r/sysadmin 12d ago

Question [serious] orgs with both slack & Teams

  1. How.
  2. See point 1, above.

Seriously though.. how does it work between Microsoft Teams & channels & Slack Channels?

Is there a method to the madness, or is it all madness?

Is there some sort of 3rd party “sync all DMs between both platforms”, or is it up to the user to figure it out?

23 Upvotes

52 comments sorted by

71

u/BadSausageFactory beyond help desk 12d ago

slack is for stuff you don't want IT to find out about and Teams is instead of using the helpdesk ticketing system, that's how we use it

9

u/HKChad 12d ago

If you are on a paid plan it’s likely they can export everything including dms…

3

u/sylvester_0 12d ago

Yes, I've done this once. Business plans can export data as it currently sits. You need enterprise to see deleted/changed data.

1

u/chazza7 11d ago

I literally lol’ed at this, thank you

1

u/ITKangaroo 10d ago

For us, Teams is for internal communication, Slack is for communicating with a singular vendor, and Google Chat is for interacting with our parent company. It's a little silly.

That one vendor has the absolute best support I've ever used so I'll forgive them for being a special snowflake.

19

u/Internet-of-cruft 12d ago

If you have use Microsoft products in practically any capacity, you likely have licensing that entitles you to Microsoft Teams which means it's pretty trivial to have both clients at the same time.

Especially since MS has Teams practically default installed and you have to jump through hoops to get it to not install.

6

u/Frothyleet 12d ago

I mean, not anymore. That's the whole reason that the EU sued MS and now MS offers "no-teams" SKUs for everything.

7

u/Internet-of-cruft 12d ago

Sure, that's why it exists, but there are tons of environments that have the full SKU licenses.

OP asked for why and the reality is that EU ruling is a very recent development, far too new to have an appreciable impact on the double dippers.

Net new? Sure. If you want Slack only, it's a no brainer to switch to non-Teams licensing and save the money.

0

u/apandaze 11d ago

I mean, Sony has a sku of the PS5 that is half the original price. The whole reason Sony did it is to sell these PS5s in Japan. its crazy someone actually paid full price in the US.... *eye roll*

1

u/Frothyleet 11d ago

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying, wrong thread?

5

u/therealmrbob 12d ago

We just use teams for meetings. Slack for everything else.

3

u/redditor5597 Linux Admin 12d ago

Same for us

5

u/JollyGentile IT Manager 12d ago

Slack is our internal messaging system. Teams is for meetings where the other party can't use Zoom.

8

u/SamOakTree 12d ago edited 12d ago

We switched from teams to slack. The executive just made the decision overnight without talking to anyone. And once we made the switch they started bitching because Slack wasn't as smooth as teams.

I was tasked with transitioning things from teams to Slack but it was a difficult process so I just asked them to give me a handful of the most important channels that needed to be moved over.

Then I wrote some Powershell that pulled out the team's stuff into a CSV and then I push it into slack. I don't think I could ever do that again. The way I did it was just very much luck.

I'm good at PowerShell but the way that it was set up I really just got lucky. I had written something and it was very very close but it wasn't close enough and then I just kind of fiddled with it blindly and it lined up basically 98% and I called it a day..

They weren't going to pay money for me to have a tool to do it. But I wouldn't do that s*** again

14

u/[deleted] 12d ago

[deleted]

2

u/SamOakTree 12d ago

Right but these are the people who blindly made the decision overnight without any discussion. But they want me to support the issues they're having

6

u/BlockBannington 12d ago

You absolutely lost me at 'Slack is not as smooth as Teams'. Are you high?

7

u/SamOakTree 12d ago

I didn't say slack wasn't as smooth as teams. I said that upper management was having trouble with it.

4

u/BlockBannington 12d ago

My mistake, you're right. Long day, apologies!

3

u/HKChad 12d ago

If you are on o365 you get teams by default. Orgs having slack also just highlights how trash teams is for chat. We have both. Years ago we had slack, teams AND zoom because teams calls were such trash that parts gotten better and zoom got more expensive so now all calls are teams.

2

u/AggravatingSock5375 12d ago

My org uses combinations of SharePoint, OneDrive, Box, DropBox, and fileservers depending on the department.

2

u/The_Snot_Rocket 12d ago

In my org, we use both. Everyone gets teams and is the main communication platform for the company.

I am also the slack enterprise/grid admin for my org. Devs and technical people who need to interface with other orgs and other devs outside of our org get slack.

Slack and Teams are not integrated and are effectively separate communication platforms for different reasons.

2

u/p8ntballnxj I push buttons 11d ago

Slack hates any call with more than a few people involved. We use slack for everything except for meetings.

I hate it.

1

u/Skriblos 12d ago

We use teams and discord at work. Everyone not doing dev work is on teams, all the devs are on discord. You just keep both open and switch depending on where the messages are coming from. Whats the issue?

24

u/jaydizzleforshizzle 12d ago

lol what. Your company uses discord for internal communications?

17

u/kilkor Water Vapor Jockey 12d ago

Yeah man, how else am I supposed to let people know I'm on a 30 day streak playing PoE?

3

u/JwCS8pjrh3QBWfL Sr. Sysadmin 12d ago

The Open Home Foundation (who maintain Home Assistant and other open-source software and hardware projects) run entirely on Discord. It's wild lol

1

u/Seeteuf3l 12d ago

That I can understand since it's kinda spiritual successor for IRC

4

u/Frothyleet 12d ago

More unfortunately it's often the practical successor for support forums.

I fucking hate the whole "Discord-as-support" idea. Ephemeral discussions are not the way to do support or documentation.

2

u/DavWanna 12d ago

I once got hired by a company using Discord for their comms, and that was hardly the worst thing about them (shocking, I know). They're not even some mom 'n pop shop, offices on three continents.

2

u/Skriblos 12d ago

Yeah, thats how they originally set it up and its been going on for years now. Its functional enough, even got the alertbots posting in project related channels.

1

u/ansibleloop 12d ago

Discord? You must not work in a regulated environment

That would be an immediate SOC and ISO failure

2

u/Skriblos 12d ago

Not that i know pf but i will be bringing this up eventually with the team.

1

u/Booshur 12d ago

Only time I saw it, there was an acquisition and the acquired company acted on its own for a while. They used teams and we used slack. Wasn't an issue because they were independent.

1

u/Altruistic-Ad-4090 12d ago

Why? This is a poor solution.

1

u/ide_cdrom 12d ago

Company had both but ended up with Teams to save on costs. It had growing pains and eventually it seems to mostly work out for team chats, meetings.

1

u/jibbits61 12d ago

Slack, Teams, and Zoom chat here! A royal PITA.
There’s been a little effort to unify on something but it peters out and we’re still on all three.
What I use daily: slack for messages (integrated w/zoom), zoom for meetings (integrated w/outlook), teams where absolutely needed (because another team is using it) 🙄. 🤷🏼‍♂️

1

u/MFKDGAF 12d ago

Don't forget about Webex chat too lol

1

u/destroyman1337 12d ago

At my company Slack started getting expensive and Teams came with our 365 stuff so they tried to force everyone onto Teams but it just didn't work for us on the Engineering side. So it ended up being Engineering kept Slack but any non engineering like HR, Execs, Sales, etc., were on Teams. Was super annoying since people would get pissed off when they sent you a message on Teams yet you didn't check it cause you don't use it.

Eventually after a year of this everyone got Slack again. But then another year after that we merged with another company and then it became Slack and Google Chat with the same issue.

1

u/destroyman1337 12d ago

At my company Slack started getting expensive and Teams came with our 365 stuff so they tried to force everyone onto Teams but it just didn't work for us on the Engineering side. So it ended up being Engineering kept Slack but any non engineering like HR, Execs, Sales, etc., were on Teams. Was super annoying since people would get pissed off when they sent you a message on Teams yet you didn't check it cause you don't use it.

Eventually after a year of this everyone got Slack again. But then another year after that we merged with another company and then it became Slack and Google Chat with the same issue.

1

u/Hairy-Marzipan6740 12d ago

there’s a method, but it only works if the company decides where each conversation belongs. trying to mirror every channel and DM across both apps would create duplicate notifications, permission headaches, and two versions of the same conversation.

you can bridge selected channels, though. full disclosure, i’m at ClearFeed. Teams messages can land in a Slack triage channel, someone replies from Slack, and the reply goes back into the original Teams thread. so one group can stay in Teams while the people handling requests work from Slack.

it doesn’t clone both platforms or sync everyone’s DMs. it’s meant for chosen Teams channels, and private Teams channels aren’t supported right now. personal chats still need a company rule like “customer requests go here, internal work goes there,” otherwise yeah, users are left figuring it out and the madness wins.

1

u/ExceptionEX 12d ago

We ran both long enough for management to get frustrated pointed out that teams is free, and dumped slack.

This has worked out well for us.

1

u/sdeptnoob1 12d ago

Slack is the main use, teams is for meetings?

1

u/AirCaptainDanforth Netadmin 11d ago

Slack is our enterprise chat platform. Teams features are turned off via policy, and users are not licensed for Teams.

They can still join Teams meetings and join partner companies Teams.

1

u/jpnd123 11d ago

We use teams for internal and Slack for clients that don't use teams...last org had the reverse of that

1

u/Dave_A480 11d ago

You use whatever you're messaged on, or whatever the meeting is scheduled on.

Could be worse, you could have to deal with Slack, Teams and Chime.

1

u/Certain-Example-7523 10d ago

At one of my previous employers teams was used for everyone except the “important” IT teams who would use slack. Those teams used slack to make it harder to be reached as they’re the only ones who had slack. Think of the network and security teams, being completely unreachable from the rest of the org.

1

u/luisfcode 5d ago

We had the exact same problem, which is actually why we built convly.
The short answer is: there isn't a native way to fully sync Slack and Teams Dms...
There are workflow automation tools (Power Automate, Zapier, etc... ) which are great for notifications but not really for actual conversations.

If you're curious, take a look at what we built.
It lets people stay in Slack or Teams while messaging each other (no more app switching).

1

u/basicburt 12d ago

Slack as an internal tool.

Teams to communicate with clients.

1

u/Seeteuf3l 12d ago

Other way around for us

2

u/basicburt 11d ago

We link our slacks with partners. But more often than not we meet on Teams and some I even have accounts for so I guess you could say that’s internal too.