Slack

Slack’s July 22 post reports some advances in their desktop client that seem to aim at reported weaknesses in the Teams desktop client. The best update is better protection against network outages. The other claims of 50% less RAM, 33% faster startup, and 10x better call joining need validation in the real world.

PowerApps, Slack, and G-Suite migration tools; this month was filled with new Office 365 updates that you need to know about.

Slack released some integrations for Office (365) on April 9. I took a look and discovered some interesting things about how the Outlook add-in for Slack works (and doesn’t work sometimes). If you use Slack, you’ll probably be interested in a tighter connection between it and Office, but if you’re invested in the Office 365 ecosystem, Teams is a better choice.

Slack is rolling out new features for Office 365 that the company hopes will bridge the gap between the two services.

Secure (or private) channels is the biggest user request to the Teams development group, possibly because Slack has this feature. The only problem is that the Office 365 Groups membership model doesn’t allow for filtering within a group, so introducing elements available to a selected set of members might create all sorts of difficulties for how Teams interacts with the rest of the Office 365 ecosystem.

A free version of Teams is now available and it’s pretty good. Up to 300 users, free storage, and lots of functionality – and a phantom Office 365 tenant (or so it seems). The nice people at Slack might not like what they see, but there’s fierce competition to secure the hearts and minds of those who choose to collaborate using a free platform.

Microsoft might be working on a free version of Teams to take on Slack. As it turns out, not many technical changes are needed to transform the full enterprise version of Teams as available inside Office 365 into a limited version that Microsoft can make available for free, leveraging its existing consumer office services like Outlook and OneDrive.

Microsoft Teams is popular now, but if you decide to use it, how can you move content from other applications to Teams. Getting email into Teams can be done individually and moving documents into SharePoint is straightforward, but moving content from other chat platforms is problematic because of the lack of a migration API.

Russell Smith shows you how to launch a UWP app when Windows starts.

The Microsoft Teams application is now generally available. Lots has been done to improve Teams since its preview release and Microsoft has made many good updates. Some edges remain for Microsoft to work on, but Teams is now more than a valid competitor for Slack in the chat-based collaboration market.