Moving your business from Slack to Teams? Be aware of these four considerations

By Mike Weaver, Technical Product Manager at Quest 

There is no denying that our working lives have been chaotically upended by Covid-19 – with millions finding themselves working at home. Whether this is in a comfortable home office, at the kitchen table or in the middle of trying to juggle a home school schedule. But now that lockdowns are gradually receding around the world, tough technological decisions lie ahead, as business and IT leaders start to create new workforce plans.

The apps which allowed us to operate from home effectively became ubiquitous out of necessity. Organisations keen to recreate the cooperative environments of their physical offices had to rely heavily on collaboration tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. We were all glued to our webcams, but now that many employees have the option to return to the office or adopt a hybrid office approach, the big question is which software will emerge as the enterprise collaboration winner – and why.

The stakes are high, as the worldwide market for social software and collaboration in the workplace is expected to grow from an estimated $2.7 billion in 2018 to $4.8 billion by 2023, nearly doubling in size, according to a prediction from Gartner.

Both Teams and Slack have experienced an understandably massive increase in users when the pandemic caught us all by surprise. Microsoft now has 145 million people using Teams communications app, according to recent figures, up from around 32 million at the beginning of the pandemic. Meanwhile Slack, the other major business-focused chat and comms app, saw concurrent users pass the 12.5 million mark April 2020. Clearly business is booming for both companies.

Despite being caught on the back foot initially, Microsoft has gradually increased available options and functionality within Teams bringing it closer to the abilities of its big rival, Slack. On top of that, new capabilities for Teams are planned for the release of the new Windows 11 operating system, which might persuade dedicated Slack users to reconsider their stance.

Teams will be integrated into new Windows version, offering one holistic platform for collaboration. As a result, many companies will now be planning to migrate Slack to Teams. Cost savings is becoming the biggest motivation for Slack-to-Teams migration projects since Teams is part of the Office 365 bundle, meaning that IT organisations can remove the extra spend on Slack.

This also removes other tooling required to manage Slack, such as enabling users, syncing users, monitoring and eDiscovery. Centralising productivity with one platform via Teams means that users know where to go to collaborate rather than trying to search for the right platform or have split conversations on multiple platforms.

Migration will undoubtably provide a challenge for many organisations which have been relying on one platform for a significant time. For a start, they could encounter resistance from passionately loyal fans of the previous platform. Most Slack users love Slack, especially since it has a great reputation with developer communities. This can create an almost cult-like following within organisations and is in itself a significant barrier.

One way to avert this is rallying staff towards the cause, providing transparency and tangible support for those experiencing the big change.

Function mapping is a major migration concern because there are four major differences between Slack and Teams. All of these need to be addressed for a successful migration:

1) Slack’s workspaces are different to Teams’

Slack doesn’t have the same structure that Microsoft Teams does. Instead, Slack has large workspaces, in many cases just one, and many channels below them.

In reality, most organisations will migrate channels into several teams, some in a “1 channel to 1 team” ratio. Others will need to organise channels into teams. Re-organising channels into teams is reported as perhaps the largest burden.

2) Slack channels

They migrate quite easily into Teams channels, but the main challenge is the issue of organising these channels.

3) Apps and integrations

This is the main functional hang-up in a Slack-to-Teams migration. For Slack, bots and integrations are the classic advantages of its platform. However, many may be surprised to see identical bots or integration options for most functions in Teams.

Even as more APIs come out, there is still manual work required by Slack admins and end-users. At a minimum, they will need to re-authenticate add-ons. Dependent upon the function, there could be a great deal of work.

Some custom developments continue for integrations, and many companies that started with integrations have not changed to the new method for their applications. This can add additional complexity to the planning. Both custom integrations and applications need to be properly analysed.

4) Direct messages

One of the major API challenges with Slack-to-Teams migrations has been the inability to migrate private messages. Some vendors have been successful at streaming direct messages into Teams, however metadata is lost. But since it is one of the most requested features by every migration administrator worldwide, we might be seeing updates coming up shortly.

The pandemic has provided a fascinating global remote communications experiment for the business world, but now the results are in and it is time to choose your technological path.

A Slack-to-Teams migration can be a difficult undertaking politically. Regardless of how often you communicate that something isn’t migrating, the expectation is that the same function will be working on Monday if it worked on Friday. Migration projects boil down to three steps: Plan, move and manage. When performing migration projects that are not moving between the same systems, you need to plan accordingly, dive into discovery and try to identify highly utilised features.

By Mike Weaver, Technical Product Manager at Quest 

There is no denying that our working lives have been chaotically upended by Covid-19 – with millions finding themselves working at home. Whether this is in a comfortable home office, at the kitchen table or in the middle of trying to juggle a home school schedule. But now that lockdowns are gradually receding around the world, tough technological decisions lie ahead, as business and IT leaders start to create new workforce plans.

The apps which allowed us to operate from home effectively became ubiquitous out of necessity. Organisations keen to recreate the cooperative environments of their physical offices had to rely heavily on collaboration tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. We were all glued to our webcams, but now that many employees have the option to return to the office or adopt a hybrid office approach, the big question is which software will emerge as the enterprise collaboration winner – and why.

The stakes are high, as the worldwide market for social software and collaboration in the workplace is expected to grow from an estimated $2.7 billion in 2018 to $4.8 billion by 2023, nearly doubling in size, according to a prediction from Gartner.

Both Teams and Slack have experienced an understandably massive increase in users when the pandemic caught us all by surprise. Microsoft now has 145 million people using Teams communications app, according to recent figures, up from around 32 million at the beginning of the pandemic. Meanwhile Slack, the other major business-focused chat and comms app, saw concurrent users pass the 12.5 million mark April 2020. Clearly business is booming for both companies.

Despite being caught on the back foot initially, Microsoft has gradually increased available options and functionality within Teams bringing it closer to the abilities of its big rival, Slack. On top of that, new capabilities for Teams are planned for the release of the new Windows 11 operating system, which might persuade dedicated Slack users to reconsider their stance.

Teams will be integrated into new Windows version, offering one holistic platform for collaboration. As a result, many companies will now be planning to migrate Slack to Teams. Cost savings is becoming the biggest motivation for Slack-to-Teams migration projects since Teams is part of the Office 365 bundle, meaning that IT organisations can remove the extra spend on Slack.

This also removes other tooling required to manage Slack, such as enabling users, syncing users, monitoring and eDiscovery. Centralising productivity with one platform via Teams means that users know where to go to collaborate rather than trying to search for the right platform or have split conversations on multiple platforms.

Migration will undoubtably provide a challenge for many organisations which have been relying on one platform for a significant time. For a start, they could encounter resistance from passionately loyal fans of the previous platform. Most Slack users love Slack, especially since it has a great reputation with developer communities. This can create an almost cult-like following within organisations and is in itself a significant barrier.

One way to avert this is rallying staff towards the cause, providing transparency and tangible support for those experiencing the big change.

Function mapping is a major migration concern because there are four major differences between Slack and Teams. All of these need to be addressed for a successful migration:

1) Slack’s workspaces are different to Teams’

Slack doesn’t have the same structure that Microsoft Teams does. Instead, Slack has large workspaces, in many cases just one, and many channels below them.

In reality, most organisations will migrate channels into several teams, some in a “1 channel to 1 team” ratio. Others will need to organise channels into teams. Re-organising channels into teams is reported as perhaps the largest burden.

2) Slack channels

They migrate quite easily into Teams channels, but the main challenge is the issue of organising these channels.

3) Apps and integrations

This is the main functional hang-up in a Slack-to-Teams migration. For Slack, bots and integrations are the classic advantages of its platform. However, many may be surprised to see identical bots or integration options for most functions in Teams.

Even as more APIs come out, there is still manual work required by Slack admins and end-users. At a minimum, they will need to re-authenticate add-ons. Dependent upon the function, there could be a great deal of work.

Some custom developments continue for integrations, and many companies that started with integrations have not changed to the new method for their applications. This can add additional complexity to the planning. Both custom integrations and applications need to be properly analysed.

4) Direct messages

One of the major API challenges with Slack-to-Teams migrations has been the inability to migrate private messages. Some vendors have been successful at streaming direct messages into Teams, however metadata is lost. But since it is one of the most requested features by every migration administrator worldwide, we might be seeing updates coming up shortly.

The pandemic has provided a fascinating global remote communications experiment for the business world, but now the results are in and it is time to choose your technological path.

A Slack-to-Teams migration can be a difficult undertaking politically. Regardless of how often you communicate that something isn’t migrating, the expectation is that the same function will be working on Monday if it worked on Friday. Migration projects boil down to three steps: Plan, move and manage. When performing migration projects that are not moving between the same systems, you need to plan accordingly, dive into discovery and try to identify highly utilised features.