Limitations of Slack and Microsoft Team for Working with Extended Teams

Looking to set up a communication platform for a large, multi-level team? If you’ve done any research into popular messaging products, you’ve probably come across Slack and Microsoft teams – two of the biggest players in the collaboration software industry. These products certainly have their merits, but what you may not realize is that their features start to break down or become cumbersome as your team expands outside of your company.

For example, both applications boast about their customizable permissioning options. However, the reality of the products is different. In MS teams, before you can add anyone to a “team” or messaging thread, you first need to take several administrative steps. You need to go to the Office start page, add them to the Office 365 Admin Panel. Then, they receive a registration email and need to log in and change their password in order to be added to a team. Finally, once all these steps have been taken and the appropriate members have been added, you as the admin are faced with another set of permissioning choices (shown below) related to your new team. The cycle continues to get progressively more confusing because, although you can create separate teams and separate channels within these teams, the permissioning is only set at the broader team level.

Slack also falls a bit short with its permissioning claims. However, instead of being overly complex like Teams, Slack is overly rigid. In Slack, your base unit is a “workspace.” Within your workspace, you can have multiple channels, which is useful if you were looking to create designated areas for specific topics or conversations. The issue arises when you want to edit the permissioning levels between channels. Because all permissioning is applied at the workspace level, admins have limited options for restricting or granting user access at the channel level. 

Additionally, like MS Teams, people are unable to view messages without registering for an account, making it really difficult to interact with people outside of your immediate circle.

Luckily, there’s uShare. Right off the bat, uShare is the superior tool for working with extended teams because each “share” or channel stands on its own, and can have its own membership and permissioning. 

While Slack and MS Teams each offer helpful ways to communicate with a small team, uShare’s unique features provide it with an unparalleled level of scalability, making it ideal for small, mid-size, and especially extended teams.

uShare also offers a variety of additional features, such as the ability to reply messages via email, the ability to include non uShare users in meetings, and the ability to make shares “public,” allowing the outer world read only access to all exchanges in the share.

So what are you waiting for? Ditch Slack and MS Teams and start using uShare today!