One of my clients staff just posted the FT article regarding Slack.
https://www.ft.com/content/8a9a8d98-0039-11e8-9e12-af73e8db3c71
It was used to support the argument that Slack ‘is better’ and they should stop trailing MS Teams (which is in pilot). Slight digress – it’s interesting to read some of the responses to the FT article. It takes me back 20 years when people were saying the same about email!). Anyway – back to the point.
If we look at the experience of other organisations who were early adopters of MS Teams (or Skype Teams as it was then) it’s not uncommon for those already on Slack to find it hard to adjust. Ideally, people already on Slack would be avoided as early pilot users as there are some ‘unconscious basis’ aspects, as there are with most pioneers of new technologies. For those interested in these type of technology developments it’s interesting to see early Slack users now moving to new ‘tools’ such as ‘Riot’ and ‘Mattermost’ (not that I’m suggesting it’s fashion rather than functionality that attracts many of the early pioneers)
As a standalone ‘chat based’ collaboration tool Slack has many advantages. It’s ‘momentum-friendly and the ability to link ‘third party tools’ and its open platform approach makes it appealing but the more you try to link in with ‘enterprise functionality’ the more you see its drawback.
So, I wouldn’t think of it as a matter of Teams v Slack but more a case of how you can begin to seamlessly collaborate using many capabilities. The more O365 capabilities that Shell introduce the better the experience of Teams will be and you begin to see far more advantages of using Teams over Slack.
There is also the risk and security issues. As companies learnt during the NotPetya cyber-attack in June 2017 the advantages of having an integrated enterprise wide chat tool, complying with all security aspects, are paramount. I know of many companies having their MS Teams cleared and restored within 48 hours, while other products took weeks to be fully verified and restored (or in some cases banned completely from ever being used again).
That could be part of the reason some articles now predict MS Teams will ‘overtake’ Slack by 2019 (although I would urge caution with any such reports but you begin to see the trend).
So, while many will still prefer what they use now (a basic instinct which we all have) I feel it’s important to look at the long-term roadmap of where these type of collaboration technologies are heading.