Are you a Microsoft Teams player?

The current surge in working remotely has seen Microsoft Teams move up the pecking order in the O365 pack. Word, Excel and PowerPoint are established tools in 0365. The Teams app has become essential for organisations. Is Teams any good? It’s as they say in the UK a marmite; you like it or you really don’t. The do not like camp are made up of tribes. Tribe one, just don’t like anything if its Microsoft, tribe two live and breathe Slack. Tribe three just want to get the job done and if Teams does the job, then all is well. Love does not come into it. To examine if Teams is good for your organisation one prism is a highly subjective comparison with Slack.

1. Identity. Slack has one, it is the product and it stands on its own. Making it easy to like and root for. Teams sits inside a box called Office 365 and works best when it interacts with all the other O365 apps. Trigger warning, one of those services is SharePoint.
2. Playing with others. Slack can play well with other services, it’s not shy. Take video conferencing . On Slack you can launch “calls from any conversation using Slack Calls or utilise your team’s favourite tool, like Google Hangouts, Zoom, Skype for Business or Webex.”. Teams is a bit shy but starting to become more outgoing with the Teams live feature “Microsoft Teams live events are an extension of Teams meetings that enable you to schedule and produce events that stream to large online audiences”
3. User adoption. Slack is cooler, can do more but a perception endures that it is not that easy to use. This maybe unfair but this perception is I think inherited from Slacks user base of more tech savvy users. Teams has fewer features but is easier to use.

A true story, anA true story. IT team at a medium sized company done a demo of Teams for their CEO. During the demo they sent invites to Teams to what they thought was just a few members of staff but inadvertently sent an invite to all staff at the company. How do you row back from that? You don’t, staff just accepted the invite and started using Teams.

As Teams sits within 0365 the adoption rate by organisations will be higher than Slack. When you buy into 0365 as an organisation its not for one product like Teams but for all the others. When you buy into Slack that’s it but Slack plays better with other tools that is its strength.