Everyone likes FREE! Microsoft announced today that a free tier of Teams is now available. This isn’t a huge shock as it’s been rumored for months. But it’s good to see the offer finally announced. Many will tell you it’s an amazing offer and honestly, it is. This is going to increase Microsoft’s reach into more and more organizations, assuming they can get people away from Slack. That is where the real problem is. For organizations that already use slack they need a reason to migrate. The “Free” version of Teams gives you lots of reasons:
- Unlimited App integrations (Slack Free is limited to 10)
- Group Calling (Slack Free is limited to 1:1 Only)
- Screen Sharing (Slack Free doesn’t offer this)
- Unlimited Searching (Slack Free is limited to the last 10,000 messages)
- More storage. 10 GB Team + 2 GB User (Slack Free is limited to 5 GB for the entire team/users)
- Search across channels, people, files (Slack Free doesn’t offer this)
- Guest Access (Slack Free doesn’t offer this but you can just make anyone a Slack user so it’s a bit of a silly item to note)
So that is A LOT of Free above what Slack is going to offer. The key is how do we get people moved from Slack to Teams. I think there are still a handful of roadblocks Microsoft needs to figure out including:
- Faster/better guest access
- Faster client
- Channel permissions
These are the three big things a Slack user would “miss” if they migrated. And, all of their data! There is still no tool for Slack to Teams migrations. I wonder if the limitation is on the Slack side or the MS Teams side. So if anyone is reading and interested in helping in a programming tool, lets see if we can build one. Maybe community built, maybe paid. Who knows what might come of it. Next week I’ll spend some time looking at what can be pulled from Slack.
