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I’ve rarely seen Teams used as a group chat like Slack. Rather: - Calls, online meetings, DMs - An easy way to set up and manage shared folders in SharePoint

I’ve rarely seen Teams used as a group chat like Slack. Rather: - Calls, online meetings, DMs - An easy way to set up and manage shared folders in SharePoint - this makes my life so much easier because everyone in my company knows how not to rely on attachments any longer. While I get Slack’s perspective, they and Teams serve different needs in my opinion.

JohnFen 4y ago
Where I work, Teams is all that we're allowed to use. This has dramatically reduced the amount of communication taking place overall, and has increased the use of email (emails will get answered eventually, Teams chats might not). We also don't use SharePoint much, although I consider that a good thing, personally.
- mcswell 4y ago
  Likewise here. IMO, Teams is a good place for information to go to die. I can file emails that I may want to refer to in my own filing system, and in some cases I've gone back to emails I filed ten years ago to discover the answer to some company question. With Teams, I can find on Monday posts that were sent on Friday. They're probably still there, I just can't find them. Similarly for files that are stored on Teams/Sharepoint; it's hard to create a useable link (at least there's no obvious way to do it), and everyone is forced to use one person's directory structure, which as often as not doesn't make any sense to the rest of us. What's the right way to store files? Store a single copy in some database-like structure, and let me create my personal "directory structure" to point to it. Then I can find it, and if anyone else uses their own personal directory structure, they can find it too. This could be a Linux file system where I'm allowed to create simlinks, but not copy a file, or it could be my Outlook folder structure. (I'm assuming that when Outlook sends an email to multiple recipients on the same email server, there's really only one copy of the email, and everyone has links to it, at least until they reply to it.)
- alexjplant 4y ago
  The only place I've ever worked that used Teams treated it as a replacement for Lync/Skype for Business. We just DM'd each other sporadically and nothing really got posted in public channels. Everything was also set to auto-delete after 60 days so it couldn't be searched as a long-term knowledge repository (why this was done is left as an exercise to the reader). Teams as an app is generally mediocre but my company's implementation was garbage; Slack is an order of magnitude better in every respect.
magicalhippo 4y ago
Same here. We have some activity in the actual teams (channels), but most of it is like you say, DM's, calls and meetings. We use the SharePoint integration to make it easy for support to find files and documentation. I've actually been trying to push more of it into the teams (channels), but the giant group chat is persistent... I think most regular folks just aren't aligned with the concept of chat channels.
Pephers 4y ago
On a previous job we underwent a migration from Lynq/Skype for Business/email to Slack. It was driven by us employees and channels were very active and people engaged. We had dev teams in four different countries and I believe the communication on Slack was a key ingredient to our success. Years later upper management must have noticed the Slack line item in the sheets and the company migrated to Teams which was of course included in the Office 365 plan. Public channels become almost silent in comparison and we reverted to DM'ing/emails.
pxc 4y ago
> I’ve rarely seen Teams used as a group chat like Slack This is because Teams is just not very good to use for group chats. Most companies that use Teams don't have anything like Slack, and so they just don't have big group chats of that kind.

JohnFen 4y ago

Where I work, Teams is all that we're allowed to use. This has dramatically reduced the amount of communication taking place overall, and has increased the use of email (emails will get answered eventually, Teams chats might not). We also don't use SharePoint much, although I consider that a good thing, personally.

mcswell 4y ago
Likewise here. IMO, Teams is a good place for information to go to die. I can file emails that I may want to refer to in my own filing system, and in some cases I've gone back to emails I filed ten years ago to discover the answer to some company question. With Teams, I can find on Monday posts that were sent on Friday. They're probably still there, I just can't find them. Similarly for files that are stored on Teams/Sharepoint; it's hard to create a useable link (at least there's no obvious way to do it), and everyone is forced to use one person's directory structure, which as often as not doesn't make any sense to the rest of us. What's the right way to store files? Store a single copy in some database-like structure, and let me create my personal "directory structure" to point to it. Then I can find it, and if anyone else uses their own personal directory structure, they can find it too. This could be a Linux file system where I'm allowed to create simlinks, but not copy a file, or it could be my Outlook folder structure. (I'm assuming that when Outlook sends an email to multiple recipients on the same email server, there's really only one copy of the email, and everyone has links to it, at least until they reply to it.)
alexjplant 4y ago
The only place I've ever worked that used Teams treated it as a replacement for Lync/Skype for Business. We just DM'd each other sporadically and nothing really got posted in public channels. Everything was also set to auto-delete after 60 days so it couldn't be searched as a long-term knowledge repository (why this was done is left as an exercise to the reader). Teams as an app is generally mediocre but my company's implementation was garbage; Slack is an order of magnitude better in every respect.

magicalhippo 4y ago

Same here. We have some activity in the actual teams (channels), but most of it is like you say, DM's, calls and meetings. We use the SharePoint integration to make it easy for support to find files and documentation. I've actually been trying to push more of it into the teams (channels), but the giant group chat is persistent... I think most regular folks just aren't aligned with the concept of chat channels.

Pephers 4y ago

On a previous job we underwent a migration from Lynq/Skype for Business/email to Slack. It was driven by us employees and channels were very active and people engaged. We had dev teams in four different countries and I believe the communication on Slack was a key ingredient to our success. Years later upper management must have noticed the Slack line item in the sheets and the company migrated to Teams which was of course included in the Office 365 plan. Public channels become almost silent in comparison and we reverted to DM'ing/emails.

pxc 4y ago

> I’ve rarely seen Teams used as a group chat like Slack This is because Teams is just not very good to use for group chats. Most companies that use Teams don't have anything like Slack, and so they just don't have big group chats of that kind.