Boost Project Collaboration with New Business Communication Apps

For the business owner that likes to keep his/her pulse on how his/her staff communicates, email has traditionally been the best solution. Most enterprise email setups these days will provide you with email, file storage, and an integration for a messaging application--all of which have their uses--but, today’s business owner has to understand that their employees are living more mobile lives and can be productive when they’re on the move. Typically, the email application, no matter how strong their integrations are, doesn’t support real-time text messaging, but today there have been a couple solutions developed to speed up and streamline business communications, they are Slack and Microsoft Teams.

What is Slack?
Slack, an acronym for “Searchable Log of All Conversations and Knowledge” takes the best parts of your enterprise email solution and the best parts of your instant messaging program and combines them into one interface. It basically allows an organization to make communication more efficient. Slack is hosted in the cloud, so it is available on nearly any mobile device that’s connected to the Internet and comes with drag-and-drop file sharing capabilities and dozens of integrations that would allow you to share work files right in the interface.

Bottom line, Slack is a business collaboration tool. It allows any user to set up chat feeds (that function much like forums) that are relevant to their responsibilities in an organization and set custom notification settings for every chat they are in. This gives each worker a custom interface that allows them to communicate the way they need to, to be their most productive. Where it really shines, however, is in project management. Each project can have its own feed, with smaller departments that may be working on individual parts of the project having their own Slack chat. This streamlines business and gives any team the kick it its pants that a dedicated email-IM-file storage interface does not.

The one element of Slack that makes it the most effective is the dozens of productivity applications that Slack integrates with. With integrations with Google Hangouts, Google Drive, Twitter, Asana, WordPress, Mailchimp, and more, Slack works to make your business faster than ever with innovative solutions that cover almost any aspect of your business. Slack can be used for free, but for an enterprise edition it has a small monthly cost per user. With over 8 million active paid users, it is one of the fastest growing tech applications around.

What is Microsoft Teams?
Much like Slack, Microsoft Teams is a chat and collaboration platform designed to streamline business communications and project fulfillment. Unlike Slack, however, Microsoft already has a major foothold in the business productivity space with their world-beating Microsoft Office 365 offering. Teams is essentially tying all their useful productivity apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, Power BI, together with an all-in-one messaging hub.

With so many people already using the cloud-hosted Microsoft Office 365 suite, having a place to streamline communications and share files within that platform is a complete game changer for businesses. Access to files, internal sites, and dashboards are controlled by Office 365 administrators and integrations are starting to pile up quickly. With over 70 connectors that include GitHub, Evernote, Mailchimp, and Salesforce, Microsoft Teams is a major upgrade to the Enterprise Office 365 offering.

If your business is looking for a communications program that is secure, mobile-friendly, and can do more than your current solutions, consider reaching out to the IT professionals at Walsh IT Group for an assessment to see what solution would be best for your company. Our dedicated technicians can find you the best fit for the demands of your business. Give us a call today at (832) 295-1445 for more information.