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I've seen firsthand that Teams is effective at drawing attention from Slack and similar. People want a persistent chat service. There was a strong push for Slac

I've seen firsthand that Teams is effective at drawing attention from Slack and similar. People want a persistent chat service. There was a strong push for Slack, or something like it. Some companies push back, but if there's enough momentum and demand, eventually infrastructure needs to provide some solution. And if a company is already a Microsoft shop, they'll provide Teams (with its full integration with everything else they're already using) rather than considering something like Slack.

gav 6y ago
A former employer bristled at the cost of Slack[1]. Why should we pay for Slack when we already own Teams? Everyone will just use Teams. About a week later I was on 4 unofficial Slack workspaces. They also mandated Teams for meetings, which was both terrible and particularly hostile to external invitees, so everyone just used free versions of Zoom instead. [1] Less than 0.07% of my base salary
- thinkharderdev 6y ago
  Yeah, the one killer thing that slack has is that there is a free tier which is perfectly usable. Organizations can try and force everyone to use Teams but in practice they can't stop people from just spinning up a free-tier slack account for their team. At the end of the day it's just not worth fighting it anymore if everyone is determined to use slack.
  - tharne 6y ago
    > Organizations can try and force everyone to use Teams but in practice they can't stop people from just spinning up a free-tier slack account for their team. Unless you work for a large corporation or really any business that takes security seriously. Many of these businesses will quickly fire employees for conducting company business on non-approved applications or sites. Major security issues there.
    - prepend 6y ago
      Those companies are bad. There’s ways to train users and secure material on slack. Picking bad tools and firing users for trying to work around IT rules punishes innovation and results in worse employees. I used to work for a company with 200k employees that banned any use of google apps. In 2009. Even working on a different company’s doc was banned. They threatened firing. It was ridiculous. One day a partner was presenting from google drive. One of the IT execs said “you can’t use google drive” during the presentation. The partner asked what he should use and the IT guy said something about opening a ticket with AV and emailing the presentation. The partner kept going and the It guy said “no seriously, you’ll be fired.” The partner laughed, kept going and said “I’ll risk it.”
      - dvtrn 6y ago
        Those companies are bad. There’s ways to train users and secure material on slack. Picking bad tools and firing users for trying to work around IT rules punishes innovation and results in worse employees. If they just capriciously fire someone for deciding to use Slack in their functional team away from everyone else, sure. But if one's org has a security mandated policy to use specific communication programs and services that one presumably agrees to and signs a document asserting their compliance to as a contingency of continued employment, and that person violates it anyway...I'm hard pressed to call the company "bad" when they take disciplinary or corrective action against that individual. Such cavalierness (generally speaking) is how you get ants..I mean data breaches et al.
        prepend 6y ago
        Slack isn’t some random company, they have enterprise practices and there are third party companies that do data management on slack. An enterprise can adapt to use tools and apply security to the tools used and needed. Also there is really basic “don’t post sensitive data to the wrong places” training. I think there’s a difference between banning posting sensitive data and stopping teams from planning a meeting agenda. A company that can’t stop an enployee posting sensitive data to Slack also won’t be able to stop them posting it all sorts of bad places. I expect that sensitive data is protected in an org. With something more effective than firing people from posting it to Slack.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Try that at my company and if you get caught, you would get fired so fast it would make your head spin. Most large corporations are very concerned about which communication platforms you use for official business.
mrgordon 6y ago
We merged with a Microsoft shop and they cut out most of the non-Microsoft services but Slack was so strongly preferred we still pay for licenses and users can use Teams or Slack (there is an app that syncs the two)

gav 6y ago

A former employer bristled at the cost of Slack[1]. Why should we pay for Slack when we already own Teams? Everyone will just use Teams. About a week later I was on 4 unofficial Slack workspaces. They also mandated Teams for meetings, which was both terrible and particularly hostile to external invitees, so everyone just used free versions of Zoom instead. [1] Less than 0.07% of my base salary

thinkharderdev 6y ago
Yeah, the one killer thing that slack has is that there is a free tier which is perfectly usable. Organizations can try and force everyone to use Teams but in practice they can't stop people from just spinning up a free-tier slack account for their team. At the end of the day it's just not worth fighting it anymore if everyone is determined to use slack.
- tharne 6y ago
  > Organizations can try and force everyone to use Teams but in practice they can't stop people from just spinning up a free-tier slack account for their team. Unless you work for a large corporation or really any business that takes security seriously. Many of these businesses will quickly fire employees for conducting company business on non-approved applications or sites. Major security issues there.
  - prepend 6y ago
    Those companies are bad. There’s ways to train users and secure material on slack. Picking bad tools and firing users for trying to work around IT rules punishes innovation and results in worse employees. I used to work for a company with 200k employees that banned any use of google apps. In 2009. Even working on a different company’s doc was banned. They threatened firing. It was ridiculous. One day a partner was presenting from google drive. One of the IT execs said “you can’t use google drive” during the presentation. The partner asked what he should use and the IT guy said something about opening a ticket with AV and emailing the presentation. The partner kept going and the It guy said “no seriously, you’ll be fired.” The partner laughed, kept going and said “I’ll risk it.”
    - dvtrn 6y ago
      Those companies are bad. There’s ways to train users and secure material on slack. Picking bad tools and firing users for trying to work around IT rules punishes innovation and results in worse employees. If they just capriciously fire someone for deciding to use Slack in their functional team away from everyone else, sure. But if one's org has a security mandated policy to use specific communication programs and services that one presumably agrees to and signs a document asserting their compliance to as a contingency of continued employment, and that person violates it anyway...I'm hard pressed to call the company "bad" when they take disciplinary or corrective action against that individual. Such cavalierness (generally speaking) is how you get ants..I mean data breaches et al.
      - prepend 6y ago
        Slack isn’t some random company, they have enterprise practices and there are third party companies that do data management on slack. An enterprise can adapt to use tools and apply security to the tools used and needed. Also there is really basic “don’t post sensitive data to the wrong places” training. I think there’s a difference between banning posting sensitive data and stopping teams from planning a meeting agenda. A company that can’t stop an enployee posting sensitive data to Slack also won’t be able to stop them posting it all sorts of bad places. I expect that sensitive data is protected in an org. With something more effective than firing people from posting it to Slack.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Try that at my company and if you get caught, you would get fired so fast it would make your head spin. Most large corporations are very concerned about which communication platforms you use for official business.

mrgordon 6y ago

We merged with a Microsoft shop and they cut out most of the non-Microsoft services but Slack was so strongly preferred we still pay for licenses and users can use Teams or Slack (there is an app that syncs the two)