Abstract vs. AlmaSuite (discontinued) vs. Microsoft Teams

• Large teams with dedicated design operations support
• UX managers that want a facilitated workflow for their teams
• Disciplined teams of individual contributors that want to adopt a process in their UI workflow
• Cross-discipline teams that want a central collaboration space for reviewing and critiquing UI artifacts
• If your files are named "FOR-REALS_FINAL_FINAL_FINAL_Super-Important-Project (copy).sketch"
• If you're managing multiple pattern libraries

Incentivized

My business is HR consulting. Best benefits: organize freelance consultants by projects and tasks.

It's amazing as a daily driver for team communication, and document search/store. Also, if you're doing a lot of LONG meetings and have trouble remembering details, the AI summarization is amazing and convenient. It just works. I'm not saying I always do this, of course, but if I need to 'skim' instead of really digging into every detail from a meeting, the AI-generated summary is generally good enough that I can get away with it.

• Allows for collaboration within Sketch.
• Allows for approval of work by team leads.

Incentivized

• Great for task administration.
• Customer service is friendly, pragmatic and always available.
• Organize freelance consultants by projects and tasks.

• Makes communication and collaboration easier through Chat.
• Lets us personalize and humanize face-to-face interactions through Meetings.
• Helps me effectively plan out my day through Calendar.
• Enables us to safely store and access our information through OneDrive.
• Simplifies calls and voice communication.

Incentivized

• People and permission management.
• Sharing particular states (presentation, inspection, etc.).
• New projects from templates.
• Pattern library migration (new users).

Incentivized

• Need to improve in the way it shows project development in time: Gantt chart, schedules, etc.

• The webinars feature has some missing functionally such as the ability for all users to use the Q&A feature (only those with a Microsoft Teams account can use it now), the ability to upload documents for attendees to easily access and download, and the ability for presenters and organizers to easily chat amongst themselves throughout the webinar.
• The "Channels" organization hierarchy could be more clear. If you have several channels set up, it can get clunky and hard to find the specific channel you are looking for.
• The MS Planner tool lacks functionality and organization. You cannot assign more than one person to a task and it's confusing when you try to share tasks with people - it would be nice if they were automatically added to someone's calendar.

Incentivized

Microsoft Teams is included with our Office 365 subscription and we have no intention of migrating off of Office 365 and Microsoft products. Since Microsoft Teams is included for free with our Office 365 subscription, and since we enjoy all the features, benefits, and functionality, there is no question that our team will continue to use the product

Incentivized

Abstract has a difficult learning curve. If a feature-branch workflow is new to you, then it will take some getting used to. They make a lot of updates to the interface and these feature releases get ahead of their documentation. They rely heavily on an excellent customer support team and are present on various Slack channels to help design professionals with issues.

Incentivized

I find that the chat function itself is quite clean, but once you incorporate the rest of the UI it becomes quite clunky. It feels as though there's too many features in one place, and that leads to it becoming convoluted and a little bit tedious to use. Due to that notifications can get missed which can lead to some tricky situations when working. I do find that it is easy to pick up though and help is readily available with a good support centre.

Incentivized

Rare, but outages do happen

Incentivized

Sometimes about once a week I get a message that says "Sorry, there seems to be something wrong". But it goes away in a few minutes.

Incentivized

Customer support seems to be fast at responding. We haven't had issues yet at least

Incentivized

The overall support provided by Microsoft for Microsoft Teams has been quite good but there is still some room for improvements. Microsoft needs to proactively work on fixing the open bugs in order to provide a seamless experience to the users. But over the service and experience provided by the Microsoft team have been quite satisfactory.

Incentivized

I find everything I need for my day-to-day work.

Incentivized

I purchased and administer Abstract. It was requested by our design department who evaluated it.

Incentivized

Better features for project development follow up than Asana and Wrike (previous choices)

Breakout rooms are a very good feature that should be added to the platform. Google Meet ranks above Teams on the web, as it's pretty lightweight; Teams tries to do so much, making it very slow or unstable when just using the web version. Teams is superior to Zoom when it comes to chat and integration with other platforms.

Incentivized

It does not appear to have a limit to how many teams and employees we can have using it

Incentivized

• Single source of truth for the team.
• Could quickly get expensive with corporate accounts.

Incentivized

• Positive: Internal Communication and Collaboration

• Allow smooth communication with team members, clients, and other internal and external partners globally.
• Provide strong security features to ensure secure communication and confidence when sharing sensitive information during our meetings and group calls.
• When working on collaborative projects, we can work together in the same document in real time.

Incentivized