Slack Integrations

How to Integrate Slack and Microsoft Teams?

Expanding Skype for businesses was a monumental decision by Microsoft. They launched their proposed software Microsoft Teams in 2017. 91% of the Top 100 companies exclusively use Microsoft Teams and it has over 18 million users today. In a similar vein, Slack has around 10-12 million users.

Both Slack and Microsoft Teams have taken over the industry and are on their way to become the default way of employee, business communication. For people interested in a little bit of history, the Slack-Teams rivalry began even before Teams was introduced. Back in 2016, Slack was about to be acquired by Microsoft. However, that deal never came through and Microsoft ended up investing the amount in their own business creating Teams in 2017.

The key purposes of a collaboration software is to provide a working interface that allows users to work under one interface saving a lot of time. Both Teams and Slack are what can be termed as collaboration software. However, despite their similar purposes, both Teams and Slack are completely different. Before we go further, let’s try and understand the difference between the two software.

Key Differences Between Slack and Teams

• Setting Up We start at the basics. A team chat software must be easy to use because most users aren’t likely to be tech-savvy in any way, shape or form. Overall, Slack is easier to set up. That is simply because Microsoft Teams was made with bigger enterprises in mind. No wonder the top businesses use it. But once set up, Teams is equally as productive as Slack at least in the user interface department.
• Integrations The reason Microsoft Teams wins out for bigger enterprises and why it is sought out more is because it gives users access to the Office 365 suite. The suite includes powerful applications like Word, Excel, Outlook, OneDrive,etc. It is one of the biggest selling points for Teams. On the other end of the spectrum, Slack does not have access to most of these applications. It does provide access to a few Office 365 apps but they’re not exactly enough. However, Slack provides an unmatched 1500+ integrations for its various applications. That does sort of cancel out the drawback of not having access to Microsoft Office.
• Bots One unique feature both collaboration software offer users are the bots. The bots are personal UIs where users can try out integrations, send links for future reference, etc. Everyone who’s ever used Slack is aware of Slackbot. Unlike Slack, Microsoft Teams offers two bots – T-Bot and WhoBot. T-bot does exactly what Slackbot but WhoBot is a unique advantage for Teams. WhoBot is AI based and will help you find people within the organization. We won’t elaborate too much on it because WhoBot deserves a blog of its own.

There are other differences between the two and we’ll link a blog that’ll tell you the differences between Teams and Slack because we are getting off track.

Why We Need An Integration Between Slack and Teams

Coming to the meat of the matter, while both Slack and Teams are simple collaboration software. However, businesses choose one of the two for their requirements. In some cases, different parts of different organizations may use both software. Both of these use cases suffer from certain limitations because of a lack of integration between the two. Here are the limitations:

• Communication is disrupted because both Slack and Teams are completely unique. However, due to customer demand during the pandemic, Slack did add the ability to call Teams users using the Teams call integration. However, file sharing, talking on chat, etc still remains a major limitation. This disruption in communication remains an issue for businesses.
• Most people have either worked just with Microsoft Teams or with Slack. This creates a kind of technical limitation for employees. An integration would help smoothen the transition from software to the next.
• Communication between different businesses also remains a challenge. For example, if two companies are planning to work together on a project, they lack the ability to work smoothly if they use different collaboration software. This can create massive gaps in communication and lead to a lot of frustration.

Infact, here’s an infographic to give you perspective on how advantageous this integration is.

How to Integrate Slack and Microsoft Teams

Glad you asked! That is exactly what this blog is supposed to tell you. Integrating Teams and Slack may seem like a big deal but with a workflow automation tool like Appy Pie Connect it is a matter of minutes.

That brings us to the big question. How does the Slack-Microsoft integration work? It is very simple actually. Appy Pie Connect lets users create a visual workflow for all the work they are doing. Using this visual workflow you can add Slack and Microsoft Teams and define ‘triggers’. These triggers when met will automatically share relevant data between the two software. Everything from file transfers to video calls to sending memes can be made possible in 5 easy steps.

• Step 1: Choose Slack as a Trigger app and authenticate your app on Appy Pie Connect.
• Step 2: Select the trigger that will start a data exchange between the two software. You can have multiple triggers.
• Step 3: Pick Microsoft Teams as the action app and authenticate your Teams account.
• Step 4: Select a resulting action.
• Step 5: Select the data you want to exchange between the two software. You can change this as per your needs. That’s it! Your Connect is now ready.

Connect Slack+Microsoft Teams

Conclusion

Direct integration between Slack and Microsoft Teams may never become a thing. It’s simply because they are direct competitors. However, with Appy Pie Connect you can leverage the best of both worlds. Let us know in the comments how your experience was with both the software.