- July 10, 2019
-
- 3 min
A new survey from market research firm ETR shows that Slack, the widely-used, collaboration tool is quickly losing ground to Microsoft Teams.
ETF asks chief information officers and other leaders at the world’s biggest organizations where they plan to spend their company’s tech budget. Their survey indicates that Microsoft Teams has a higher adoption rate and fewer defections, while a significant number of organizations using Slack intend on leaving the service.
Valiant used both collaboration tools in parallel shortly after the release of Teams to determine which is the best fit for our staff, as well as to assist our clients in choosing the tool that is right for their business. After a period of 3 months, we made the switch over Microsoft Teams and have found it to be an indispensable tool that has led to an increase in internal collaboration and assisted in streamlining the services we provide to clients.
Cost Savings
Microsoft Teams is part of the Office365 ecosystem, and if you already have O365 chances are that you have teams – at no additional cost.
A business with 20 staff members using the Plus tier of Slack will save $3,600 annually if they make the switch. That’s a considerable amount of money that can be used for other purposes – and only one of the many benefits of adopting Microsoft Teams.
O365 Integration
Teams, like most other apps in the O365 ecosystem, are tightly integrated and make sharing information across your business a breeze. Microsoft SharePoint’s integration with Teams allows for each team to have a dedicated site for file storage, data collection, and more. Depending on your business’s needs, the combination of Teams and SharePoint can meet nearly all, if not all, of your collaboration and data storage needs.
Other O365 apps like Microsoft Forms can be used to incorporate data collection directly in chat, allowing you to perform surveys and receive feedback immediately.
Centralized Administration
Much like other apps in O365, administration is handled from a single, familiar, console. When administering services on a network, one less tool can present a significant time savings – time that can be invested in improving services or achieving business goals. Microsoft’s granular approach to administration also provides more flexibility, allowing administrators to allow and restrict specific features to maintain security.
Cross-Organization Collaboration
Both Slack and Microsoft Teams help enable collaboration within a business, and the ability to create a connection between two businesses has the potential to improve efficiencies between your staff, clients, and partners.
While this can be accomplished in Slack by using a 3rd party tool, it’s a native feature for Teams. Depending on how your business uses collaboration tools, the efficiencies found here can be astronomical.
We recently worked on a project with a company in New Jersey with 2 development teams located overseas and about 15 participants. Traditional methods of communication and file sharing worked, but we weren’t moving as quickly as we wanted to.
Luckily, Microsoft Teams was mentioned during a break and once a bridge was created between both businesses, tasks that were planned to take place over the course of a week were completed within hours. Conversations between team members took place in real time and could be referenced later, files were shared and collaboratively edited, and the ability to instantly initiate a video conference while sharing screens maintained our velocity and resulted in a positive result in a fraction of the estimated time.
Is your business currently using Slack, but exploring a switch to Microsoft Teams? If so, our team of experts are ready to help you how to benefit the most from it and the entire suite of Office365 apps – including staff training to optimize usage and realize efficiencies that help your business achieve its goals.
