Just wait for the migration from Slack to MS Teams, makes me wanna stop working all together. Also, MS recently launched their Notion clone, so all Notion users in MS shops better prepare to migrate to a much worse alternative.
I think this is what some people just don't understand, especially executives or managers who are too far removed from individual contributors' day-to-day activities.
The wrong choice of IT tools can suck the life out of your organization.
Sure, on paper two tools can seem equivalent, but in reality, they are not the same.
Maybe the difference is that my employer fully embraced the Microsoft stack, with Office, Outlook/Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams forming a coherent and well-integrated whole.
(It petered out when my priorities shifted, though, so I guess that tells you how much bandwidth people actually have for caring about their instant messaging. (There had already been a successful underground movement to use something other than Teams for video conferencing.))
Sure, there is other stuff that might be junk like files, tasks and apps but I just don't use that.
That is the old adage about keeping the main thing the main thing. It depresses me how many major apps doesn't even do the basics well, either performance is terrible or the UX is over-complicated.
Teams definitely falls in this category. It is dog-slow, but even worse for a chat application it randomly just drops messages(!) quietly(!!) which makes for very confusing discussion threads when different people have different sets of messages. That is arguably the very most basic feature that one can expect from chat, and Teams fumbles even it.
I've also been using MS Loop a lot and it's pretty great actually. It's clearly still under development and missing a lot of features but leaving that aside, I don't think it's fair to dismiss it as a Notion clone. It's far simpler than Notion and for writing things like company handbooks that's a good thing, actually. Sometimes simpler is better. If you need all the tables as database stuff, then use Notion. If you need a simple and clean documentation source, well I've tried a lot of these kinds of apps over the years and Loop is shaping up to be one of the better ones IMO.
I say this grudgingly, BTW. I strongly resisted choosing MS for our business. But as a small company in Vietnam we get an amazing value proposition from MS 365 that isn't even close to matched by anything else. We pay about $3.50 per user and we get Teams, video conferencing, office apps, Loop, Visio, Whiteboard, SharePoint (ok that one is genuinely quite bad), and also a load of business automation stuff in the form of Workflows that I'm still exploring. Oh and Shift scheduling. OneNote. About a hundred other things that I forget right now.
Even still I resisted but the final straw was that automatic translation is included in Teams for free. As a bilingual team that's vital for us.
By contrast, just Notion would be $8 per user. I think Slack is $6 per user. Not a lot for a western tech company, but we genuinely can't afford that. MS 365 wins by being "just good enough" at _loads_ of things, and way cheaper than the competition.
Loop - Super beta product with very few features compared to Notion. In particular, I've enabled it in our tenant and it has a showstopping bug for many users in which none of their work is saved. This bug exists from day 1 and still not fixed.
> MS 365 wins by being "just good enough" at _loads_ of things, and way cheaper than the competition.
Agreed!
Two problems with information are duplication (too many copies around, all of them slightly different) and finding where it is. MS Teams makes it easy to store duplicate data and hard to find it later: did you upload the data as a file in the "development" channel, or as a link in the "updates" wiki? Nobody knows, not even the search function. And with each new project manager creating five channels per project, two of which will actually see any activity...
I think MS Teams wants to be everything for everyone and succeeds at neither.
Teams wants to be Slack killer and making sure people stay in MS ecosystem, and it is succeeding in it. You can call the concept flawed, but it is a response to strong demand in the market.
I don't doubt that the plan is to keep people in the MS ecosystem and I don't dispute that it's working. But let's not claim that Teams' popularity has anything to do with its technology when it's clear that MS used it's dominant position to push it down everyone's throat.
One particular bad aspect is people started recording meetings. No one has any idea where these things get put. There are links that are shared but where are the actual files.
I use a OneNote to keep track of links. It's craziness.
Miro has its own management issues as well once you start getting projects and things in the mix.
It's like every new app now is designed to work with maybe a handful of objects but beyond that it's a huge mess.
Isn't this what SharePoint is for? As in, Teams integrates with it, so all the recordings, and planning boards, and file uploads, and yes - chats too, end up being stored there - where it is indexed and searchable (subject to your IT dept. competence and company access policies).
I have a feeling that most of the complaints about Teams come from people using it standalone, vs. a small part of a whole suite of tools Microsoft sells to businesses. This of course doesn't excuse Teams being shitty in those cases - but perhaps explains why I, and some others, tend to have almost no negative experience with Teams.
No, it entirely deserves it.
The underlying philosophy with Teams is top-down control: the assumption is that the organisation structure can adequately predict what communication patterns between its members should be allowed.
The underlying assumption with Slack is that the organisation members should be able to set up productive communication patterns without needing top-down control, and that having to impose that control is a bug.
The Slack approach requires discovery and working in the open, to a certain degree, so that what the research calls "weak links" can form between individuals in disconnected parts of the organisation. Teams (at least, wherever I've seen it) is actively hostile to this: you have to invite, to be invited, to already know who to speak to. Slack - when done right - radically changes how the organisation integrates with itself.
I have, of course, seen it done very wrong: if you come from a Teams world you'll likely want to lock Slack down so that it can't provide its main benefits; the instance I'm on right now blocks public channel creation, which is bonkers if you understand the problem area.
If your org is small enough and has enough of a mixing function outside the digital tooling that it doesn't need a helping hand, then there's not much in it, but past a certain size and it's not even close.
If I was working with a team of tech savvy developers, I'd completely agree with you, and we'd probably be using Slack, or maybe Zulip. I'm not - I work at a bakery and I'm the only technical person at our company. Most people don't even own a laptop. Every day is a surprise to me as I get a tech support call about something so basic like not checking if something is plugged in. If you've ever watched The IT Crowd, and thought the tech support calls were satire - they are not.
Everything has to be locked down and simplified to the extreme, otherwise I will be called to fix or explain it over and over again. The thought of allowing everyone to create a channel whenever they want is giving me nightmares, honestly. It's already a daily frustration to get idea of channels across at all. Actually scratch that, even getting people to stop using Zalo (local version of Whatsapp) was a struggle and I'm pretty sure it's still happening behind our backs.
Thinking about allowing everyone to create channels ad-hoc. It wouldn't work, it would turn our communications into a mess. We have total of about six channels and already get complaints that it's too confusing.
A lot of its design decisions make sense in this context: for example, the reason "you have to invite, to be invited, to already know who to speak to" in Teams is that because you can't exactly fit 10 000 employees and an unbounded number of contractors and external parties in a vertical list, and tell the users to scroll through it. At this size, you need some discovery / matching process to even figure out who to write.
This also drives many of the "barriers" in Teams - you can't expose everyone to everyone else by default, because the CPU (and the notification counter) would have trouble keeping up. Instead, with everything being need-to-know by default, a new employee is going to start in a small, cozy team space, and gradually expand their list of contacts and team memberships. However, they're not actually isolated - the megacorp is still there, thousands of teams, tens of thousands of people, all accessible through that unassuming search bar at the top.
And there's the problem. Slack also has that search bar, but it also has public activity so you have a chance of knowing what to search for. The discovery process is the public conversations.
> This also drives many of the "barriers" in Teams - you can't expose everyone to everyone else by default, because the CPU (and the notification counter) would have trouble keeping up.
This is just not a problem. If you've got notifications on by default for busy public channels, you're going to have a bad time.