I'm not familiar with Office licensing. Do you have to pay more because they bundled Teams (maybe) or do you have to use it? (that would be surprising)
Anyway, at least you can self host Exchange. Slack is centralized.
Anyway, at least you can self host Exchange. Slack is centralized.
No, we don't have to use Teams. But we were using Skype, so we were going to move to something. No one was already using Slack and paying for just chat wasn't going to be in the budget. We can certainly uninstall it. But you have to be sure to uninstall the machine-wide installer they stick on there or it comes back.
After covid, we hold most meetings in Teams now and its been fine. Wish I had more control at the beginning and it didn't just show up where we already had Skype.
I’m guessing that’s what they mean by it being forced upon their users.
Honestly, Teams is better than Skype. But it wasn't until covid forced everyone home that we really started using Teams, that first week was painful.
So our folks were comfortable once the MS EOL statement came out and the company started moving everyone over. Everyone else had quite a bit of a struggle for a week or so though.
On the plus side, I think there were very few complaints after a couple of weeks. Which probably had a lot more to do with how bad Skype for Business was (much worse than Lync) than how good Teams was (it was still fairly unpolished at the time...it's much better now...MS has been adding features and fixing issues rapidly).