Teams has been awful in terms of getting the notifications to you. Also small things like not being to able to reorder channels is bonkers.

I was going to suggest moving to Slack for our nonprofit, having been unsatisfied with Mattermost a while back. It might be time to reconsider...

Could you share the specific limitations of Mattermost that were unsatisfactory? Are there any circumstances under which you'd still recommend them?

I hate microsoft, but I really hate slack.

Now I understand all of those old bitter IT people that I didn't understand when I was young and starting out in tech.

I really wonder why Discord didn’t start an enterprise offering called Concord. I’m sure there’s enough kids using it that it would get some traction.

It's quite fortuitous Discord never went down this path you've outlined. "Concord" is now a term synonymous with abject and astounding failure. "Unity" is also taken and fraught with negative associations. "Harmony" might be free.

“Harmony” is a line of programmable remote controls from Logitech.

Yeah, Discord not going into competition with Slack or Teams has been an own-goal that I've been baffled by for years. Given that Slack apparently thinks their incredibly subpar offering is worth $200k a year, I can't imagine why Discord wouldn't roll out a "We'll run a standalone instance of Discord with your information siloed and DMs retained for legal purposes, with full Nitro/Boost perks for $ALOTOFMONEY/user" version of their software.

yep tech is a truly revolutionary industry - it goes in circles. Once you seen the same BS cycle happen a few times it's real hard to not become jaded.

Honestly I have so many issues getting notifications on Slack. Messages go completely missed even when I have the user VIP'd, starred, notifications on, everything. I don't know what else I can do to make sure I get messages, to the point I ask people to reach out on Signal if I don't get back to them on Slack and it's at all urgent.

A lot of tools integrate with Slack and don't have native/built-in integrations for Teams.

I like the Slack UX better but is very hard to describe why.

Also every time I join a Teams call on an iMac, the camera freezes.

Teams organizes your communications into "teams", slack into "channels". Somehow the latter just makes more sense to more people.

That Teams requires you to put every channel in a team is a huge pain. We often have orthogonal needs (teams vs projects) and need cross-team adhoc channels. When I was with an organization that used Slack, this was easy. With Teams, you have to figure out where to put a channel and who is on that team. You also cannot tell who is in a channel because you join teams, not channels. I miss Slack's ability to spin up a cross-team project channel and just invite whoever needs to be involved.

Also, whenever you create a team in Teams, it creates a SharePoint site for that team. So we are the engineering team and want all our docs in engineering. But to spin up a cross-team project team means it gets its own SharePoint site and now files are scattered. Want to add a Loop workspace? That's per channel, not per team. And teams are exchange groups - so it makes handling exclusive email groups more difficult because if your team is public then anybody can join your email group.

That's my biggest gripe about Teams. But also notifications have never worked well for me. The integrations, even with Microsoft products, are poor. Want to send a well-formatted Azure Monitor alert to a Teams channel? You have to set up a complicated and fragile logic app (power automate) and figure out how to transform the message from the "common alert schema".

And message management is harder. In Slack I could always use the built-in remind-me-later. It'd put the message in Later and notify me again. The best we have in Teams is the power automate workflow to resend the message. But it's just too much friction typing in the exact date and time I want it resent vs Slack where I could just click "remind me tomorrow".

End rant

You can create chat between any group of people that you want and then rename the chat to have a name, but that’s not a channel and it’s not a team and it doesn’t really have a full-fledged files area, though you can share files in a rudimentary way.

I had a problem where it was not possible to include people from different organisations. Once you have more than one external organisation involved, I have to manage how they join and whether "external" or "guest". This makes it difficult or even impossible to set up the channel/chat with the people you want. This is entirely a Teams limitation.

Slack does not have these artificial barriers. You can invite single channel guests, or add them as full-fledged members. It's simple and logical.

We often use meeting chats for these kinds of channels. Meetings that happened months ago sometimes.

It's very easy to describe for me. Teams is horrible in writing text, editing text, reading text, notifications. I'd rather use IRC than teams for text communication.

Its not even good for sharing meme photos, they always a appear as a link I have to click on, instead of showing the image referenced in the link.

That’s a relatively new and annoying change - if the clipboard has an image and the URL it came from, teams always takes the URL. You have to abuse screenshots now.

It works fine on the mobile app, and I'm guessing it works fine in Windows or people wouldn't be using them. But on MacOs its just a link.

People will grumble switching from Slack to Teams but it won't actually mess up the business.

Our business unit within a large public company was using it and we were spun off, Slack was going to be $1M/yr and the CFO/Execs definitely weren't going to pay that.

We are fine on teams, but there was a lot of wailing and gnashing. We had tons of slack customizations, automation, integrations, etc..