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I use both daily. I think the biggest problem with Teams can't be discovered by feature comparisons and performance metrics. Teams enables a company to "secur

I use both daily. I think the biggest problem with Teams can't be discovered by feature comparisons and performance metrics. Teams enables a company to "secure" the application in the same way other MS products can be. That makes the product easy to sell, but in practice, it prevents Teams from being an effective collaboration tool. If I want to create a new channel, I need to get approval from IT. If I want to invite a vendor to participate, I need to convince IT that the benefit of adding this particular vendor to Teams outweighs a raft of vague "security" concerns. In the end, it's not worth the trouble of asking and I end up setting up Slack channels instead. By creating a product that can satisfy the IT policies of their enterprise customers, Microsoft has unwittingly created a platform completely unsuited to flexible and open collaboration.

choppaface 7y ago
In my experience with Slack, vendors are always locked down. A good practice is to create a totally separate Slack instance where vendors and contractors can talk freely with employees. If non-emoloyees are on company Slack, they can pick up IP, be witnesses to harassment, be exposed to PII leaks, etc. Locking down channels is tough. As a company grows, there can be immense confusion when channels pop up all over (especially duplicates). Having some friction to creation can be helpful, but that could be simple public “shaming” instead of getting IT / HR in the mix. When HR thinks its job is to administrate, the company has lost its chance at having a real culture. It sounds like using MS Teams is like having HR administrate over everything you say at work.
- timoth3y 7y ago
  That's effectively what I do as well, but we don't have a corporate Slack account. Teams is great for internal communications on long-running projects. It's well suited to that and I wouldn't substitute Slack. When used well, it cuts down on a ton of internal emails and status updates. I don't really blame IT for locking down Teams. It makes a lot of sense for all the reasons you mention and many more. It's just that by locking it down they prevent Teams from really being a challenger to Slack. It's not that Teams can't be configured to be just as useful as Slack, but enterprise IT best practices pretty much guarantees that it never will be.
  - jackvalentine 7y ago
    Our Teams is basically completely open and not locked down at all. I still hate it.
    - c0vfefe 7y ago
      Why do you hate it?
      - jackvalentine 7y ago
        It's slow. It's broken in weird ways (renaming or moving a file will break it basically) The threaded chats confuse everyone. It's poorly integrated with the rest of office (I can't seen to figure out how to 'share to teams' from Word or Excel for example. Plusses: The group video chat works well. It's not Skype for Business.
- celim307 7y ago
  Why not create seperate private channels and make vendors single channel users?
  - choppaface 7y ago
    I’ve seen that too, but having a whole separate instance gives the users a more flexible environment. There’s also the issue of discoverability... sometimes the company doesn’t want employees and vendors to know that certain relationships exist.
    - cannonedhamster 7y ago
      And you can federate the two slack instances as well as a separate firewall without having to create multiple accounts for the same users to access multiple instances.
moksly 7y ago
I think Teams is exactly excellent because it allows you to secure your collaboration tool. Especially valuable post GDPR where you really don’t want your non-tech savy employers putting privacy data into some online Trello board, or slack/discord for that matter. The fact that teams is just part of your 365 platform is soooo awesome in non-tech enterprise that it’s hard to describe just how useful it is. But basically we have 7000 employees in my shop, 20% of them them can’t name the operating system iOS/Android/windows when they call support. You want your IT to protect them from themselves, even if that’s obviously not how you would word it in your strategy. Too much control is bad though, like you say, creating channels/teams/task-boards shouldn’t be too bureaucratic. We were a little too liberal when we first opened up, allowing people to name their own, which resulted in mail-list mayhem. Because Microsoft created an e-mail address with the name people chose. This resulted in the “specialised child care department” creating a “specialised childcare” e-mail address, that would show up in outlook. Which in term led to some rather important e-mails getting lost, because people sent them to the one of the now two “specialised child care” email addresses that wasn’t getting read. We fixed this by moving creation into our own tool and using the 365 API, so people still get to name their own collaboration projects, but they get a “Teams - “ in front of the name, and that’s filtered out of the e-mail listing so they don’t show up in the outlook address book. I don’t personally like Teams or Tasks all that much functionally wise compared to other tools, but the fact that they are part of our 365 security setup and the fact that we’ve already paid for them, means I’ll use them.
- arsenico 7y ago
  How is putting privacy data in Teams different from putting it in Slack?
  - youdontknowtho 7y ago
    Teams benefits from the cross-product and service GDPR and eDiscovery tools that MS has built. It's hard to explain the scale of some of that stuff, but it cuts across O365.
  - moksly 7y ago
    I’m the wrong person to ask, all I know is that Microsoft, Azure and Offfice365 is on the government list of places we can put our data (which doesn’t go above NSIS level 3) safely and legally. Slack isn’t on that list.
arethuza 7y ago
"If I want to create a new channel, I need to get approval from IT." That depends how it is configured - where I work you can create channels in Teams even if you're not an owner of that Team. Anyone can create a Team as well - but it is accepted that this is only done for a good reason.
krageon 7y ago
> I end up setting up Slack channels If you can do this without getting fired, what is the problem for you?
jjwhitaker 7y ago
Alternatively, I can create a new team or channel myself without oversight, standards, or any sort of best practice. That functionality is not locked down allowing freedom but the possibility of a wild west chat system.
Meph504 7y ago
This is IT specific, in fact, you actually have to run powershell scripts over an admin console in 0365 to prevent to creation of teams by anyone in the organization, doing so also prevents the creation of groups in outlook, and plans in planner, as they are all back ended to the same place.

choppaface 7y ago

In my experience with Slack, vendors are always locked down. A good practice is to create a totally separate Slack instance where vendors and contractors can talk freely with employees. If non-emoloyees are on company Slack, they can pick up IP, be witnesses to harassment, be exposed to PII leaks, etc. Locking down channels is tough. As a company grows, there can be immense confusion when channels pop up all over (especially duplicates). Having some friction to creation can be helpful, but that could be simple public “shaming” instead of getting IT / HR in the mix. When HR thinks its job is to administrate, the company has lost its chance at having a real culture. It sounds like using MS Teams is like having HR administrate over everything you say at work.

timoth3y 7y ago
That's effectively what I do as well, but we don't have a corporate Slack account. Teams is great for internal communications on long-running projects. It's well suited to that and I wouldn't substitute Slack. When used well, it cuts down on a ton of internal emails and status updates. I don't really blame IT for locking down Teams. It makes a lot of sense for all the reasons you mention and many more. It's just that by locking it down they prevent Teams from really being a challenger to Slack. It's not that Teams can't be configured to be just as useful as Slack, but enterprise IT best practices pretty much guarantees that it never will be.
- jackvalentine 7y ago
  Our Teams is basically completely open and not locked down at all. I still hate it.
  - c0vfefe 7y ago
    Why do you hate it?
    - jackvalentine 7y ago
      It's slow. It's broken in weird ways (renaming or moving a file will break it basically) The threaded chats confuse everyone. It's poorly integrated with the rest of office (I can't seen to figure out how to 'share to teams' from Word or Excel for example. Plusses: The group video chat works well. It's not Skype for Business.
celim307 7y ago
Why not create seperate private channels and make vendors single channel users?
- choppaface 7y ago
  I’ve seen that too, but having a whole separate instance gives the users a more flexible environment. There’s also the issue of discoverability... sometimes the company doesn’t want employees and vendors to know that certain relationships exist.
  - cannonedhamster 7y ago
    And you can federate the two slack instances as well as a separate firewall without having to create multiple accounts for the same users to access multiple instances.

moksly 7y ago

I think Teams is exactly excellent because it allows you to secure your collaboration tool. Especially valuable post GDPR where you really don’t want your non-tech savy employers putting privacy data into some online Trello board, or slack/discord for that matter. The fact that teams is just part of your 365 platform is soooo awesome in non-tech enterprise that it’s hard to describe just how useful it is. But basically we have 7000 employees in my shop, 20% of them them can’t name the operating system iOS/Android/windows when they call support. You want your IT to protect them from themselves, even if that’s obviously not how you would word it in your strategy. Too much control is bad though, like you say, creating channels/teams/task-boards shouldn’t be too bureaucratic. We were a little too liberal when we first opened up, allowing people to name their own, which resulted in mail-list mayhem. Because Microsoft created an e-mail address with the name people chose. This resulted in the “specialised child care department” creating a “specialised childcare” e-mail address, that would show up in outlook. Which in term led to some rather important e-mails getting lost, because people sent them to the one of the now two “specialised child care” email addresses that wasn’t getting read. We fixed this by moving creation into our own tool and using the 365 API, so people still get to name their own collaboration projects, but they get a “Teams - “ in front of the name, and that’s filtered out of the e-mail listing so they don’t show up in the outlook address book. I don’t personally like Teams or Tasks all that much functionally wise compared to other tools, but the fact that they are part of our 365 security setup and the fact that we’ve already paid for them, means I’ll use them.

arsenico 7y ago
How is putting privacy data in Teams different from putting it in Slack?
- youdontknowtho 7y ago
  Teams benefits from the cross-product and service GDPR and eDiscovery tools that MS has built. It's hard to explain the scale of some of that stuff, but it cuts across O365.
- moksly 7y ago
  I’m the wrong person to ask, all I know is that Microsoft, Azure and Offfice365 is on the government list of places we can put our data (which doesn’t go above NSIS level 3) safely and legally. Slack isn’t on that list.

arethuza 7y ago

"If I want to create a new channel, I need to get approval from IT." That depends how it is configured - where I work you can create channels in Teams even if you're not an owner of that Team. Anyone can create a Team as well - but it is accepted that this is only done for a good reason.

krageon 7y ago

> I end up setting up Slack channels If you can do this without getting fired, what is the problem for you?

jjwhitaker 7y ago

Alternatively, I can create a new team or channel myself without oversight, standards, or any sort of best practice. That functionality is not locked down allowing freedom but the possibility of a wild west chat system.

Meph504 7y ago

This is IT specific, in fact, you actually have to run powershell scripts over an admin console in 0365 to prevent to creation of teams by anyone in the organization, doing so also prevents the creation of groups in outlook, and plans in planner, as they are all back ended to the same place.