Slack Vs Microsoft Teams - user experience

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gzt

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#290471 14-Nov-2021 09:11

I'm a Slack user for work. Imo it's not a bad communication tool for four or five people and using a similar number of channels. With over a hundred users and 50 super active channels and 50 less active channels the user experience is a nightmare. It's like playing whack-a-mole all day. It's no surprise Slack started as a game. With any kind of volume Slack starts feeling like a toy compared to even average IRC clients.

Microsoft Teams I have not used. I'm aware Slack and Teams are incompatible.My question is for experienced users of both Slack and Teams with high numbers of active users and channels:

Is Microsoft Teams any better?

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#2812495 14-Nov-2021 09:30

I've used teams a lot for a few years, and I've used Slack a little bit with a few channels. I find the Slack UI confusing, and having to manually change between groups / channels or whatever they're called is really odd. But note that I am a very light user of Slack so have little experience.

Teams while not perfect is quite good. I'm part of maybe 15 teams (a team can be a project or any other grouping of people) plus a number of active chats. It's all well integrated with itself and Outlook for meetings, voice / video calls and chats are easy, you can invite others outside Teams for one-off meetings and if other organisations have teams you can work together. All in all I find it miles better than Slack.

gzt

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#2812522 14-Nov-2021 10:41

Slack comes with integrated video and voice chat. Is that the case for Teams or is Skype For Business also a requirement for Teams?

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#2812532 14-Nov-2021 11:15

gzt: Slack comes with integrated video and voice chat. Is that the case for Teams or is Skype For Business also a requirement for Teams?

Teams has voice and video calling built in.

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#2812537 14-Nov-2021 11:21

The teams video / voice calling works well. You don't need any other products to use it. The virtual backgrounds are great for remote workers to mask where they are, they work quite well. I spend hours a day on teams video calls, works well.

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#2812538 14-Nov-2021 11:21

I have used both and if you are looking for something to use on windows then teams wins.

That is mostly because of the way that it integrates with the MS email and calendar tools.

If you are using Linux then teams sucks. It matters not whether you use the web based client or the Linux app, half the time, your microphone will not work.

In terms of the text chat, both suck. A geekzone style forum system would be way better.

gbwelly

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#2812663 14-Nov-2021 15:18

gzt: With over a hundred users and 50 super active channels and 50 less active channels

Well there's yer problem. Setting up a single Team with 100 members and 50 channels in MS Teams you're probably going to have the same problems.

Do all 100 people need to interact with all other 99 people in the same location to do their jobs? In MS Teams you'd make a Team for each Business unit and Project. Then each person would be in a couple of Teams only (their business unit and 1 or 2 projects they are on). Chatting outside of the teams would be done with ad-hoc chats. Company wide announcements would be done with a thing called an org-wide team, which would be configured to only allow posting by the team owners (i.e. the comms team or CEO etc).

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#2812667 14-Nov-2021 15:40

Currently working (in NZ) for an off-shore Vendor who uses Teams, but on assignment to client, with a client laptop, who is entirely Google Workspace based, but also uses Slack extensively. Coming down on the side of Teams at this stage. I'm finding the combination of Slack plus Google Workspace to be awkward.

gzt

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#2812669 14-Nov-2021 15:46

gbwelly:
gzt: With over a hundred users and 50 super active channels and 50 less active channels
Well there's yer problem. Setting up a single Team with 100 members and 50 channels in MS Teams you're probably going to have the same problems.

I call this the Marie Kondo response. Slack kind of encourages it.

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#2812671 14-Nov-2021 15:53

gbwelly: Do all 100 people need to interact with all other 99 people in the same location to do their jobs? In MS Teams you'd make a Team for each Business unit and Project. Then each person would be in a couple of Teams only (their business unit and 1 or 2 projects they are on). Chatting outside of the teams would be done with ad-hoc chats. Company wide announcements would be done with a thing called an org-wide team, which would be configured to only allow posting by the team owners (i.e. the comms team or CEO etc).

Closely related engineering teams tend to need to dip in and out of each other's channels as work demands. Tasks crossing functional areas and things like that. People seconded to a different team while keeping up with their home team.

That's a strength of Slack. Users can join and leave channels as tasks require.

Does Microsoft Teams allow this or does this become administrative load and permissions and things like that required?

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#2812676 14-Nov-2021 16:20

Longtime user of slack, and have been using Teams for the last 6 months.

My personal preference is Slack, but both are equally effective. Slack is a more mature product, with more features and fewer bugs.

Slacks strengths:
- Features parity between Web, Mobile and Desktop Apps
- Great flexibility around notifications
- Huge huge amount of plugins
- Richer txt editing and more emojis etc

Teams:
- Tight integration with Office 365
- Desktop app frequently steals focus from other apps.
- Some features missing from desktop app, e.g can't reply to individual message with a chat on the desktop app, but can if it's within a site/channel.
- Can see when someone has read your message

gzt

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#2812678 14-Nov-2021 16:24

gbwelly: Chatting outside of the teams would be done with ad-hoc chats.

Is this in the form of user created channels? I'm interested in how this part works in practice.

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#2812775 14-Nov-2021 19:41

gzt:
gbwelly: Chatting outside of the teams would be done with ad-hoc chats.

Is this in the form of user created channels? I'm interested in how this part works in practice.

No it’s basically in the form of instant messaging

Either 1 on 1 or group IM

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#2812830 14-Nov-2021 20:13

I prefer Slack.

I find Teams good enough all around product, it was quite confusing at first with how it's a sharepoint backed file storage system.

The chat isn't as good as Slack but if you're already paying for O365, Slack would be a hard sell.

The video conferencing isn't anywhere near as good as Zoom, but once again if you're paying for O365 it's good enough, Slack video calling isn't amazing either.

Teams can also integrate with PSTN, so it's a full S4B/Lync/OCS replacement.

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#2812833 14-Nov-2021 20:46

gzt: Closely related engineering teams tend to need to dip in and out of each other's channels as work demands. Tasks crossing functional areas and things like that. People seconded to a different team while keeping up with their home team.

That's a strength of Slack. Users can join and leave channels as tasks require.

Does Microsoft Teams allow this or does this become administrative load and permissions and things like that required?

That sounds like a nightmare for billing and timesheeting.

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#2812898 14-Nov-2021 22:04

I call this the Marie Kondo response. Slack kind of encourages it.

Might be time to reign in some user permissions, and prevent just anyone from creating new channels. When I used it, we had strict naming conventions to help organise channels.

E.g
p-project name
t-team name
P-Product name
In addition to General, Random, and any private team channels.

When I administered it, I would also archive unused channels fairly regularly. The reports are super helpful to point you to unused channels.

More recently slack added the ability to create team tags per user, that allowed me to organise my frequent contacts and lift them higher up the tree structure than the rest of the 1v1 chats.

We used Slack side-by-side with Google Workspace hangouts/meet. I suspect if we were a MS shop it wouldn't have made sense to pay extra for Slack.

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