Discourse vs. Microsoft Teams

Discourse is perfect for communities and basically the best forum software out there. Wherever a forum would make sense, Discourse is probably the best solution. Having said that, small corporations with little external outreach have limited advantages with Discourse, since it's designed to facilitate discussions which happen at a slower pace while startups and small corporations will probably want to move faster with software like Slack.

Incentivized

Microsoft Teams is ideal for organizations where employees regularly collaborate by sharing files, working on the same documents, updating the progress, etc. This is because different file formats are supported for online editing and collaboration with the help of Microsoft Teams. Additionally, for every file which is shared among the team members, emails are not sent again and again which helps in easily managing and organizing files. It is less appropriate where the team members have to instantly reply to an urgent task as sometimes the notifications are not sent properly which may lead to a delay in the work.

Incentivized

• It is a super-easy way for members to have online discussions
• Very easy to administer and moderate discussions
• The pricing is fair and the support is top-notch

Incentivized

• Video calls are great with Microsoft Teams. They've made big improvements over the last year and I rarely have issue with getting on. It's nice when things just work.
• The most used functionality is, of course, the chat feature. It does what it's supposed to do and you can create chat groups from whoever you'd like. We use it a lot when there is a special project and a team from various groups get together for a short period of time to get things done.
• An overlooked function is the ability to search anything within Microsoft Teams. Any photo, document, or chat can be searched and found pretty easily. I can't tell you how many times this has saved me from having to rewrite something or start over.

Incentivized

• Unsure of how to use tags, since they are all lowercase and it feels a bit messy for a user-centric experience.
• Private Messages can be seen by Administrators, something which might not be clear to everybody.
• Mailing List Mode is very powerful but it's a bit tiresome to set-up consistently compared to the experience of the Graphical User Interface.

Incentivized

• I sometimes have a hard time viewing both the meeting screen and chat window at the same time.
• There have been times when someone in a meeting will totally lose their connection.
• At times the sound quality is not what it should be which makes it hard to hear each other.

Microsoft Teams is included with our Office 365 subscription and we have no intention of migrating off of Office 365 and Microsoft products. Since Microsoft Teams is included for free with our Office 365 subscription, and since we enjoy all the features, benefits, and functionality, there is no question that our team will continue to use the product

Incentivized

The overall functionality of the product is incredible in that it provides a one-stop solution for organization and communication. The product is also very well integrated into Microsoft Outlook and other Office apps. Visually pleasing and very easy to use interface. New features are constantly being added to enhance the user experience.

Rare, but outages do happen

Incentivized

Sometimes about once a week I get a message that says "Sorry, there seems to be something wrong". But it goes away in a few minutes.

Incentivized

I think Microsoft Team is overall good application for communication, track Project work inter the teams and also intra teams. I have 7 out of 10 because it needs improvements in certain features like video sharing call, call drop, audio quality and connecting problems even after having good internet connection.

I find everything I need for my day-to-day work.

Incentivized

Vanilla's mobile functionality was downright awful and it felt like it was stuck in the 2000s. While they have similar features, Discourse blows them away in almost every department. We don't regret switching at all.

Incentivized

We chose primarily because of the promised integration with the Microsoft Business Suite - which it mostly delivers on. That does give Teams an obvious advantage over competitors. IMHO Teams has a richer, more mature feature set, and the experience is more reliable and stable. Although like any of there there is room for imporvement.

Incentivized

It does not appear to have a limit to how many teams and employees we can have using it

Incentivized

• It allowed us to stand up multiple community discussion forums for various project
• It caused some difficulty when navigating our grant application process
• It allowed us to track public interest in different discussions

Incentivized

• User experience has been much better than the previous Skype for Business app. It has an easy-to-use interface with persistent chats. The search feature is very fast and useful.
• MS Teams has mostly focused on Collaboration and team building features which are very useful for organisational communications. This in turn has a positive impact on the overall business outcome.
• Scheduling meetings have never been so easy in the past. We can schedule meetings on the go without any hassles
• Since Teams is accessible from multiple platforms like Laptop, Desktop, Mobile phones, etc it has been very convenient from a Mobility perspective.

Incentivized