Discourse vs. Microsoft Teams

[Discourse is by] far the best online forum platform in the industry. It may be a little pricey for people looking for a cheap option for their hobby forum, but for any type of business that relies on a forum, the pricing is more than fair.

Incentivized

It is well-suited for an organization with many team members who are scattered throughout different locations. It offers organization and clarity to projects, files, and tasks in one centralized location. It would be a bit of an overkill for a small organization where everyone is in the same location 5 days a week

Incentivized

• User Privileges : Teams, Trust Levels, Moderation, Private and Public Threads make it possible to have as much transparency, privacy or power decentralization as one wishes.
• Gamification: Badges and Achievements can be customized for User Activity and frequent readers and writers.
• Mailing List mode: Users can choose to use forum threads without the User Interface by subscribing via mailing list mode.

Incentivized

• 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

• Some configuration UIs are difficult to follow
• Not well-suited for managing workflows (grant management as an example)
• Bulk operations across multiple threads either impossible or difficult to figure out

Incentivized

• the calendar function can improve it's not 100% feature parody with outlook.
• Better search for documents and contact with AI
• offer the same security for document sharing as is available in outlook. Especially concerning PII and documents shared to "external" contacts.
• Contact is hidden away in "Calls" and needs to be better exposed like it use too.

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

If you have the full Microsoft Office suite, it works really well because it's integrated well within its ecosystem, but if not, it can be annoying because it tries to open a shared file in the web versions of the file equivalents. The web version is also a bit slow, and the login is very difficult to handle if you have multiple Microsoft or Outlook accounts.

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

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

Vanilla's mobile functionality was downright awful and it felt like it was stuck in the 2000s. While they have similar features, Discourse blows them away in almost every department. We don't regret switching at all.

Incentivized

Microsoft Teams offers a much more integrated experience between their chat and video call function compared to Google Chat and Slack. Both other tools are much better for internal communications are they have simpler UI without other features. Whereas Microsoft Teams can be used for more critical conversations, particularly between external companies, and has been very useful in sales conversations which is what we chose it for when speaking to companies that work exclusively through Microsoft.

Incentivized

Honestly, this tool is worth every penny. Yes, it's not free and you pay for the quality of services and the license. But the ROI and the benefits are all there. Also, the renewal, negotiation, and contract terms are all very well explained by our Microsoft account manager, and she's a charm.

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

Incentivized

I used Skype for Business to take calls, hold conferences, and provide remote assistance to users. Microsoft Teams, on the other hand, is superior to Skype for Business in my opinion. My job entails a lot of screen sharing.

• Community Members are eager to jump into the discussion.
• Conversations can be tracked easier without the risk of being lost in a sea of messages as people tend to construct their posts more carefully than on any workspace messenger.
• It's open source and configurable with many other add-ons to help integration with other services.

Incentivized

• Because our unit decided to go all in with Microsoft Products, the integration and flow of our communication and files are seamless.
• Microsoft Teams is very secure. Only those who are logged in with their university credentials can access the files we share and the events we host. Therefore, we don't have to worry about privacy and security for the virtual events we host.
• If our virtual events are open to the public, joiners outside the organization often struggle to join because Microsoft Teams is not the most familiar tool amongst the public.

Incentivized