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Teams - the not so transparent Slack (think twice before switching)
May 28, 2019

Teams - the not so transparent Slack (think twice before switching)

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Teams

We do not use Microsoft Teams. We planned to roll it out to our staff, as we receive it at no cost with our non-profit license. We had hoped to use it as a team collaboration tool. It works similarly to Slack. These sorts of tools create an alternative space to email where your teams can collaborate, discuss and share work. The interactions are smoother and more organic than one tends to see in email.
  • Organic Conversations and collaboration - This isn't particular to Teams but it does it well
  • Integration with SharePoint and other Office 365 tools - If you are a pure MS shop and are not using other tools, you should give it a try
  • Provides integrated security for your team conversations, it all in Office 365.
  • Video conference quality is very poor outside of the very high-speed internet connectivity of urban areas.
  • Unable to allow users to call in to video calls without an internet connection - i.e. call in numbers. This can be done at a cost but other services do this much more cheaply.
  • Teams security structure does a lot to get in the way of breaking down communication silos. By default most Teams are setup as private, blocking organization members from seeing conversations and progress. If one goal is transparency across departments, this is a problem.
  • NA - We did not implement because of the issues we had with the product.
We had thought it might work well to replace Slack (already in use) and Zoom for video conferencing. It may have made an adequate replacement for Slack, especially with the superior integration with SharePoint provided in Teams. However, the video conference tool from Teams is by no means comparable to Zoom. Zoom's quality and reliability, especially on international and low-bandwidth areas (rural USA) is FAR superior to Teams.

Slack vs. Teams may be a work process question more than something to do with actual tools. Personally, I never felt as comfortable with Teams but Slack is easy to use.
If your group is not using other tools like Slack or Zoom for collaboration, AND you are already using Office365 including SharePoint and One Drive, AND you primarily work in highly connected environments, Teams may be a great way to go since Teams is included in your license.

If you don't meet the conditions above, you might want to stay away.