It was interesting to see this week that Atlassian doomed the future of HipChat and its successor, Stride, with an aggressive wrap up schedule, with the services set to be discontinued on February 15, 2019. At Built to Roam, as a consulting company, we use a number of messaging tools including Messenger, Skype, Skype for Business / Microsoft Teams, Slack, HipChat and a few others. The upshot is that none of these tools do a great job of even their primary function (i.e. chat conversation between two or more parties), as I’ve posted about previously.
As a couple of posts have indicated, the messaging market has become over populated – for a while it felt like I was installing a new messaging app every second day. When Teams first came to the market, there was a lot of criticism aimed at it because it was a primitive offering in comparison to both Slack and HipChat but it’s rapid growth has started to put pressure on other players in the market. I think a rationalisation of the market was due, and I’m not sorry to see the back of HipChat. As one of the older products in the market, it never quite understood the need for users to belong to multiple organisations and to be able to switch between them.
There are some posts that are talking up the closure of HipChat/Stride as an attempt by Slack and Atlassian to team up in the fight against Microsoft Teams. So the question is, will this make a difference? Will it slow the growth of Microsoft Teams? Will it help Slack win over the corporate space?
Recently, Microsoft Teams announced a free tier, which was one of the things that held a lot of smaller companies and teams from using Microsoft Teams. This move in itself has weakened Slack’s position in the market. However, the true hook for Microsoft Teams and in my opinion the sole reason for its wide adoption (because let’s be honest, it’s far from being a great product!), is that it allows users to sign in using their Office 365 / Microsoft 365 account. In other words, if your company has made, or is moving, to Office 365, you can use your existing credentials to sign into Microsoft Teams. And of course, once you do, you can see and communicate with all the other users in your organisation. Can do you do this with Slack? The short answer is no. The long answer is yes but you need to do a bunch of stuff, including pay a ton of money for stuff that should be out of the box (seriously like what the? https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/categories/200122103-Workspace-Administration#configure-access-security).
The ridiculous thing is that integration into Azure Active Directory (i.e. use Office 365 and Microsoft 365 credentials) is pretty straight forward. Is there something that Slack can do to get the jump on Microsoft Teams? Yes, provide out of the box support to sign in using either G-Suite or Office 365 credentials. In the future there will be two types of organisation, those that use Office 365, and those that don’t. Most of those in the latter group will probably use some form of G-Suite, so providing out of the box support for G-Suite should be on the radar of any enterprise software.
I know this post has gone on a bit but my last point is that I wish services would stop charging a premium for improving the security of their service. Integration with Azure Active Directory and G-Suite should be include in the cheapest tier of any offering. Why would you compromise the security of your service and the data of your users by not providing this.