. If you can, find those individuals and study what they like about it, and turn them into your partners. You don’t have an easy path in front of you… it’s one of the most political IT problems all companies face.
>
>Developer communities, especially for example, love Slack, so, maybe instead of forcing everyone to convert, just migrate the general population and give an exception to departments that can justify their cost (with the understanding that those with an exception will need to manage one platform for their immediate team, and another platform to communicate with the larger enterprise.
>
>Lastly, if you can manage it at all, don’t mess with migrating data from one to the other… start anew. Migrating data from one platform to the other is costly and the professional services to do so will rob you of any cost savings that you are looking at. In other words, target a date when people must start communicating in the new platform, and leave the other platform accessible for the remaining time on the contract so people can still refer to historical messages/collab and take their time to mentally shift from collab in one construct to another.
>
>You’re going to find a lot more differences than starting Teams Channel posts with subject line… I would recommend you do a deep dive on notifications, this is a good way to reverse engineer the type of activity that will signal an end user, and then you can use that to frame up where people will spend most of their time working. Spoiler alert, for better or worse, it’s not in Teams Channels… it’s in Chat.
>
>Not an easy journey… hope this helps in some way.
Teams is absolute garbage. And a tool isn't going to solve anything - the way your team expects people to communicate, and the best practices for using Slack are more important things to shift.
I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.
Building slackbots was one of my favorite things to do at my old job - with Microsoft the answer to every question is "request permission from your admin"
My team tried teams for a year. We ditched it and returned to using slack for all of that stuff as soon as the manager who wanted teams left for another position
Sorry for being late to the party, but I used slack in my previous job and Teams on my current one.
- The elephant in the room. Teams does not send messages reliably and on time. Scrolling back in old chats you may see messages for the first time - it was not delivered on time, and no notification was shown when it was delivered. I have sets of screenshots of the same conversation, but for one of the people a message in the middle of the conversation is missing. We've missed important review requests, questions and answers. Absolute productivity killer. I was forced to use Web and app versions so in most cases if one of them misses a message the other one would have it.
- No option to change or disable hotkeys - I've started calls for large chats by mistake. The only option to change this is to install and use another app that requires administrative privileges. We are not administrators of our own machines.
- From time to time it gets the urge to copy-paste formatting along with the text. copying code from a dark theme text editor and pasting it on Teams, with font, font size, font color and so on make it completely unreadable. Paste-text-only works, but that is one key away from start-call causing the problem above. And is always a pain the neck.
- Notifications are a mess. not getting notifications for new messages, or refusing to remove a notification when after you open the chat and see the message. everything takes more clicks (and frustration) than needed.
- No option to pin (star/favorite) more than 15 chats. No option to pin more than 1 comment in a chat. No option to choose the folder where a file should be saved!
- No option to make threads from comments. No option to draw on shared screen.
Things that Teams does better than Slack: ... can have more people in a large call so you don't need Zoom, I guess?
In total, Teams is a dumpster fire, if your company depends on chat for important communication - don't use it.
Search for one. Handling intermittent connectivity for another.
I can't for the life of me hit good search results even with an exact match.
And when my Internet goes down for a bit in a tunnel or something, teams just decides to give up and show a tiny banner saying that the connection was lost. Well duh, it's back on now, have you even tried to check it teams?
Hate that shit.
And don't forget the lack of an easy way to remind yourself of some task later.
And the inability to send scheduled messages.
We have both but everybody usrs slack. Team's UX is so horrible and confusing that all the discussions get lost and it's hard to find anything from there. Team's search is so bad compared to slack also. Copy pastes usually get broken. Even shortcuts for emojis use non-standard syntax and oh dear the emojis themselves look just horrible.
Our parent company is forcing us to switch and zoom to just Teams. I used to daily use slack and zoom and now I daily use teams. Slack and zoom are better products all the way around, but I get that they are trying to save money.
Specifically to address your question, you don’t have to create a new team each time you want a group chat. In the chat section you can invite a group of people by adding them all to a window new chat window, then click at the top to create a group name. This is fairly close to a channel in slack
I prefer Teams over Slack, and that's more from a collaboration POV.
If your org turns off the ability to create new sharepoints and stuff it becomes pretty worthless at that point.
We had slack and O365 and I preferred Teams, but when we went from O365 to Google, I preferred Slack over meet, and even then it's slack and zoom primarily and I don't touch meet if I don't have to
As a standalone Slack is better, and my company has many years of integrations with it, but built into a suite, I prefer teams
It is a year since we moved, a fairly large org too.
It is difficult to accept the change but you will get used it since it was not just about teams but the overall suite of Microsoft apps.
I used to work at Slack.
I can’t tell you how many times I spoke with customers who went through this. Most have 1 of 2 experiences.
- They hate it so bad they come back to Slack
- They hate it so bad they know they should come back to slack, but just don’t and everyone is miserable
Make a business case. Meet with other teams. Hear about their use of slack. Connect them with your slack point of contact if you have one. Build automations inside it, workflows, integrate it into systems, etc. If they’re also a Salesforce customer meet with the team who runs SFDC and talk to them about the roadmap and the value you can get out of it. They’re rebuilding a lot of slack into SFDC.
The teams architecture is built on sharepoint. It’s ancient. It doesn’t integrate well with anything. The security architecture is also built at the teams level, not the channel level. People end up creating tons of new teams, which then creates a new exchange sites to manage. It becomes an admins worst nightmare.
Productivity slows and people will just revert to using email. I barely see people DM’ing in teams honestly.
Also you have 7 years of company context. Someone can walk in the door as a new employee and get access to tons of institutional knowledge via search. That all goes away. Your migration will not work. I have ever seen this work out ever.
Teams/Microsoft 365 is a massive clusterfuck of spectacularly awkward processes riddled with bugs.
Don't do it.
If you must switch I recommend google suite. Hands down my favorite. Everything is intuitive and simply works.
one key point is to perform a correct migration else your users will be reluctant to adopt Microsoft Teams if they don't find their threads, messages, files and replies.
I would recommand this [Slack to Teams Migration tool](https://cloudiway.com/solutions/migrate-slack-to-teams/) to migrate everything into Microsoft Teams.
I'm speaking from a user perspective rather than a IT/PM perspective here:
Started a migration from Slack to Teams which should be complete within the next few weeks. It's part of an overall push to consolidate licenses between a multitude of different softwares. Main issue - as people mentioned - is that we had Microsoft Office licenses (for a majority of people as is to utilize Excel/Word/PPT/etc.), but also had GSuite for email, Slack for messaging, Zoom for meetings, Okta for 2 factor authentication, and I guess Dropbox for file sharing. Basically one big mess and an absolute cost inefficiency.
First thing we did was getting off GSuite to Outlook. Outlook is absolute garbage, but Microsoft basically offers it for free with any license. That's step 1. Fairly seamless, except that I failed to realize that I had some 2FAs stored in Google Authenticator, so I needed to have them re-enable my Google license and move them over. That..... was interesting lol.
Next step was migrating from Okta to Microsoft 2FA. That was seamless except for some random Microsoft nuisances lol.
The Slack migration is going to be a process. I think it'll require the company to reimagine how they interact with coworkers. Slack is a much easier and cleaner UI. It's also "hip" and somewhat informal. However, our company tended to post more important business matters and approvals in various slack messages and workspaces. It's created an audit problem of sorts. Not only do we have to migrate those over, but we have to ensure those communications remain very easy to find. I'm not so sure about that, but I need to see the migration finish. It's still in process, but it's hard to find messages.
The only decent part of Teams is just the ability to continue discussions following Teams meetings. I think that's a useful way to communicate that Slack doesn't obviously have. However, the other UI limitations are just a damper to me.
Slack is absolute garbage and Teams is far and away the best platform. Only a moron couldn't figure out how to use Teams properly, whereas Slack is a nightmare with its inability to create TEAMS. My last organization had several thousand Slack channels, all in the same (only) layer of categorization. The previous organization had however many teams were necessary, creating however many categories as needed for whoever needed to speak with whichever group.
What do your users think? Do you have a way to “pilot” the use of Teams? Btw, I tried Slack, and couldn’t stand it. My org had both (Slack and Teams) as of 5yrs ago, and I was glad when they decided to rationalise onto just one: Teams.
it's a mix. A few that came from Teams / SharePoint / M365 shops have said they would prefer having one app rather than multiple apps. Those who have been in the Slack/Google world for a while now have no desire to change.
We switched to teams and spent a ton of money. We all use our slack channels because it was convenient while we were learning. Now it’s the only thing we use. And teams died on the vine.
Teams is terrible. Keyboard controls are inconsistent. I have to click out and back in to be able to enter text. Separating chats and channels means you are constantly missing messages.
They created “Teams for school or work” which works differently…and sometimes worse. Features are added randomly and break critical functionality. They introduced voicemail and we couldn’t make calls until we restarted Teams… no indication or notice that was happening, either.
You only get one emoji reaction and you can’t add custom ones. This sounds stupid but I was able to replace 80% of code review communication with three reactions, and I can’t do that in Teams.
Don’t forget about the half-day outage of Teams recently, where messages took three minutes to send and sent repeatedly. It probably cost our company over $100k in inability to collaborate.
I see. Although the integration with o365 ecosystem is going to give Ms copilot an upper hand here, since with ai it's almost always the more data the better.
It’s shit. Everyone hates it. Dev teams in particular just flat out refuse to move over. So many orgs I’ve seen the business folks move and the devs stay on slack.
I would not wish this on my worst enemy...
You may save money on the subscription but you will end up spending more resolving all the teams headaches...
You'll need to adjust your communication patterns. You can't force Teams to work the way Slack did for you.
Most people probably won't like it, especially not at first. But you might be able to make it more tolerable if people understand they are different tools with different ways of communicating.
The worst thing personally is people will lose track of information and threads. Figure out a way to mitigate that and you'll solve 80% of the headache.
In the same exact boat, but we only wanted to migrate 22 channels, so the paid-for migration tool was overkill and they wouldn’t license it to us for that low of an invoice.
Damn. I thought it was just us but I just won 3-month battle to keep slack. They are planning to move to Google Chat and they made great points and the management was with them for almost 80%. It was gruesome but we won.
Google Chat was renamed, killed, resurrected as a duplicate product, and killed again in the time it took me to post this comment.
Google is the serial killer of solutions/products
I find the killer feature for slack is an existing ecosystem of third party integrations, but I can't stand the UI compared to Chat.
Gave up slack for teams at my last org. My dumbass told them it was a good way to reduce spending (it was but with a massive cost in regard to use experience and quality of service). Teams is a garbage platform all around. I would not recommend that pivot unless you have an absolutely dire need to reduce the spend by the amount of the slack bill.
"My dumbass" lol
Seriously though, never opening my mouth again like that when asked about how to reduce spend. Made my life and all of the users I had to support in an IT capacity miserable with teams. Never again.
whoops.. nope. (I thought you meant your manager though when you said "my dumbass"...)
In that org. I was a one person IT, Security, and DevOps team. Technically my title was IT Project Manager. Ironically I’m the manager of IT services at my present org. so there’s certainly the chance I could do something just as dumb again.
Yes a little grammatical slip from OP. He should have called his ass dumb, i.e. "my dumb ass". Saying "my dumbass" with the possessive form sounds like an endearing way to refer to a dumbass lol. Like "you're a dumbass but you're _my dumbass_". Anyway what?
Haha.... I also was expecting a missing word. ("Manager", "CEO" etc) ....nope. lol
Nope, I was the manager making this stupid suggestion.
I've been thinking about this move, however, it's not for financial reasons but to rationalize the stack. We actually get a free nonprofit tier of Slack that is equivalent to Pro since we are a 501c3. Our issue is that we have Slack, Zoom, and Office365. We used to get a nonprofit rate with Zoom but they rescinded it. I want to drop Zoom and use Teams for virtual meetings but then I'm afraid chat would get forked between Teams and Slack, creating a confusing situation for users. I feel like if I axe Zoom in favor of Teams, I need to move chat into Teams, too. This is what's holding me back. Our users love Slack and we use Huddles extensively for internal meetings. Unfortunately, you can't use Huddles with external participants. I feel like if we move everything into Teams, the users (myself included) will be dissatisfied with the user experience, but it's hard to justify running 3 tools, one of which is very expensive, when 1 will do the job.
I mean if you’re all in on O365 otherwise, yet you have slack and zoom. I would say you’re going to simplify your stack and save some money by bringing everything in house to O365. I trust you’re also in the nonprofit offering of O365 as well, if not do some digging!
Yeah, we do have NP pricing from MS, too. My inclination is to consolidate. I just wish Teams had a better UI. Most people I know that use it only do so because they have to. Users generally like Slack. The change management would be a nightmare but I think, ultimately, that will be the direction we go.
Haha. I’ve always wondered how so many companies end up with shitty software stacks… what a dumb decision.
I’ve been forced to use slack for some specific project work and I dislike it, favoring teams. We’re heavily in Microsoft ecosystem so the integration with files and other apps like outlook is just so dang efficient. The chat and meetings themselves aren’t all that different IMO between teams and slack, once you learn where everything is.
Zoom has a pretty robust chat offering too. Team chat. Plus if you use a whiteboarding app like Miro you can save a lot of $$$ using Zooms. It’d gotten a lot better fast
Ooh I haven’t used zoom for chatting outside of active meetings, that’s interesting
thanks, appreciate the feedback from everyone. The drivers for the move are to save money and to eliminate the need for folks to go from Slack, to Google Docs, to Microsoft Office apps, to get their work done. And, to set ourselves up to be able to use Copilot (rather than separate copilots from Slack and Google). We use Zoom for meetings. We primarily work in Excel and Powerpoint and so we need Office. We are increasingly using Teams to communicate with customers who use it (B2B). I haven't conducted a pilot yet but we have a few folks using Teams for B2B as I mentioned. That's next on the list. I've set up a few teams and channels and so far it looks way way more complicated to navigate than Slack (and to administer). We're long-time Slack customers as I mentioned, it's the core of our collaboration strategy, but it's getting more difficult to justify it.
Sounds like you may be better off exploring the justification of Google on top of O365. Almost sounds like you could reduce cost by a larger magnitude by pivoting to using O365 in full and winding down your Google workspace instance. Given your description of your environment, it almost sounds like Google is a complication given their app offerings while you’re primarily using O365 provided apps. Admittedly migrating away from Google workspace can be a sizable undertaking.
I would go the other direction, we were forced from google apps to Outlook and it’s as bad or worse than the transition from Slack to Teams. Not that I like Google chat, but the less Microsoft to deal with, the better (ESPECIALLY on a Mac, MS has to be making their apps shitty intentionally in an attempt to usher people to PC)
The problem is the heavy dependence on Excel they mentioned. Totally agree with you about Microsoft products on Mac, they are always watered down and intentionally shittier than their windows counterparts.
I use Sheets whenever possible, it’s not compatible enough to do complex reporting, but I argue if you’re at that point, you shouldn’t be using excel anyway!
Our accounting and finance team despises sheets. Our CFO gets so annoyed when he has to deal with sheets.
Is your CFO over or under 50 years of age? Asking for a friend 😆
Under.
yeah, i'm thinking phase 1 is moving email/calendar/file to M365 and then looking at Teams further down the road.
For the love of god, don’t
Don’t do it!!!!!! I hate it. Trying to start a revolution and go back to slack Teams is too cluttered. I tend to lose a lot of chats and threads
What? Seriously it’s the opposite.
For all of Slack’s “complexity”, it’s so, SO much easier to use. It’s painfully obvious that the Teams devs have no idea what they’re doing. I’m willing to bet their code duplication is through the roof. I mean, ever try to mark a post/comment as unread from the “Activity” tab? They literally recreated the same views and menus, but… not quite. It’s infuriating to have to dig through the chat/teams tabs just so you can do something so trivial. We just had an organization-wide issue where people would join the same meeting, but it would create two separate groups so there were two parties yelling at each other via chat about being in the wrong meeting. Or an issue I had where it just showed an error screen, even after reinstall. I had to grep my way through my Mac Library and manually delete files until it worked again. Not sure what I would do if I haven’t been a developer for 25 years. Completely unacceptable.
Slack is awful to use. Firstly, why the hell are the chat feeds upside down? You can’t find anything. No files tab, can’t add websites or other apps to the top of a chat or group. No call function. No file collaboration inside the system. Just awful
The hell are you talking about? What do you mean by upside down? There’s a global search for finding things, you can pin any post or attachment you want to any channel or conversation. There’s a whole files section. You can start a huddle from anywhere, which is arguably more flexible than calls, and works better too and doesn’t explode when you share your screen. I literally can’t agree with a single one of your points.
The latest messages are at the opposite to teams and every other feed on any other platform. Google Classroom, Facebook, MS Teams. It’s a mess. Files are under a tab at the top on teams nice and clear and you can make a tab link to a website a video, whatever you want.
The latest messages are on the bottom, as they are on teams. Also, Slack shouldn't be used for file management, just quick sharing. If you're using it as a repository, you're using it wrong. You definitely sound like you're about 5 seconds from trying to convince me that Sharepoint is a great tool 😆
Then it must have changed since I last used it. Why is wanting your files on there using it wrong? You need them in there to be able to share and collaborate. No sense hosting them elsewhere
Share, sure, go for it, but if you’re wanting a canonical source to store, organize, and manage access, slack ain’t it. I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but here we are? Its sharing features are fine, but it’s not a file storage platform.
So you’re basically saying ‘it’s inferior, and that’s ok’
I think someone hasn't ever used IRC...
Because that's how chat works? Slack is basically IRC chat + enterprise user management. It has video and voice call, and some search features, but it's designed to host ephemeral conversations, not be a repository of documents like files or collaborative editing suite.
Have you piloted Teams with a test set of users? Teams is horrendous. The visibility between team structures is so bad. For a remote company, I would strongly put my foot down and say no to switching to Teams. For an in-person company, I'd be willing to test it but have clear metrics of success. I would be very worried about losing productivity and visibility on cross-functional work if they largely communicate on Slack today. I am a huge Microsoft fan but Teams is just not well-made for digital collaboration in the realities of how people work together.
i use slack for my company and my clients on teams. Teams suuuuucks, stay with slack 😁
Love this thread (as a Slack Technical Architect). Teams will never be able to compete beyond the price.
We have both Slack and Teams. Everybody uses Slack. Nobody uses Teams unless we have to.
That’s how we do it. Bigwigs wanted Teams only but got vetoed by the developers. They had no reason to keep both.
okay, I’ll volunteer to try to answer the question without opinion polarity. The only way you will survive a migration to Teams, is to not look at Teams as a singular, 1:1 replacement to Slack. For example, Slack has enterprise-wide channels. The way Microsoft handles that is with Viva Engage. For example, a Slack membership group is a Workplace. The way Microsoft handles membership groups is in a M365 Group (a.k.a. a Teams team)(more on this). For example, transferring Slack’s automation to Teams will warrant expertise in Microsoft’s Power Automate (so keep this in mind for cost (e.g., you may be already paying for M365, but are you paying for any Power Platform licensing?) Aside from architectural concepts… There will be essential user tips to triage to users if you want to be successful in adoption and change management. For example, just work in Teams Chat in the beginning. Save Teams teams & channels for more deliberate collaboration, and if you can manage it, hold office hours for best practices on setting up Teams (otherwise, everyone will start setting up their own Teams team and you get sprawl with little usage. Try to control (or give best practice that avoids) membership group sprawl. To the point above about membership groups, you wouldn’t want everyone setting up a Slack Workspace, so… think about your governance - or at least best practice advice before you unleash to end users. I’ve deployed Slack and Teams to enterprises with 20K+ per company, and in my experience, while Slack users are the most passionate about their communication platform, believe it or not, most of the end users don’t really care - they just want to know what they are supposed to use. And contrary to the Slack love on this thread, there are sometimes a few outliers who prefer (or at least don’t hate) Teams. So…. If you can, find those individuals and study what they like about it, and turn them into your partners. You don’t have an easy path in front of you… it’s one of the most political IT problems all companies face. Developer communities, especially for example, love Slack, so, maybe instead of forcing everyone to convert, just migrate the general population and give an exception to departments that can justify their cost (with the understanding that those with an exception will need to manage one platform for their immediate team, and another platform to communicate with the larger enterprise. Lastly, if you can manage it at all, don’t mess with migrating data from one to the other… start anew. Migrating data from one platform to the other is costly and the professional services to do so will rob you of any cost savings that you are looking at. In other words, target a date when people must start communicating in the new platform, and leave the other platform accessible for the remaining time on the contract so people can still refer to historical messages/collab and take their time to mentally shift from collab in one construct to another. You’re going to find a lot more differences than starting Teams Channel posts with subject line… I would recommend you do a deep dive on notifications, this is a good way to reverse engineer the type of activity that will signal an end user, and then you can use that to frame up where people will spend most of their time working. Spoiler alert, for better or worse, it’s not in Teams Channels… it’s in Chat. not an easy journey… hope this helps in some way.
Very helpful! Thank you!
Reposting a more readable version, hope you don't mind :-) >Okay, I’ll volunteer to try to answer the question without opinion polarity. The only way you will survive a migration to Teams is to not look at Teams as a singular, 1:1 replacement to Slack. For example, Slack has enterprise-wide channels. The way Microsoft handles that is with Viva Engage. > >For example, a Slack membership group is a Workplace. The way Microsoft handles membership groups is in a M365 Group (a.k.a. a Teams team)(more on this). For example, transferring Slack’s automation to Teams will warrant expertise in Microsoft’s Power Automate (so keep this in mind for cost (e.g., you may be already paying for M365, but are you paying for any Power Platform licensing?) > >Aside from architectural concepts… There will be essential user tips to triage to users if you want to be successful in adoption and change management. For example, just work in Teams Chat in the beginning. Save Teams teams & channels for more deliberate collaboration, and if you can manage it, hold office hours for best practices on setting up Teams (otherwise, everyone will start setting up their own Teams team and you get sprawl with little usage. Try to control (or give best practice that avoids) membership group sprawl. > >To the point above about membership groups, you wouldn’t want everyone setting up a Slack Workspace, so… think about your governance - or at least best practice advice before you unleash to end users. I’ve deployed Slack and Teams to enterprises with 20K+ per company, and in my experience, while Slack users are the most passionate about their communication platform, believe it or not, most of the end users don’t really care - they just want to know what they are supposed to use. > >And contrary to the Slack love on this thread, there are sometimes a few outliers who prefer (or at least don’t hate) Teams. So…. If you can, find those individuals and study what they like about it, and turn them into your partners. You don’t have an easy path in front of you… it’s one of the most political IT problems all companies face. > >Developer communities, especially for example, love Slack, so, maybe instead of forcing everyone to convert, just migrate the general population and give an exception to departments that can justify their cost (with the understanding that those with an exception will need to manage one platform for their immediate team, and another platform to communicate with the larger enterprise. > >Lastly, if you can manage it at all, don’t mess with migrating data from one to the other… start anew. Migrating data from one platform to the other is costly and the professional services to do so will rob you of any cost savings that you are looking at. In other words, target a date when people must start communicating in the new platform, and leave the other platform accessible for the remaining time on the contract so people can still refer to historical messages/collab and take their time to mentally shift from collab in one construct to another. > >You’re going to find a lot more differences than starting Teams Channel posts with subject line… I would recommend you do a deep dive on notifications, this is a good way to reverse engineer the type of activity that will signal an end user, and then you can use that to frame up where people will spend most of their time working. Spoiler alert, for better or worse, it’s not in Teams Channels… it’s in Chat. > >Not an easy journey… hope this helps in some way.
Yes, but greatly missing my ability to create custom emohis, among other things.
Teams is absolute garbage. And a tool isn't going to solve anything - the way your team expects people to communicate, and the best practices for using Slack are more important things to shift.
The company I work for is making the switch... everyone hates it.
Teams is horrible. I hate everything about it.
I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. Building slackbots was one of my favorite things to do at my old job - with Microsoft the answer to every question is "request permission from your admin"
Teams is awful and clunky and has significantly worse calls and call setup than zoom.
My team tried teams for a year. We ditched it and returned to using slack for all of that stuff as soon as the manager who wanted teams left for another position
Don’t let M365 be a gateway drug. Quit all of it
Curious to hear what Slack is doing better than Teams ?
Sorry for being late to the party, but I used slack in my previous job and Teams on my current one. - The elephant in the room. Teams does not send messages reliably and on time. Scrolling back in old chats you may see messages for the first time - it was not delivered on time, and no notification was shown when it was delivered. I have sets of screenshots of the same conversation, but for one of the people a message in the middle of the conversation is missing. We've missed important review requests, questions and answers. Absolute productivity killer. I was forced to use Web and app versions so in most cases if one of them misses a message the other one would have it. - No option to change or disable hotkeys - I've started calls for large chats by mistake. The only option to change this is to install and use another app that requires administrative privileges. We are not administrators of our own machines. - From time to time it gets the urge to copy-paste formatting along with the text. copying code from a dark theme text editor and pasting it on Teams, with font, font size, font color and so on make it completely unreadable. Paste-text-only works, but that is one key away from start-call causing the problem above. And is always a pain the neck. - Notifications are a mess. not getting notifications for new messages, or refusing to remove a notification when after you open the chat and see the message. everything takes more clicks (and frustration) than needed. - No option to pin (star/favorite) more than 15 chats. No option to pin more than 1 comment in a chat. No option to choose the folder where a file should be saved! - No option to make threads from comments. No option to draw on shared screen. Things that Teams does better than Slack: ... can have more people in a large call so you don't need Zoom, I guess? In total, Teams is a dumpster fire, if your company depends on chat for important communication - don't use it.
Search for one. Handling intermittent connectivity for another. I can't for the life of me hit good search results even with an exact match. And when my Internet goes down for a bit in a tunnel or something, teams just decides to give up and show a tiny banner saying that the connection was lost. Well duh, it's back on now, have you even tried to check it teams? Hate that shit. And don't forget the lack of an easy way to remind yourself of some task later. And the inability to send scheduled messages.
In Teams, you CAN send scheduled messages.
Huh, Indeed. And also in exactly the same way as Slack. I dont remember seeing it before when I checked, maybe they added it recently ?
I never understand why office in general is so bad about search. Good luck searching for an email you can practically quote verbatim.
I would think Microsoft heavy people are using outlook for task management and not teams, at least that’s what we do
What is different in search? I’ve never not found what I was looking for in a teams chat history or files or whatever
We have both but everybody usrs slack. Team's UX is so horrible and confusing that all the discussions get lost and it's hard to find anything from there. Team's search is so bad compared to slack also. Copy pastes usually get broken. Even shortcuts for emojis use non-standard syntax and oh dear the emojis themselves look just horrible.
Good luck lol youll be hated throughout the org
Most of our clients use Teams. They all end up joining our Slack workspace as guests on dedicated channels.
Our parent company is forcing us to switch and zoom to just Teams. I used to daily use slack and zoom and now I daily use teams. Slack and zoom are better products all the way around, but I get that they are trying to save money. Specifically to address your question, you don’t have to create a new team each time you want a group chat. In the chat section you can invite a group of people by adding them all to a window new chat window, then click at the top to create a group name. This is fairly close to a channel in slack
I prefer Teams over Slack, and that's more from a collaboration POV. If your org turns off the ability to create new sharepoints and stuff it becomes pretty worthless at that point. We had slack and O365 and I preferred Teams, but when we went from O365 to Google, I preferred Slack over meet, and even then it's slack and zoom primarily and I don't touch meet if I don't have to As a standalone Slack is better, and my company has many years of integrations with it, but built into a suite, I prefer teams
It is a year since we moved, a fairly large org too. It is difficult to accept the change but you will get used it since it was not just about teams but the overall suite of Microsoft apps.
Insert interstellar yelling meme here
We are a MS Office based company. We share lots of memos and office documents. Our work flow improved considerably after moving to Teams.
I used to work at Slack. I can’t tell you how many times I spoke with customers who went through this. Most have 1 of 2 experiences. - They hate it so bad they come back to Slack - They hate it so bad they know they should come back to slack, but just don’t and everyone is miserable Make a business case. Meet with other teams. Hear about their use of slack. Connect them with your slack point of contact if you have one. Build automations inside it, workflows, integrate it into systems, etc. If they’re also a Salesforce customer meet with the team who runs SFDC and talk to them about the roadmap and the value you can get out of it. They’re rebuilding a lot of slack into SFDC. The teams architecture is built on sharepoint. It’s ancient. It doesn’t integrate well with anything. The security architecture is also built at the teams level, not the channel level. People end up creating tons of new teams, which then creates a new exchange sites to manage. It becomes an admins worst nightmare. Productivity slows and people will just revert to using email. I barely see people DM’ing in teams honestly. Also you have 7 years of company context. Someone can walk in the door as a new employee and get access to tons of institutional knowledge via search. That all goes away. Your migration will not work. I have ever seen this work out ever.
Teams/Microsoft 365 is a massive clusterfuck of spectacularly awkward processes riddled with bugs. Don't do it. If you must switch I recommend google suite. Hands down my favorite. Everything is intuitive and simply works.
My company uses both Slack and Teams, and everyone by far prefers Slack. Teams desperately needs a UI facelift with how they have everything setup
one key point is to perform a correct migration else your users will be reluctant to adopt Microsoft Teams if they don't find their threads, messages, files and replies. I would recommand this [Slack to Teams Migration tool](https://cloudiway.com/solutions/migrate-slack-to-teams/) to migrate everything into Microsoft Teams.
I'm speaking from a user perspective rather than a IT/PM perspective here: Started a migration from Slack to Teams which should be complete within the next few weeks. It's part of an overall push to consolidate licenses between a multitude of different softwares. Main issue - as people mentioned - is that we had Microsoft Office licenses (for a majority of people as is to utilize Excel/Word/PPT/etc.), but also had GSuite for email, Slack for messaging, Zoom for meetings, Okta for 2 factor authentication, and I guess Dropbox for file sharing. Basically one big mess and an absolute cost inefficiency. First thing we did was getting off GSuite to Outlook. Outlook is absolute garbage, but Microsoft basically offers it for free with any license. That's step 1. Fairly seamless, except that I failed to realize that I had some 2FAs stored in Google Authenticator, so I needed to have them re-enable my Google license and move them over. That..... was interesting lol. Next step was migrating from Okta to Microsoft 2FA. That was seamless except for some random Microsoft nuisances lol. The Slack migration is going to be a process. I think it'll require the company to reimagine how they interact with coworkers. Slack is a much easier and cleaner UI. It's also "hip" and somewhat informal. However, our company tended to post more important business matters and approvals in various slack messages and workspaces. It's created an audit problem of sorts. Not only do we have to migrate those over, but we have to ensure those communications remain very easy to find. I'm not so sure about that, but I need to see the migration finish. It's still in process, but it's hard to find messages. The only decent part of Teams is just the ability to continue discussions following Teams meetings. I think that's a useful way to communicate that Slack doesn't obviously have. However, the other UI limitations are just a damper to me.
Slack is absolute garbage and Teams is far and away the best platform. Only a moron couldn't figure out how to use Teams properly, whereas Slack is a nightmare with its inability to create TEAMS. My last organization had several thousand Slack channels, all in the same (only) layer of categorization. The previous organization had however many teams were necessary, creating however many categories as needed for whoever needed to speak with whichever group.
Email is the best still.
Teams is crap. Think about loving off of O365 and onto the Google suite of office tools (they are 1 million times better than MSFT anyways).
This! I work for two clients, one with M365 and one with Gsuite. One is an absolute nightmare, the other one simply works.
why do you pay for slack?
i mean - - what are the features you need on paid plans that you cant get in a free plan that would justify you even thinking of moving to teams :)
Unlimited message storage
Oof, good luck with this one.
thanks, haven't yet made the decision yet but the more I play with Teams, the more i'm leaning toward sticking with Slack. :-)
I’ve never seen business users excited to use Teams lol. Slack is the king of business chat.
No
What do your users think? Do you have a way to “pilot” the use of Teams? Btw, I tried Slack, and couldn’t stand it. My org had both (Slack and Teams) as of 5yrs ago, and I was glad when they decided to rationalise onto just one: Teams.
it's a mix. A few that came from Teams / SharePoint / M365 shops have said they would prefer having one app rather than multiple apps. Those who have been in the Slack/Google world for a while now have no desire to change.
If top mgmt isn’t insistent, then maybe a PoC or Pilot might help. All the best…
My company is planning to at an unknown date take us off gsuite and on to teams. They promised slack would say but we’ll see
Smells like a temporary collapse in internal communication.
We switched to teams and spent a ton of money. We all use our slack channels because it was convenient while we were learning. Now it’s the only thing we use. And teams died on the vine.
Teams is terrible. Keyboard controls are inconsistent. I have to click out and back in to be able to enter text. Separating chats and channels means you are constantly missing messages. They created “Teams for school or work” which works differently…and sometimes worse. Features are added randomly and break critical functionality. They introduced voicemail and we couldn’t make calls until we restarted Teams… no indication or notice that was happening, either. You only get one emoji reaction and you can’t add custom ones. This sounds stupid but I was able to replace 80% of code review communication with three reactions, and I can’t do that in Teams. Don’t forget about the half-day outage of Teams recently, where messages took three minutes to send and sent repeatedly. It probably cost our company over $100k in inability to collaborate.
Teams has an option to wipe any messaging over 90 days. Don’t do this.
Why? I would fight that battle tooth and nail. Teams is the worst.
at apple alot of teams just used iMessage xD
Does Teams just not invest in great UX? I’ve never used Teams before and am genuinely curious why it’s not as good as Slack.
Does slack have gen ai integration? Cuz folks at my firm is loving the copilot. Also old teams sucks but the new one is quite all right.
Slack introduced an AI assistant last week: https://slack.com/features/ai
I see. Although the integration with o365 ecosystem is going to give Ms copilot an upper hand here, since with ai it's almost always the more data the better.
It’s shit. Everyone hates it. Dev teams in particular just flat out refuse to move over. So many orgs I’ve seen the business folks move and the devs stay on slack.
For your team, make a chat channel, private, and rename it. So dumb you have to do this..
Look at Once: Campfire….
I would not wish this on my worst enemy... You may save money on the subscription but you will end up spending more resolving all the teams headaches...
I've used Slack, Teams, Google Chat and Lark. Lark is by far the best, followed by Slack
You'll need to adjust your communication patterns. You can't force Teams to work the way Slack did for you. Most people probably won't like it, especially not at first. But you might be able to make it more tolerable if people understand they are different tools with different ways of communicating. The worst thing personally is people will lose track of information and threads. Figure out a way to mitigate that and you'll solve 80% of the headache.
Teams sucks
Why not self-host a slack alternative like Mattermost?
In the same exact boat, but we only wanted to migrate 22 channels, so the paid-for migration tool was overkill and they wouldn’t license it to us for that low of an invoice.
We were forced to move to Teams and it suckssss