Microsoft Teams vs. Parabol

Positive: The virtual workspace created for a work team within the same company, for the resemblance of information and communications in one place.Negative: The access for members of a non-profit organization who have external emails from the host but need the same access as an internal person since their volunteer work is part of the very core of the federation.

Incentivized

Parabol has been very useful in running meetings in person as well as digitally. Parabol become extremely useful for us in COVID when we used smart meeting scheduling and run them in an agile way using Digital Kanban board and sticky notes, easy to manage check-ins and integrations with internal tools.

• Virtual meetings - ease of set up and execution
• File sharing! We build channels for projects, and being able to invite only project members is huge!
• Peer-to-peer communications - being able to "ping" one of my colleagues, either text, video or call-only, on-demand, is what runs our business.

Incentivized

• Virtual Retrospectives
• Teamwork
• Easy to Use

Incentivized

• The feature of notifications in the mobile application could be improved. Sometimes notifications of different teams are not visible and are only visible when the application is opened.
• It uses lots of computational resources while running and thus, slows down the system sometimes.
• It allows a few channels per team. The number of channels could be increased for better productivity.

Incentivized

• Integrations with internal tools.
• Smart Scheduling rules can be much advanced like Calendly.
• More flexibility for users.

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

User experience has been much better than the previous Skype for Business app. It has an easy-to-use interface with persistent chats. The search feature is very fast and useful. MS Teams has mostly focused on Collaboration and team building features which are very useful for organizational communications. Since Teams is accessible from multiple platforms like Laptop, Desktop, Mobile phones, etc it has been very convenient from a Mobility perspective.

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

Using Microsoft Teams has resulted in much faster business communications with both co-workers and consultants. There has been little need for support with this software as the interface is very intuitive and the product is overall very well designed. We did encounter an issue with the built-in phone service, however, this was quickly resolved by the support team.

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

Incentivized

Our company and IT department previously used Skype for our communication needs. Skype was not dependable in my opinion, because it seems each time I used it during a call and/or a meeting, I and several other team members would get disconnected more than once. This caused a great interruption of our meeting, caused team members to have to ask others to repeat themselves and caused a general lack of interest in employee attendance during meetings.

The capability to create reflections and comments while maintaining anonymity is a very useful feature that contributes to group engagement without individuals feeling that they have to censor what they say. Parabol's anonymous functionality promotes honest discussion and feedback that most likely would not occur when employees feel that their input would not be taken seriously.

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.

• I'm not sure I can point to a specific ROI, but it has improved our ability to communicate and work more effectively together.
• It's also nice to have records of every interaction, photo, and document that has been shared. Less chance of something completely disappearing.

Incentivized

• Parabol helped in better collaboration.
• Parabol improved productivity.
• Was not high on ROI in monetary terms.