Microsoft Teams does not facilitate open communication
Coming from a company using Slack to a company using MS Teams, there were a lot of features that I missed. Not only that, but it simply isn’t pleasant to use. I’ve never had that experience in Teams of being pleasantly surprised by a feature.
Replying to messages
In Slack it’s simple to reply to messages. It starts a thread that represents a conversation parallel to the current channel. Many conversations can be taking place simultaneously, each in its own thread.
Teams doesn’t have this feature. They recently added a button to reply to a message, but in reality it’s just a shortcut that copies a link to/the text of the original message and embeds it into the reply. It lacks the uniformity of Slack, where private chats are the same as channels. In fact, thanks to this uniformity in Slack, private chats between multiple people can easily be converted to public channels to invite wider participation.
Communicating with people outside the team
MS Teams should be renamed to MS Team (singular), because communicating within your own team is fine, whereas communicating with anyone else’s team is discouraged. Another alternative would be MS Silos.
Using the desktop application it’s impossible to browse other teams that you’re not already a member of, and it feels as if your team is in a tiny clearing in a dark, impenetrable forest. There could be important conversations happening in other channels, but you’d never know. In fact, I’m pretty sure that users believe that you must be invited to a channel in order to access it, which is false. The way to do this is set the channel to private. The lack of discoverability is a separate “feature”.
In fact, I’m not sure whether this lack of discoverability is a feature, or actually a bug of the desktop application. If I use the mobile app, I can in fact browse other teams! This situation is bizarre. When I showed my colleagues they were shocked.
Another issue arising from requiring people to be a member of a team to participate, is that other users can’t be mentioned to notify them of an announcement. The only way to do this is to manually get the link to the channel, invite the user to it and then, only once they’re a member, tag them or send them a link to the discussion.
Quality of bots/integrations
In Slack the quality of integrations, and the ease of discovering them by typing / directly into the chat window really encourage their use. In contrast to Teams, where even though Polly (an integration that helps creating custom polls) is installed, I see people creating ad-hoc polls using emojis:
Hi everyone! Please vote for your favourite option by replying with the corresponding emoji:
1. Option 1 :)
2. Option 2 :(
3. Option 3 :o
Granted, this could be an issue specific to my company, and that enterprise users just aren’t that savvy, or even bother to get to grips with their own tools. I suspect though that the ease at which you can discover and use these integrations directly affects how much they’ll be used.
Limited reaction emojis to announcements
This complaint sounds extremely childish, but it highlights how software can be functional and playful. The reaction emojis on offer from Teams can’t really express the full gamut of human emotion: Like, Heart, Laugh, Surprised, Sad Angry.
At a previous company that used Slack, colleagues took full advantage of the ability to upload and use custom emojis. The result was a very playful atmosphere.
Conclusion
I think the use of Teams stifles intra-organisation communication. Unfortunately many companies have defaulted to using it, solely because it’s bundled with the online office suite. Slack have filed a motion with the EU courts claiming that Microsoft is abusing its position to create a monopoly, and I for one hope that they rule in Slack’s favour!
