Is Slack Ready to Compete with Microsoft Teams?
Salesforce announced new capabilities this week and that it would start to position Slack as more of a Digital Work Hub this past June.
These moves are good but they are overdue. While Slack had the early lead in the team collaboration market, Microsoft has fought back, but in ways that many didn’t anticipate. This blog talks about the updates to Slack and the growing competition between Salesforce and Microsoft.
Salesforce Adds Quip Capabilities to Slack and Calls it Canvas
To break this down, to make Slack more of a digital work hub he need to add more work capabilities to the platform. Enter Quip, which was the product that Salesforce bought a few years ago from Brett Taylor who is now the co-CEO of Salesforce. Quip basically added Google Doc features like document creation and sharing.
Salesforce found a home for Quip by stuffing it inside of Slack channels. With the addition of Canvas, now teams can use Slack for more than just collaboration. They can use it as a true digital work hub.
The heartache lies in that Canvas still needs to be refined to make it easier and more intuitive to use.
Slack Huddles for Meetings
The other key capability that Slack announced in June was Huddles, which is its attempt to add video conferencing to Slack.
Communications capabilities have always been part of Slack but it was all point to point. During Covid – which was actually the time frame when Salesforce was buying Slack – many other providers and has their product offering significantly beyond team collaboration/messaging. One of those providers who made significant strides during the pandemic was Microsoft and it’s offering called Microsoft Teams.
Slack as a UC&C Offering
When it comes to Unified Communication and Collaboration (UC&C) stack, Slack is behind.
In fact, this week, Aragon Research published it’s UC&C 2022 Globe Report and Slack did not meet the minimum criteria to be included.
Many other providers Now offer a unified client that allows users to call meet or chat in a totally seamless fashion. To us, Slack is still primarily a chat focused platform, that is now becoming a work hub.
Microsoft Teams: The Old and the New
While Salesforce focuses on business users, Microsoft is known for focusing on IT buyers who were supposed to serve the needs of business users. We know that has changed as business buyers want to control their own destiny. Microsoft is no dummy and that is why they have quietly been introducing and promoting a new product offering that is teams based called Microsoft Viva.
Microsoft Viva is focused on employee engagement and it is a solid set of capabilities that is essentially a digital work hub for employees. Viva combines Microsoft Teams, Microsoft SharePoint for Content, and Microsoft AI – allowing project rooms to be created automatically based on things such as email and chat discussions.
To be blunt, Viva offers much more than the updated Slack – which includes Canvas and Huddles.
One Advantage for Salesforce is External Use Cases
The one area where Salesforce and Slack have an advantage is their focus on customers and customer use cases. While Microsoft will dispute this, it is widely agreed to that Microsoft’s focus over the years has mainly been on him internally facing projects and capabilities. However, the new Microsoft with his focus on industry clouds is more like Salesforce than ever before.