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Ask HN: Is anyone using Microsoft Teams?

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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Microsoft Teams?

#4
My opinion(1), after playing a while with MS Teams:

The pros : the product is quite good, let say it is good enough and much better than the status quo of relying on emails or Whatsapp. It is integrated with the Office suite, and if I understand correctly, will be free for pro Office users. It has a handful of very interesting product decisions, like threaded replies and iframe apps.

The cons : MS Teams is not as polished as Slack, the UI (especially of the chat area) is not as clear. The installation/onboarding is not as fluid. They have less apps and integrations (obviously, this is just the beginning).

My guess : MS Teams will not even begin to make a dent in the almost 100% market share of Slack among startups, agencies and similar small, agile groups. The whole Office ecosystem is simply to heavy, the UX is not as great, and some integrations might be missing. On the other hand, it might win big in the entreprise segment, where Slack is less present, and where being in the Office family is not seen as a drawback but actually an sign of solidity

(1) I am an independent dev, working on an app for their platform, so this is an educated guess based on my testing. I will enable Teams to connect with each other or with Slack teams through shared chat (www.smooz.io/microsoft).

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Microsoft Teams?

#5
I can't even find their pricing page. Clicking Free Trial and they are already asking me for information when I don't even know what it costs.

I guess it's startup unfriendly and only marketed for enterprise.

What made you want to switch from Slack to Microsoft Teams? How large is your team? Curious to see the responses to this thread.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Microsoft Teams?

#7
Microsoft is smart to build their own Outlook killer, and they certainly succeeded in freaking Slack out[1]. We (SpiderOak) evaluated teams as competitive research when building Semaphor [2] (our own end-to-end encrypted alternative to Slack/HipChat.)

I found Teams to be a credible offering. It's shortcomings are mostly about being very new (e.g. no linux client yet, some unpolished UI associated with window resizing.) The O365 integration is nice. The client seems to be built using Electron and TypeScript, and if the pace of development maintains I expect it will be a serious threat to Slack. Of course Slack and Teams require trusting the vendor with your unencrypted content.

[1] https://spideroak.com/articles/slacks-morning-after

[2] https://spideroak.com/solutions/semaphor/business/tour

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Microsoft Teams?

#8

I can't even find their pricing page. Clicking Free Trial and they are already asking me for information when I don't even know what it costs. I guess it's startup unfriendly and only marketed for enterprise. What made you want to switch from Slack to Microsoft Teams? How large is your team? Curious to see the responses to this thread.

The trick is that it's is part of Office365, you can't buy it separately. But for a few bucks you get a coherent suite of many products, Microsoft Teams just being one of them. So it does not have to be greater than Slack, just good enough, since you bought it anyway with your Office365 subscription.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Microsoft Teams?

#9

My opinion(1), after playing a while with MS Teams: The pros : the product is quite good, let say it is good enough and much better than the status quo of relying on emails or Whatsapp. It is integrated with the Office suite, and if I understand correctly, will be free for pro Office users. It has a handful of very interesting product decisions, like threaded replies and iframe apps. The cons : MS Teams is not as pol…

Yea I think you describe it well there as "heavy" it doesn't feel agile. The whole concept that a single login is more fluid only has a little validity because when you login to a suite of apps you feel so overwhelmed. Logging into slack means you're logged into slack. Pretty simply and light.
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