If you’re thinking about quitting Slack in favor of Microsoft’s collaboration platform, you should weigh the benefits and drawbacks of Microsoft Teams. Getting people to use a new tool might be difficult. That’s why it’s important to have reliable information under your belt before taking on a challenge of that nature.
It’s possible that Teams is already available to you if you’re an existing subscriber of Office 365. It’s possible, though, that you haven’t yet started using it. That raises the question: why?
Perhaps more people have heard of Slack just because of its name. That’s because it’s the gold standard for group projects. Of course, it’s not the only resource of its kind available to you.
Now, let’s take a close look at Microsoft Teams’ advantages and disadvantages to determine once and for all if this Office 365 app can take the place of Slack.
Advantages of Microsoft Teams
Increased Work Focus
Users of Microsoft Teams report being more focused on their work, albeit this may be due to a placebo effect. One positive aspect of holding a conversation in Teams is that it eliminates the need for time-consuming and inefficient email exchanges. As a result, that is a surefire way to maintain your concentration intact throughout the workday.
However, Microsoft Teams’ channel organization might also be to blame. In this manner, your inbox will not get a flood of urgent notifications. It is instead sorted into distinct routes for dissemination. This helps employees stay focused and organized. Conversations, meetings, and files relevant to a certain channel’s topic can all be stored there.
Yet, Teams’ more polished user interface may also be to blame for the team’s heightened concentration. Gifs, emoticons, links, and link previews can all be used to improve team members’ communications. However, the features of Teams may make its users less likely to get side-tracked by unsolicited messages of any kind, including email.
Better & Improved Team Productivity
It is difficult to put a number on the potential boost in productivity a team can experience after adopting new software. Having everything in one place has its advantages, though. Finding a file or piece of data now takes zero extra time. In fact, today’s workforce is familiar to having instantaneous access to all information they require.
Therefore, it would be conceivable to witness improved team productivity with a unified platform for managing all communications. You and your team members may integrate all of your favorite apps into Teams. Every week, if not every day, there’s a new integration that you may use to enhance efficiency.
Of course, everything in the Office 365 suite works seamlessly with Microsoft Teams, but there are also third-party apps that can transform your Teams interface into a powerful enterprise-grade platform for teamwork.
Consider the Microsoft Teams Vacation Planner as an illustration. Managing your time off has never been easier thanks to our leave tracking tool’s tight integration with Microsoft Teams. Users can:
- Quick approval or request that disappears in a flash
- Find out about upcoming absences
- Employees can access their own leave calendars, leave balances, and more from their desks at the company.
A Simple Method for Getting Started
It’s not going to take as long as you think for your team to become comfortable with using Teams, so you shouldn’t be concerned about that. A positive aspect that stood out to us throughout our analysis of the platform was the simplicity with which Microsoft Teams can unquestionably put it into use.
This tool, like the majority of Microsoft’s offerings, is quite simple to learn and use. The processing power is enormous because it is entirely cloud-based. You can access this capability at any time. Every member of your team will have unrestricted, anytime, device-agnostic access to all data.
Having established some of Microsoft Teams’ benefits, let’s examine some of its less laudable disadvantages.
Read also -> Best Tips on Making an Android App
Disadvantages of Microsoft Teams
Complicated Document Organization
As was previously said, today’s workforce (consisting mostly of members of Generation Z and Millennials) does not prefer sitting about doing anything. They don’t care to find out the file’s location. Therefore, it is essential that digital libraries are easy to comb through. You can perform a file search in Microsoft Teams, but the app’s storage structure can be confusing. All files uploaded to a channel are available in the main folder for that channel for easy access. The link from the Teams chat to the file may become invalid if you reorganize or move around the files in this root folder.
It is a challenging design issue that calls for original thinking. It may also necessitate a shift in our psychological filing systems, where we no longer worry about preserving a strict hierarchy between different types of documents.
It’s Not the Same Attending a Meeting Online
We can’t discuss the merits and shortcomings of Microsoft Teams without contrasting it with Slack. When it comes to coordinating remote teams, Slack was the first of its kind. In addition, they were the first to perfect the team call function.
While the convenience of group calls on Slack cannot be denied, the online meeting experience pales in comparison. It’s possible that this feature will discourage some users from making use of it. Teams currently lack the ability to host meetings, but Microsoft is working to fix that. We anticipate that this integration will make the calling capability more natural to use. However, Teams also has other fantastic features for virtual meetings, like as the ability to take notes in OneNote during a conference call.
Restricted Flexibility
When you make a new Team on the site, you’re essentially starting over with the organization. To make matters worse, Teams doesn’t provide a lot of leeways when it comes to reproducing said framework.
You can’t, for instance, copy a Team or relocate a channel. You must do so manually to replicate a Team when the need arises. This may seem counterproductive or pointless. Additionally, although one of the ‘Teams’ primary benefits is that it makes it easier to share information, adjusting users’ access levels can be a bit of a challenge at times. Another way in which Microsoft Teams may not be adaptable enough for some users. Everyone in a Team gets full access to the Team’s channels and files. In Teams, at least for the time being, there is no way to restrict access to only managers.
Most people are reluctant to use a new tool unless they see the value in doing so. Microsoft consistently works on enhancing and developing new functionality and features of Teams. As a result, before making any hasty decisions, you should carefully weigh the benefits and drawbacks of Microsoft Teams. Connect with us on Facebook, Linkedin, and Codecreators.ca.
