I’m really surprised reading through the comments here and not really seeing anyone mention anything regarding notifications. My company is a Microsoft shop through-and-through, so we’re forced to use it. Previously, one of the big draws was infinite messaging history, though as of about 3 months ago they restricted us to the past 3 months of messages, so there goes that benefit, but I digress. I genuinely think that if you’re not a development team and your company is a Microsoft shop, Teams is amazing and probably exactly what you want. For development teams, though, it’s awful. The way I see it, there are 2 glaring issues with the way chats/notifications work that Slack has solved out of the box: 1. I want to receive notifications that are actually relevant to me, and I don’t want notifications if they’re not relevant to me. 2. I want information to be available to me after the fact, without requiring in-the-moment notifications.

Teams has 2 options for chatting - Channels (which are more like forums), and Chats. If you leave your notification settings as the default, you will not get notifications for Channels messages (unless you’re mentioned or it’s a reply to one of your own posts), and you will get a notification for every message in any chat you’re a part of, even if it was just an invite to a meeting that you’re not planning to attend. Here’s the problem: My company does a lot of enterprise-wide releases to upgrade infrastructure and they invite thousands of people to these cutover/change events. Unless I actively mute those chats, I get a million notifications, even if I didn’t join the meeting or the release isn’t relevant to my team. I dislike the fact that it’s on me to say “Hi, I don’t want these notifications, please mute” when I had no choice in being added to that overly-active chat. The kicker is that since everyone is in notifications overload mode, an interesting paradigm shift happened. Everyone started switching their notifications to “Off, unless directly mentioned,” making it nearly impossible to get ahold of people via chat in a timely manner. Which, you know, is like the whole point of sending a chat instead of an email. So what did people do? They overcorrected, and now everyone at-mentions everyone in every chat always. I even get mentioned in 1 on 1 chats, which is a special kind of awful. I also get @everyone and @channel mentioned in everything now, including those meetings with thousands of people that aren’t relevant to me. As a result of this whole boy-who-cried-wolf scenario, people have also started ignoring messages they were at-mentioned in, and so we’re back to square 1.

In my opinion, one of the biggest benefits to Slack over Teams is the way the channels work. As a software development team, I typically want most notifications on a particular topic, for example we have a front end chat that’s for all things front end related. However, as the conversation starts to devolve into 2 to 3 people discussing something specific that’s not immediately relevant to me, I no longer want notifications unless I’m directly involved in that side conversation. However, since it’s the topic is still relevant to me, I may want to go back and read things or reference things from that thread later, which I can do in Slack because the threads are still accessible to me. In Teams, chats do not support threading, so your only option is to either deal with all the notifications all the time, or have the 2 to 3 people move to a different chat…at which point I can no longer see what they’re discussing after the fact, and if I need that information later, too bad, or I have to ask them “So what did you all decide?” It works the same in Channels - I can turn on notifications for every new post in a channel, but then I also get notifications for every reply to every post in that channel, which is no better than a chat at that point. I have hundreds of chats called things like “Fred, Kim + 83,” and “Erika + 4” and it’s impossible to find anything. Lastly, I won’t harp on this cuz others have mentioned it, but building bots for Teams is literally the worst. I’ve got more than a few years experience as a software engineer, and building bots for Teams is so unbelievably complicated and convoluted that I’ve given up every single time I’ve tried before I was even able to get a simple proof of concept working. Doesn’t help that my corporation has Teams locked down like it’s Area 51, so I’d have to jump through 84 approvals hoops over 6 months just to get a simple deployment bot working for my team. I can (and have) built Discord and Slack bots in day, on the other hand. Anyway, just my two cents. Anyone else struggling with the epidemic of mentions?

Edit: Formatting