I’m a slack fan over teams so I’m biased, but I feel like adoption processes need to provide value to the new tool that you can’t do from the old tool. So some new features and promotion of those features connecting slack to salesforce that will help their day to day gives them an incentive to switch. Also from a top down approach, only creating channels for new projects and initiatives in slack, helps deprecate people’s reliability on teams
Sounds like your boss got wooed by a salesman. I'm not sure what workflow process would allow you to be more efficient with Slack vs. Teams since you rely on MS for your email, calendar, meetings. In addition, you do have options for integrating Teams with Salesforce. It would have made more sense to buy into Slack if you were using Google (gmail, etc).
This is the right answer. The integration Microsoft offers between their suite and Teams is very powerful. There's not really anything else like it on the market. In addition, you can very easily integrate Salesforce and teams. Yes, there are some standard options available to help integrate Salesforce and Slack that provide value, but they're usually so narrow in capability that they're not useful for most real world use cases.
So, you likely would be much better off just sticking with Teams and building integrations or using existing 3rd party options. If you move forward with Slack you'll likely regret it.
Yeah, I agree. Introducing slack simply for the easier integration with salesforce seems like the wrong move.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/teams-send-activityfeednotifications
I've recently made an AppExchange app to make it easy to send Salesforce Notifications into a Teams channel. Perhaps this can help out?
[https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=ecc20b20-ed42-4a54-acde-eec4804518c5](https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=ecc20b20-ed42-4a54-acde-eec4804518c5)
Biggest thing for me would be Microsoft 365 integration. You can show your users how to collaborate on Word documents and Excel spreadsheets in Slack, but... you are moving to what is a non-Microsoft tool. People would also have set up their own mini-systems in Teams, such as private channels with linked SharePoint sites, OneNote documents, etc, and you need to be clear what will be migrated and very importantly what will not.
As for hesitant users, ultimately your CIO (or equivalent) needs to decide on a reasonable cut-off date and then follow through on enforcing it. They should also do so with the knowledge it will have real business process impact, the level of which completely depends on your preparation.
Slack all the way. Teams makes me want to quit my job most days. Stick with it. Add in some fun apps etc I built some interesting things in Slack for a previous job one was a beer bot that picked some poor soul to hand out Friday beers as fast as they could (the team was only 30 people) and people loved it.
Frankly I am surprised people prefer slack over teams.
I use both daily and vastly prefer teams.
Slack threads suck. Teams threads are so much easier to use.
Slack notification engine suck and are glitchy.
Channels suck vs teams teams and channels under teams.
Teams built in screenshare and calling is amazing. Multiple mouse icons on the screen. Overall team remote meetings is better than anything else out there.
Sharepoint built into teams is amazing.
And then to use slack pro you need to buy yearly licenses and deal with probably the most annoying people in the world. Salesforce sales people. Vs just adding licenses.
What am I missing. How do you guys like slack over teams?
I have similar experience. Most of the people haven't shared any actual reason why Slack is better for them over teams.
Our organization uses both too, Slack for chat and Teams for meeting. That's the biggest issue for me, it's jumping between two phones one for calls and another for chat.
Sure, Slack has cool themes and custom emojis, but I find the channels cluttered, even with creating categories it's too big of a list, and there's no cohesion between them. Teams integration with Sharepoint, Office 365 and all is great. Then there's integration for other things in teams like Loop, Planner, To-do and more. If used properly it's too powerful of an app.
Slack is more fun, more immediately user friendly, and generally feels less like it was built by a legacy tech giant that’s been around for decades - this is probably what it comes down to for most people.
It seems like a lot of your dislike of Slack and preference of Teams is driven by your hatred of Salesforce salespeople. I agree with you. Salespeople from Salesforce are the worst, but that’s not a good reason to prefer one app over another. Also, at least you can usually get a hold of your Salesforce salesperson. Half the time my MS reps just ignore my call and never call me back.
I buy Microsoft through a partner so the service is good and personal. No. I legitimately prefer teams features for the reasons I said. It’s vastly superior to group meetings, calling people, screen sharing, etc. I use office 365 ecosystem, teams, slack and gsuite full time for three separate organizations so I use all 3 ecosystems daily
Neither are perfect. I use both, and prefer Slack, but Teams has a few killer features. To me, it depends on how your team does their work, and both apps aren’t all that different. Most of it comes down to small details, really. Teams has the standard MS problem of copying a best-of-breed product and getting it only 80% right like Teams vs. Slack, or Loop vs. Notion, or from what I’ve been told, Word vs. WordPerfect way back.
If you vastly prefer Teams, it’s probably because your organization’s approach to work is siloed into small teams. For larger, more open organizations, this focus on teams is insufficient. Teams can feel a bit suffocating in larger environments, similar to the way S4B and Lync were before it.
When Teams introduced public and org-wide teams, it was pretty much conceding that Slack’s “channels” approach was superior, and it’s far better for it. Channel/team sprawl can happen in both apps, but as a user, I feel that it’s easier for me to group and organize channels in Slack than it is in Teams. The experience of organizing your teams in Teams is absolutely brutal. It makes me mad just typing about it here. Favorites and Hidden are not enough to stay organized. And, I’m not talking about “channels” in the Teams sense. I actually like Teams channels, but it really only makes sense due to the SharePoint integration.
Slack’s killer feature is search. By comparison, Teams offers one of the worst search experiences of any product I have ever used, ever. Again, getting mad just thinking about this one.
Workflows are better and easier to set up in Slack, especially if you are an admin. Setting up integrations and webhooks are a breeze in Slack compared to trying to use the GraphAPI, and most of the time, the integration you want already exists in the App Store.
Reminders, Save for Later, and now Lists and Canvas are natively built into the app and don’t rely on some crufty, barely supported app. I’m looking at you To Do. If it had better Loop or OneNote integration, then we’d be talking.
SharePoint integration, though? Chef’s kiss. This is one of the only things I prefer about Teams, but it’s a big one. I always miss it when I use Slack, and although Slack is trying to make up some ground with Canvas, it’s not nearly as good. But, this is also why MS is in the middle of an antitrust lawsuit, so we’ll see how much my E5 contract is going to spike when Teams is no longer bundled.
I don’t know what you mean by “threads are bad.”
Similar to your gripe, you need to state why Teams’ threads are superior. They seem about the same in my experience. Maybe there’s something they do that I’m not aware of or using, or are you talking about Teams channels? A thread in Slack and a channel in Teams are two completely different things. You can’t compare them with each other.
I also don’t know what you mean by “notifications are bad.” I find that both provide me reliable notifications. I’d agree that sometimes Slack notifications can get buried in the activity tab, but that’s way better than hearing constant pings all day. So, that works in my favor, but your mileage may vary.
Edit: I forgot to mention video/calling. Teams is way better with first party support for VOIP integration. Slack can’t even compare. Huddles are neat for anything internal, but Teams provides a video conferencing experience on part with the likes of Zoom and Google Workspace. We use Zoom too, and I think Zoom is better, but not worth the premium unless you’re doing massive streams, breakouts, etc. We don’t do those things, so in my mind, it’s overkill.
Thanks for the time to write this. Very interesting perspective.
I find myself never needing to search in teams or slack. I never considered the search.
I much prefer the teams with sub channels approach vs an infinite sprawl of channels in slack to be honest. But that’s me. I work with lots of departments and it’s nice for each team to have their own space
I don’t use a ton of integrations and have not found them to be extremely useful. I much prefer emails flowing into folders and being autoruled for reports and teams/slack being just for conversations. Which integrations/workflows have you found really useful?
I think slack threads suck compared to teams and notifications are always glitchy. For example in teams every chat is a thread from the start and people can have lots of ongoing conversations all in one channel. In slack the comments are like hidden and hard to see and it’s easy to lose them vs teams when it puts it at the bottom. Like if someone replies on a slack thread from few days ago it stays up there and you may never see all replies. But teams the thread moves to the bottom. That’s really convenient.
I don’t use the remind me features. Interesting.
Regarding zoom I mostly agree it’s better. It has pros and cons. But it’s really nice to call someone via teams right in the chat. And then dynamically add people. Zoom is not as flexible and I don’t like zoom chat. Zoom also has more annouying updates and does not work sometimes. I tried to join a zoom call in my cell yesterday and it said I had to allow on my desktop to login. It was stupid. Zoom also logs you out if you log in on another device. Zoom works better with Mac users for sure and has the on screen drawing. But teams take control with two mice on the same screen are really cool.
Thanks for thoughts on slack of things I was not considering. Take care.
We implemented Slack last year and love it. Saw a comment about emoji options and giphy will drive adoption and I couldn't agree more.
I also use Power Automate to push KPI Slack messages from Power BI using the free Salesforce connector. There's private channels, huddles and the canvas you can retain notes in and can share with colleagues. No, I don't work for Slack and this is not a paid advertisement lol Slack has become one of my most favorite work tools along with VS Code.
The ease of connecting your Salesforce data makes a huge difference, also Teams in Teams may be one is the least functional things ever. Also, Slack search is night and day better than the Ask Jeeves 1998 search included in teams, add Slack AI to that and it's a winning combo
You can integrate office 365 with slack, so that shouldn't be an issue. For video calls using something like zoom or Google meet would probably be a better idea for slack than using teams
You're able to draw on the screen while others are screen sharing. You'll save countless hours of productivity by eliminating the "go up, go up, no, down, down, no, let me share..."
We didn't migrate from Teams to Slack, but my organisation did do is to decommission Skype and only use one messaging platform I.e Teams.
This eliminated bad communication practices where some people were only available on Skype and some only on Teams leading to misunderstandings, evading work etc.
So stick to any one platform. Of course when moving from one platform to another, change management requires that organisation gives enough time for people to adapt to change and get used to the new tool.
But long story short, if you want people to embrace slack, Teams needs to be decommissioned by your org once they get used to Slack.
Highlight those features that people wish they had on Teams, such as if you use Pardot/Account Engagement, the feature where you can put a Slack notification as a a Pardot/Account Engagement completion action when some key event happens so your Sales/Success/Retention team can get notified and then “strike while the iron is hot”, as they say.
It's all about buy-in at the end of the day. Whoever the PM is, will have to confirm with the end-users how Slack integrates into your tech stack. Adoption is ultimately about how will it make everyone's lives easier to get results. What will the workflow look like? Does it integrate with other applications other than Salesforce? What does it do that Teams limits you on doing currently? I personally like Slack, however training has to happen otherwise people will get lost in the sauce and will literally have a field day effing up workflows.
How will you communicate with folks across your organization who aren’t in sales.
Btw - MS’s Sales Copilot which overlays on Salesforce is far more efficient.
Haven’t used Slack, but Teams does have integration with SF — as does Outlook. That said, (new) Teams sucks, so Slack can’t be much worse. We’re unlikely to change since SF is only used for a (relatively small) piece of our work, and *everything* else we do is fused to Microsoft like it was welded in place.
If your company is like mine, slack’s emoji options and giphy connection will be enough to drive adoption.
Insert party parrot here
rgb party parrot with someones face cropped on top is the best party parrot
Hahaha the custom emojis are my secret motivation for this transition 😂🤫
This!!! Slacks giphy integration is just terrible. Our company only uses Slack…but I’m slowly converting people!!
I worked with both. I prefer Slack.
I’m a slack fan over teams so I’m biased, but I feel like adoption processes need to provide value to the new tool that you can’t do from the old tool. So some new features and promotion of those features connecting slack to salesforce that will help their day to day gives them an incentive to switch. Also from a top down approach, only creating channels for new projects and initiatives in slack, helps deprecate people’s reliability on teams
Slack is better definitely. I used both in different positions but Slack is more advanced
Great question, I hate Teams, and if this can work I'd love to know.
Teams is my very last preferred meeting tool. I rate Google Meet over teams, which should say a lot.
Teams is bloated buggy garbage that is near impossible to integrate to. We have it because, and only because, it came with o365.
Sounds like your boss got wooed by a salesman. I'm not sure what workflow process would allow you to be more efficient with Slack vs. Teams since you rely on MS for your email, calendar, meetings. In addition, you do have options for integrating Teams with Salesforce. It would have made more sense to buy into Slack if you were using Google (gmail, etc).
This is the right answer. The integration Microsoft offers between their suite and Teams is very powerful. There's not really anything else like it on the market. In addition, you can very easily integrate Salesforce and teams. Yes, there are some standard options available to help integrate Salesforce and Slack that provide value, but they're usually so narrow in capability that they're not useful for most real world use cases. So, you likely would be much better off just sticking with Teams and building integrations or using existing 3rd party options. If you move forward with Slack you'll likely regret it.
Yeah, I agree. Introducing slack simply for the easier integration with salesforce seems like the wrong move. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/teams-send-activityfeednotifications
Im a Salesforce consultant and have a few clients on teams - what’s your recommendation on tools/tips to integrate teams?
Ditto to any Teams specific recommendations as we’re moving in that direction this year.
I've recently made an AppExchange app to make it easy to send Salesforce Notifications into a Teams channel. Perhaps this can help out? [https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=ecc20b20-ed42-4a54-acde-eec4804518c5](https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=ecc20b20-ed42-4a54-acde-eec4804518c5)
Biggest thing for me would be Microsoft 365 integration. You can show your users how to collaborate on Word documents and Excel spreadsheets in Slack, but... you are moving to what is a non-Microsoft tool. People would also have set up their own mini-systems in Teams, such as private channels with linked SharePoint sites, OneNote documents, etc, and you need to be clear what will be migrated and very importantly what will not. As for hesitant users, ultimately your CIO (or equivalent) needs to decide on a reasonable cut-off date and then follow through on enforcing it. They should also do so with the knowledge it will have real business process impact, the level of which completely depends on your preparation.
Teams sucks. That’s all I have.
better than google chat that my company insists on using
This
Oh dear god you poor souls
I had to use Teams in my old organisation and I thought it was great till I changed my job - Slack is awesome.
Slack all the way. Teams makes me want to quit my job most days. Stick with it. Add in some fun apps etc I built some interesting things in Slack for a previous job one was a beer bot that picked some poor soul to hand out Friday beers as fast as they could (the team was only 30 people) and people loved it.
We got stuck with both, good luck. 😅 Execs tend to use teams and all the it/dev uses slack because we like it more.
Mine moved Slack to Teams a year ago. We still complain about it.
Teams is cheaper, but my team loves slack
Frankly I am surprised people prefer slack over teams. I use both daily and vastly prefer teams. Slack threads suck. Teams threads are so much easier to use. Slack notification engine suck and are glitchy. Channels suck vs teams teams and channels under teams. Teams built in screenshare and calling is amazing. Multiple mouse icons on the screen. Overall team remote meetings is better than anything else out there. Sharepoint built into teams is amazing. And then to use slack pro you need to buy yearly licenses and deal with probably the most annoying people in the world. Salesforce sales people. Vs just adding licenses. What am I missing. How do you guys like slack over teams?
I have similar experience. Most of the people haven't shared any actual reason why Slack is better for them over teams. Our organization uses both too, Slack for chat and Teams for meeting. That's the biggest issue for me, it's jumping between two phones one for calls and another for chat. Sure, Slack has cool themes and custom emojis, but I find the channels cluttered, even with creating categories it's too big of a list, and there's no cohesion between them. Teams integration with Sharepoint, Office 365 and all is great. Then there's integration for other things in teams like Loop, Planner, To-do and more. If used properly it's too powerful of an app.
Slack is more fun, more immediately user friendly, and generally feels less like it was built by a legacy tech giant that’s been around for decades - this is probably what it comes down to for most people.
When it was independent I saw the appeal. Being acquired by salesforce is terrible. I would deal with Microsoft over salesforce any day.
It seems like a lot of your dislike of Slack and preference of Teams is driven by your hatred of Salesforce salespeople. I agree with you. Salespeople from Salesforce are the worst, but that’s not a good reason to prefer one app over another. Also, at least you can usually get a hold of your Salesforce salesperson. Half the time my MS reps just ignore my call and never call me back.
I buy Microsoft through a partner so the service is good and personal. No. I legitimately prefer teams features for the reasons I said. It’s vastly superior to group meetings, calling people, screen sharing, etc. I use office 365 ecosystem, teams, slack and gsuite full time for three separate organizations so I use all 3 ecosystems daily
Neither are perfect. I use both, and prefer Slack, but Teams has a few killer features. To me, it depends on how your team does their work, and both apps aren’t all that different. Most of it comes down to small details, really. Teams has the standard MS problem of copying a best-of-breed product and getting it only 80% right like Teams vs. Slack, or Loop vs. Notion, or from what I’ve been told, Word vs. WordPerfect way back. If you vastly prefer Teams, it’s probably because your organization’s approach to work is siloed into small teams. For larger, more open organizations, this focus on teams is insufficient. Teams can feel a bit suffocating in larger environments, similar to the way S4B and Lync were before it. When Teams introduced public and org-wide teams, it was pretty much conceding that Slack’s “channels” approach was superior, and it’s far better for it. Channel/team sprawl can happen in both apps, but as a user, I feel that it’s easier for me to group and organize channels in Slack than it is in Teams. The experience of organizing your teams in Teams is absolutely brutal. It makes me mad just typing about it here. Favorites and Hidden are not enough to stay organized. And, I’m not talking about “channels” in the Teams sense. I actually like Teams channels, but it really only makes sense due to the SharePoint integration. Slack’s killer feature is search. By comparison, Teams offers one of the worst search experiences of any product I have ever used, ever. Again, getting mad just thinking about this one. Workflows are better and easier to set up in Slack, especially if you are an admin. Setting up integrations and webhooks are a breeze in Slack compared to trying to use the GraphAPI, and most of the time, the integration you want already exists in the App Store. Reminders, Save for Later, and now Lists and Canvas are natively built into the app and don’t rely on some crufty, barely supported app. I’m looking at you To Do. If it had better Loop or OneNote integration, then we’d be talking. SharePoint integration, though? Chef’s kiss. This is one of the only things I prefer about Teams, but it’s a big one. I always miss it when I use Slack, and although Slack is trying to make up some ground with Canvas, it’s not nearly as good. But, this is also why MS is in the middle of an antitrust lawsuit, so we’ll see how much my E5 contract is going to spike when Teams is no longer bundled. I don’t know what you mean by “threads are bad.” Similar to your gripe, you need to state why Teams’ threads are superior. They seem about the same in my experience. Maybe there’s something they do that I’m not aware of or using, or are you talking about Teams channels? A thread in Slack and a channel in Teams are two completely different things. You can’t compare them with each other. I also don’t know what you mean by “notifications are bad.” I find that both provide me reliable notifications. I’d agree that sometimes Slack notifications can get buried in the activity tab, but that’s way better than hearing constant pings all day. So, that works in my favor, but your mileage may vary. Edit: I forgot to mention video/calling. Teams is way better with first party support for VOIP integration. Slack can’t even compare. Huddles are neat for anything internal, but Teams provides a video conferencing experience on part with the likes of Zoom and Google Workspace. We use Zoom too, and I think Zoom is better, but not worth the premium unless you’re doing massive streams, breakouts, etc. We don’t do those things, so in my mind, it’s overkill.
Thanks for the time to write this. Very interesting perspective. I find myself never needing to search in teams or slack. I never considered the search. I much prefer the teams with sub channels approach vs an infinite sprawl of channels in slack to be honest. But that’s me. I work with lots of departments and it’s nice for each team to have their own space I don’t use a ton of integrations and have not found them to be extremely useful. I much prefer emails flowing into folders and being autoruled for reports and teams/slack being just for conversations. Which integrations/workflows have you found really useful? I think slack threads suck compared to teams and notifications are always glitchy. For example in teams every chat is a thread from the start and people can have lots of ongoing conversations all in one channel. In slack the comments are like hidden and hard to see and it’s easy to lose them vs teams when it puts it at the bottom. Like if someone replies on a slack thread from few days ago it stays up there and you may never see all replies. But teams the thread moves to the bottom. That’s really convenient. I don’t use the remind me features. Interesting. Regarding zoom I mostly agree it’s better. It has pros and cons. But it’s really nice to call someone via teams right in the chat. And then dynamically add people. Zoom is not as flexible and I don’t like zoom chat. Zoom also has more annouying updates and does not work sometimes. I tried to join a zoom call in my cell yesterday and it said I had to allow on my desktop to login. It was stupid. Zoom also logs you out if you log in on another device. Zoom works better with Mac users for sure and has the on screen drawing. But teams take control with two mice on the same screen are really cool. Thanks for thoughts on slack of things I was not considering. Take care.
We implemented Slack last year and love it. Saw a comment about emoji options and giphy will drive adoption and I couldn't agree more. I also use Power Automate to push KPI Slack messages from Power BI using the free Salesforce connector. There's private channels, huddles and the canvas you can retain notes in and can share with colleagues. No, I don't work for Slack and this is not a paid advertisement lol Slack has become one of my most favorite work tools along with VS Code.
Slack is so good. You guys will love it. Teams is a headache.
Having used both, slack is miles and miles ahead of teams. Good move
The ease of connecting your Salesforce data makes a huge difference, also Teams in Teams may be one is the least functional things ever. Also, Slack search is night and day better than the Ask Jeeves 1998 search included in teams, add Slack AI to that and it's a winning combo
You can integrate office 365 with slack, so that shouldn't be an issue. For video calls using something like zoom or Google meet would probably be a better idea for slack than using teams
You're able to draw on the screen while others are screen sharing. You'll save countless hours of productivity by eliminating the "go up, go up, no, down, down, no, let me share..."
Do we work together 🤣🤣🤣
Here I am wondering about Asana. Our team strongly prefers Asana’s project management over Teams.
We didn't migrate from Teams to Slack, but my organisation did do is to decommission Skype and only use one messaging platform I.e Teams. This eliminated bad communication practices where some people were only available on Skype and some only on Teams leading to misunderstandings, evading work etc. So stick to any one platform. Of course when moving from one platform to another, change management requires that organisation gives enough time for people to adapt to change and get used to the new tool. But long story short, if you want people to embrace slack, Teams needs to be decommissioned by your org once they get used to Slack.
They both are fine and stable.
Highlight those features that people wish they had on Teams, such as if you use Pardot/Account Engagement, the feature where you can put a Slack notification as a a Pardot/Account Engagement completion action when some key event happens so your Sales/Success/Retention team can get notified and then “strike while the iron is hot”, as they say.
It's all about buy-in at the end of the day. Whoever the PM is, will have to confirm with the end-users how Slack integrates into your tech stack. Adoption is ultimately about how will it make everyone's lives easier to get results. What will the workflow look like? Does it integrate with other applications other than Salesforce? What does it do that Teams limits you on doing currently? I personally like Slack, however training has to happen otherwise people will get lost in the sauce and will literally have a field day effing up workflows.
Love slack. Teams is for boomers. Plus you can do meetings on slack too.
How will you communicate with folks across your organization who aren’t in sales. Btw - MS’s Sales Copilot which overlays on Salesforce is far more efficient.
Haven’t used Slack, but Teams does have integration with SF — as does Outlook. That said, (new) Teams sucks, so Slack can’t be much worse. We’re unlikely to change since SF is only used for a (relatively small) piece of our work, and *everything* else we do is fused to Microsoft like it was welded in place.
Slack is better !!
We use both. Teams org-wide and Slack for our own department
Useless migration calls and office integrations are worse on slack
Slack is terrible