Let's Chat vs Microsoft Teams

As it is the communication tool chosen for the course, our team will be using Slack to monitor the course announcements from our instructor as well as to communicate with the instructor and industry partners. The tool for communicating within the team will be Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams enables the team to share documents and edit them synchronously(Google Drive is not an option due to one team member's location). Since it also provides a group chat feature, we chose to use it as our communication tool to avoid using too many softwares.

we were using slack and at the same time we had a subscription with office 365. after a while we hit the slack free limitation quota. and it got annoying. the search ability was useless in free tier. and more annoying whenever you search, it opens a webpage and doesn't do it in the app.

on mobile there were many cases that I didn't get notification of important discussions. rooms was the way to separate a talk. but it become tedious. each time for a new subject that you wanted to discuss, you needed to add all the team members into a new room. and after a while the room goes silent. you will end up with a tons of not-in-use rooms that you don't want to clean up them for history purposes. also the slack UI for sub discussion is very stupid. if someone forget to check the checkbox to post the subdiscussion in the main discussion thread, other team members even won't notice such discussion is in progress.

we was paying for office 365 and thought why not give the teams a shot. we won't be in worth situation than we are. we moved to teams and we loved it instantly, we had a separate tab aggregated all the files upload. we could reply on other talk. no need of creating a new room. this way room belongs to a team and not a certain topic. our sub discussion was visible to the whole team. enjoyed integration with azure and unlimited history. the best part was integration with outlook. it was a full suit solution. our stats become busy on outlook meeting events. we get weekly analyse. we didn't need to host our wiki seperated. we've created wiki per team. the communication was much more fun.

Communication We have chosen two tools for our team communication.

• Slack

We choose Slack since all of us are familiar with this communication tool. We have a private channel for our team Sphinx for text messages. We added Github apps inside our private channel for repo update notifications. Furthermore, we could contact the subject matter experts within the workspace DCSIL directly for the issues we meet.

• Microsoft Teams

We use Microsoft Teams for virtual meetings for its fast connection speed. In addition, the call feature in Slack is a paid feature, and we could have virtual meetings and share screens for free in Microsoft Teams.