We recently made the switch to Office365 at work, which comes with the cool collaboration feature “Teams.” Prior to the switch, my department used a paid version of Slack and loved it.
We switched over to Teams because it would allow us to collaborate with other departments using Teams, and we anticipated it would function about the same as Slack. It does…but there are some features Slack has, that Teams does not.
Messaging myself
Remember when you used to send yourself emails to remind yourself to do something? Or before that, you would call your office phone and leave yourself a voicemail? You never did that? Must have just been me then…
Anyway, Slack had a feature where you could “message yourself.” Basically send a chat message to yourself. I used it all. the. time. to post reminders and links I wanted to share. Teams doesn’t have this…or at least I have not found it.
Emojis
While Teams has animated emojis (which are super fun), Slack had many more emojis. Slack’s emojis were not animated, but the sheer volume of them rivals Teams. Plus, Slack featured the ability to make your own! That’s a win for everyone.
Notifications
Teams will notify you of a new message in the same way Slack does. Except Slack would provide the first part of the message in the banner notification. Believe it or not, that is extremely helpful when you are going between texts, email, chat and social notifications.
Channels
You can never have too many channels. But in Teams, evidently you can. Teams limits the number of channels shown to 11. You can have more, but they are displayed as “hidden” channels and you have to click to see them.
These aren’t deal breakers, but just little features that do make a difference.
One Kansas Girl 