Why Microsoft Teams is so much better than Zoom and Slack for collaboration

I’ve been a bit of a Microsoft Teams nayayer for the past few months.

During the COVID-19 crashes, I condemned the complexity of this collaboration application and avoided it like a wet gym sock. I thought:

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

It was like this big piece of swollen software sitting in a dusty application tray. I didn’t want to click on it and I didn’t want to learn how it worked. Sometimes I reluctantly published a few papers and tested features, while I wanted to go back to Slack.

I’ve constantly told people that Microsoft Teams is a joke.

I was wrong.

In the past, I have advocated for Slack and Zoom because, at least for most of my daily work, they are functional, elegant and intuitive. It’s easy to talk to the people on Slack, and the features are so easy and simple that you could teach them to a newly created intern (depending on the intern). Zoom has become the de facto tool for most workers because video chats are smooth and reliable.

Using teams with a real – you know –team these few weeks have completely changed my perception. I think it’s a bit bloated, with too many features that people will never use. There is a task management system, called Scheduler, just a click away, but it has no serious automation and is a whole galaxy away from the power and simplicity of Trello. It’s incredibly annoying that you can’t jump into thin conversations, like you can in Slack. And I’m not even going to start missing some features for video chats. (Disabling the camera in Teams means you become an icon, a tiny photo at the bottom of the screen. I keep thinking that someone isn’t ringing, and I wonder when they’ll join – in Zoom, you’ll see a blank screen.)

And yet, here we are. I like teams.

Microsoft made its name in technology with a single word. It may oversimplify a 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 try to complete a report and you are alone in an office, the integration is remarkable. We were able to start a video meeting with people with a single click. That’s great! I can do this in Slack. But then I managed to add 17 more people with a few more clicks and schedule meetings with them in teams and work together on a Word document.

I will take several steps further. I am now beginning to believe that Teams are much better at collaborating during (hopefully the last few 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 them the link, I’ll take it. Listen to me right about this – the individual tools in the Microsoft ecosystem are not always better. I prefer Slack and Zoom. What I have found is that my tired version of COVID prefers an ecosystem that does everything. The pandemic changed my mind.

Which leads us to Google. There are only two companies competing for total dominance of worker productivity. (Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t seem to know what they’re doing about it. There’s no Slack, Zoom, or Teams alternative to real business productivity.) Google and Microsoft remain standing.

Google is the closest thing to Microsoft in that everything works smoothly and intuitively, but Google Meet is far from Teams. I’m not even in the same league. If it weren’t so! I prefer Google Docs to the online version of Microsoft Word, and Gmail (as part of Google Workspace, which was called G-Suite) is much better than Microsoft Outlook, especially for those of us who never delete an email and get based on a search in your inbox every five seconds.

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

When things finally return to normal, I could be prepared for the simplified, straightforward and intuitive approach with Slack and Zoom. We will see.