Why Microsoft Teams is so much better than zoom and slack for collaboration

I have been a little against Microsoft Teams in the past few months.

During the COVID-19 blocks, I complained about the complexity of this collaborative application and avoided it like a wet gym sock. I thought:

Microsoft does not understand how we work. The application has many features. It does not fit the lifestyle of modern remote workers. I hate the color purple.

It was like a large piece of bloated software, sitting on an application tray collecting dust. I didn’t want to click on it and I didn’t want to learn how it worked. Sometimes, I reluctantly posted some documents and tested resources, all the time wishing I was back on Slack.

I always told people that Microsoft Teams is a joke.

I was wrong.

In the past, I have defended Slack and Zoom because, at least in most of my daily work, they are functional, elegant and intuitive. Chatting with people on Slack is easy and the resources are so easy and simple that you could teach them to a newly trained intern (depending on the intern). Zoom has become the de facto tool for most employees because video chats are smooth and reliable.

Using teams with a real – you know –team these past few weeks have completely changed my perception. I think it’s a little bloated, with a lot of features that people will never use. There is a task management system called Planner that is just a click away, but has no serious automation and is an entire galaxy far from the power and simplicity of Trello. It’s incredibly annoying that you can’t get into chained conversations like Slack. And don’t even tell me about some features that are missing for video chats. (Turning off the camera in Teams means that you become an icon, a small photo at the bottom of the screen. I keep thinking that someone is not on a call and wondering when to join – in Zoom, you see a blank screen.)

And yet, here we are. I like teams.

Microsoft made its name in technology because of a word. It may be an oversimplification of a multi-billion dollar company, but the word is integration. Outlook is integrated with Word, which is integrated with Teams. Over the years, people have used another word for this (monopoly), but when you are trying to finish a report and are alone in an office, the integration is excellent. I was able to start a video conference with people with one click. Great! I can do that on Slack. But I was also able to add 17 other people with a few more clicks and also schedule meetings with them at Teams and work on a Word document together.

I will take several steps forward. Now I’m starting to think that Teams is much better for collaboration during the (hopefully, final months) of the pandemic. We need integration now more than ever. If I can click once to start a meeting with 10 people instead of sending the link, I’ll accept. Listen to me correctly – individual tools in the Microsoft ecosystem are not always better. I prefer Slack and Zoom. What I have discovered is that my tired version of COVID prefers an ecosystem that does everything. The pandemic changed my view.

Which brings us to Google. There are only two companies competing for total knowledge worker productivity dominance. (Unfortunately, Apple does not seem to know what it is doing in this regard. There is no Slack, Zoom or Teams alternative to real business productivity.) Google and Microsoft are the two survivors.

Google is the closest to Microsoft in terms of making everything work in a fluid and intuitive way, but Google Meet is a long way from teams. They are not even in the same league. If it weren’t so! I prefer Google Docs over the online version of Microsoft Word, and Gmail (as part of the Google Workspace, which used to be called the G-Suite) is much better than Microsoft Outlook, especially for those of us who never delete a email and rely on an inbox search every five seconds.

For now, easily starting a video chat (and adding a team) in Microsoft Teams and integrating with Outlook to schedule group chats is winning me over.

When things finally get back to normal, I can be ready for the simplified, simple and intuitive approach with Slack and Zoom. We’ll see.