The topic of todays article is one of my favorites. Collaboration Tools 📢
During the COVID-19 pandemic I worked as a solution consultant for a SME in the IT industry where collaboration tools literally saved us all. WFH concept was a novel concept which we all had to adapt quickly. Maintaining transparency and productivity, team collaboration in a time of uncertainty like that equipped me with a new skillset which I absolutely value to this day.
I thought of writing a bit about the tools that helped me to get my team back on track, working from home and not just to maintain productivity but to increase productivity.
I’m going to be talking about three tools in this article,
Microsoft Teams
Slack
Zoom
Microsoft Teams is such a gem. It’s a team communication tool that integrates chat, video calls, and file sharing into one platform and it is widely used in IT and corporate environments.
Some of the key features of Teams include,
Channels & Teams – Organize discussions by department/project
Chat & Meetings – Send instant messages and schedule video calls
Integration with Office 365 – Work on files directly from Teams
File Sharing & Collaboration – Store, edit, and manage documents
Task Management – Integrates with Planner & To-Do
As a project manager working on multiple projects at the same time, Teams helped me a lot to keep details of each project separate. Organizing meetings for different teams, team meeting notes and minutes, sharing documents during a meeting with all team members were all very easy with teams. Even in one project there can be different small teams like the dev team, QA team, BA team, PM team and the client services team. Each team can have separate channels to keep their work separate from the others.
Integration with Office 365 made it very easy to keep working on project documents directly from teams and to keep my calendar updated with outlook integrated with teams.
Teams is like an all in one solution for team management. You don’t need to rely on any external app or system as you can find everything you need within teams. I really like this tool and it helped me a lot during the pandemic to manage my teams seamlessly while working from home.
Lets talk about Slack. Slack is a messaging tool for fast, real-time team communication. It reduces email usage and makes collaboration easier through channels and integrations.
Below are some of the key features in Slack,
Channels – Organized conversations (e.g., #marketing, #engineering)
Direct Messages (DMs) – Private chats
Threads – Keep discussions tidy within channels
Integrations – Connect with Jira, Trello, Google Drive, etc.
Slackbot – An AI assistant for reminders & automation
I love the reminder feature on Slack. You can simply type in the message section something like “ /remind me to check Jira at 10 AM” and the SlackBot will set a reminder for you. You can set a reminder for yourself or for the team by selecting which channel you want the reminder to be applicable for. You can use it to set one time reminders or even recurring reminders. For example you can set a reminder for your daily standup meeting every weekday at 8AM and SlackBot will remember that for you.
So the question comes, Teams or Slack?
Slack focuses more on messaging whereas Teams is a part of the Microsoft ecosystem and more complete solution for all your team management needs. One thing is Teams requires a more complex and secure setup, and Slack is easier to sign up and use. If your organization is already deeply using Microsoft 365 then using Teams for team management makes more sense. Teams is better suited for people who have to oversee communication between dozens of different departments and locations. Slack is perfect for less corporate, smaller organizations. Features that allow for greater customization and flexibility will also be more appealing to this group. One thing I’ve seen is that Slack has a loyal fanbase. Its understandable because Slack has very cool features, my favorite being the / commands. Its very easy to handle repetitive tasks with this feature.
Choosing Teams or Slack depends on many factors, the budget of your organization, the requirements of the team etc. As someone who has used Teams in every organization I’ve worked for and never used Slack in a professional setting, I would love to get that experience using Slack in a professional workplace so I can make a good comparison based on my own experience. For now, I’m partial to Teams because that’s what I use.
Next up we have Zoom, which I think is the most popular video conferencing tool, known for its reliability and simplicity.
Some of the key features of Zoom include,
Meetings & Webinars – Host and join video calls
Breakout Rooms – Split participants into smaller discussion groups
Screen Sharing – Share presentations, code, or documents
Recording & Transcripts – Save meetings for later reference
I love Zoom. Its just a really solid, easy to use tool. Even if I use Teams for my internal meetings, I still use Zoom for my client meetings, mainly because my clients are more comfortable with Zoom. Most of my external stakeholder meetings happen with Zoom, and my day to day meetings with overseas friends happen on Zoom, of course when we need to discuss something important and share documents.
In summary, we looked at three most used collaboration tools in the market right now, Teams, Slack and Zoom. Each has its own features and pros and cons and choosing the correct tool for your team depends on various factors. Also, there’s no saying that you just need to use one tool. I use both Teams and Zoom on a daily basis.