Yet there are Teams features that nobody else has emulated yet and which quickly become almost indispensable for business use. I'll name two:
1. Teams automatically creates a chat group for every Teams calendar event. This can include external attendees.
2. Teams is useful for chat & meetings, but Teams spaces are hugely helpful as document repositories, too, and it's additionally easy to add things like Gantt charts and other enriched content types through add-ins.
And a bonus one:
3. The ability to seamlessly transfer a Teams meeting connection between arbitrary devices (laptop -> desktop, phone -> laptop, etc).
Additional feature of Teams is that their web app refuses to work on my firefox after working until two months ago. I'm not a heavy business user and the casual experience with this thing is pretty annoying.
> Teams automatically creates a chat group for every Teams calendar event. This can include external attendees
Great, so each conversation is spread out and siloed. Thankfully Teams has good search and you can find stuff, right? Right?
> Teams is useful for chat & meetings, but Teams spaces are hugely helpful as document repositories, too, and it's additionally easy to add things like Gantt charts and other enriched content types through add-ins
Slack Canvas kind of does this. I'm not convinced having all your documentation in your chat/meeting app makes sense, but it could be useful.
> The ability to seamlessly transfer a Teams meeting connection between arbitrary devices (laptop -> desktop, phone -> laptop, etc).
Zoom does this too, and has for years. I think I've seen Slack huddles offer the same option too.
> 1. Teams automatically creates a chat group for every Teams calendar event. This can include external attendees.
This happens in Zoom as well, without the extra Teams downside of external attendees being 4th class citizens.
> 2. Teams is useful for chat & meetings, but Teams spaces are hugely helpful as document repositories, too, and it's additionally easy to add things like Gantt charts and other enriched content types through add-ins.
This is really simple in demos, but tends towards sharing documents via email again (for external attendees) or growing the channel size massively (for internals who need the documents but aren't obviously needed in the team).
I does also help propagate the other "elephant in the room" problem M365 users face, which is document version control. Since people are constantly sharing actual files -- vs symlinks as with Google Workspace -- nobody ever really knows who has the canonical version of whatever. This is solved in regulated industries with "add-ons" (it's a huge stretch to call it that) like Veeva Vault that enforce formal document control workflows, but it doesn't help normal business users at all.
Pretty sure just about every other option is pretty likeable compared to Teams!