Microsoft Teams 'can't compete with Slack' and is part of 'confusing set of tools', says Blenheim Chalcot CIO
'It doesn't feel like a finished product,' says Mark Ridley
Collaboration product Microsoft Teams feels "unfinished" and "just doesn't compete with Slack", underlining a need for the company to cut down and standardise its social cloud collaboration offerings, says Blenhem Chalcot's CIO, Mark Ridley.
Speaking to Computing during a systems rearchitecture in which the startup accelerator firm intends to begin "heavily using Azure," Ridley stated his relative dismay at the standard of Microsoft's collaboration solutions when trying to remove a shadow IT element of Slack from the company.
While Ridley admitted that having OneDrive and Teams "all in one place... could be really interesting", and even "something powerful" in the future, he is not so sure about the state of Teams on release.
"To me, it doesn't feel like a finished product," lamented Ridley.
"There are still too many areas where it just doesn't compete with Slack. Every user that I know would absolutely prefer to use Slack - whenever I speak to users, all the integrations are better."
But the same time, he continued, using Teams is "better than trying to use Skype For Business for the same thing".
"I think Microsoft were actually very weak in that kind of chat collaboration area before," he explained.
"They brought in Yammer [too], and as an administrator t just looks like a really, really confusing set of tools to use. Do you use Yammer, do you use Teams, do you use Skype for Business, do you use normal Skype?"
Ridley went on to suggest that Microsoft simply consolidate their collaboration and social services, and remove any that seem to conflict with each others' use cases.
"[Employees] are left very much to their own devices, so what would be really useful would be if Microsoft just take a view and go 'Now we're just tackling this one - this is where you go for a particular piece of functionality' and they just shut all the others down.
"But [at the moment] it's a sort of generic Microsoft standard [practice], with lots of different divisions doing lots of different things."