Things the Teams can’t do that Slack can

A growing list of things that Teams can’t do that Slack can. While some things on the list may appear trite or subjective, taken as a whole Teams is not a tool fit for purpose in a development environment.

🔇 Mute

Teams can’t mute channels for a predefined amount of time. A user either has to mute a channel and hope that they remember to tune it later, or leave a channel to blast constant alerts at the user.

Teams doesn’t not respect your status of BUSY. Even if your profile shows a red circle and you are on a call, Teams will still alert you to incoming messages on all groups you are in.

🧵Threads

Teams. Can. Not. Do. Threads.

In channel of even a few people, it is often the case that the channel will be discussing two or more things at the same time. Slack uses threads for this, keeping the channel well organised and distraction free.

🔎 Search

Teams search doesn’t work sometimes.

📹 Video Calls

Teams and Slack can do video calls, however you can not draw on the screen during a call. This is a critical component of developers discussions (especially pull requests) as we need to point to places in the code or diagram quickly what we are talking about. The hours spent say “No, not that line, the other one…. no not there, above and to the left” is insane.

Slack does quick and easy audio calls known as huddles. They are quick ways to grab a few developers together to thrash out an issue. It’s a bit like gathering around someone’s desk to discuss and issue.

Teams and Zoom can do split screens, allowing two team mates to colloborate together.

🖋️ Markdown

Teams markdown, especially for code is terrible.

It’s ugly and doesn’t take into account tabs, spaces or the coding language

It’s almost uneditable once the markdown has been formatted, leaving the user either to press enter and hope the others can parse the code.

Text sizes, styles (bold, italic etc) are still displayed when text is copied into a code block. This is nonsense.

🖼️ Media and images

Uploaded videos to Teams can not be viewed in Teams always. Often they are link to somewhere on Sharepoint and take the user away from the conversation. There is no clear reason why this is the case.

Images uploaded to teams take on different sizes, from the original size, but also in relation to each other.

It’s not always possible to crt-c and crt-v an image into Teams.

🌴 Away Messages

Team does not have away messages that last a specific amount of time. If you set yourself away/busy your status stays that way.

Slack allows you to set yourself as being “Sick until tomorrow”, “Busy for 2 hours” etc.

Bugs

Profile pictures of team members won’t update wihtout logging back in again.

Things that Slack can do that Teams does

• 📞 Start Teams video calls
• 📅 Create/view and alert you to Outlook calendar events