The Teams Decision You've Been Putting Off

Microsoft's decision to unbundle Teams from Office 365 did something unexpected: it put a question on the table that many executives had been thinking but not asking.

Do we actually want to keep using this?

For years, Teams was the default. It came with the bundle, it was "free," and choosing something else meant justifying the switch, fighting internal momentum, and navigating a Microsoft relationship most organizations didn't want to complicate.

Now that Teams is a line item, that calculus has changed. And we're hearing from more executives who are quietly exploring what a move to Slack would look like, and whether it's actually feasible.

The answer is yes, but the path forward looks different than most people assume.

The Real Blocker Isn't Technical

When executives hesitate on a Teams-to-Slack migration, the stated concern is usually disruption. Lost messages, confused employees, parallel systems creating chaos, IT stretched thin trying to manage the transition.

These are legitimate concerns. They're also solvable now, and we've been building toward this moment.

The deeper blocker is organizational inertia. Teams is embedded in workflows. People know where things are, even if they don't love the experience. Switching platforms feels like asking thousands of employees to change habits simultaneously.

Most approaches treat this as a people problem that requires heavy change management. We've found that the right tooling, paired with the right guidance, removes most of the friction before it starts.

What we've learned from guiding these transitions is that the companies who succeed don't treat migration as a single event. They treat it as a gradual shift in gravity, making Slack the place where momentum builds, while giving people a bridge from the old world to the new.

What's Changed on Microsoft's Side

In September 2025, Microsoft announced the unbundling of Teams from Microsoft 365 in response to European competition concerns. For organizations evaluating their options, two things matter here.

First, Teams is now a visible line item. The "free with Office" framing that kept so many organizations from seriously evaluating alternatives is gone. Every renewal is now an explicit decision to keep paying for Teams.

Second, and less discussed: the data export process is more straightforward than it used to be. Microsoft has made it easier to pull channel history, chat logs, and meeting transcripts out of Teams in structured formats. That's the raw material for a clean migration.

We've been migrating customers for years, primarily through structural migrations like rebuilding channels and moving smaller data sets. But these changes have made full data migration more direct than ever, dramatically speeding up what used to be a longer, more complex process.

What We Built to Make This Work

Easier data export is just the starting point. Turning that export into a seamless transition requires tooling built with deep Slack expertise, and that's where we focused.

Full message migration. We can move Teams channels, chats, and meeting transcripts into Slack with full fidelity. Timestamps, threading, user attribution, and file attachments all come across intact. This eliminates the "institutional memory" objection entirely. You're not asking employees to abandon years of context; you're bringing it with them.

To give a sense of scale: we recently completed a migration for a 2,500-person organization that involved 8.5 million messages. The full history came across intact.

Relay Bot for parallel operation. Most migrations fail not because of the technical cutover, but because of the awkward in-between period where people don't know which platform to check. We built a Relay Bot that bridges critical channels across Teams and Slack during the transition. Announcements, escalations, and high-traffic channels get mirrored in real time so nothing falls through the cracks.

This means teams can start working in Slack while the rest of the organization catches up. There no longer needs to be a hard cutover date where you need to hope it all went smooth. Adoption happens organically as people see momentum building in the new platform.

The combination of these two capabilities changes the fundamental psychology of migration. You're not asking people to leap. You're letting them walk across.

What Leaders Should Actually Be Weighing

If you're evaluating this decision, here's where to focus:

Timing. With Teams now unbundled, your next renewal is a natural decision point. Waiting another cycle means another year of license costs for a platform you may not want long-term. If you're considering the move, reach out to us or your Slack team early so we can help you plan ahead of that window.

Trajectory. Microsoft is betting its collaboration future on Copilot integration. Slack is betting on openness: an API-first architecture that plays well with the growing ecosystem of AI agents and custom automation. Where your organization is headed should shape which platform you're building on.

Platform fit. Slack's integration ecosystem runs deep, especially if you're already in the Salesforce world. The user experience tends to drive stronger adoption, and the workflow automation capabilities are more mature. For organizations that treat collaboration as infrastructure rather than just chat, these differences compound over time.

Internal readiness. The biggest variable isn't technology; it's whether you have a champion who can own the transition internally. Migrations succeed when someone is accountable for adoption, not just implementation.

Risk tolerance. A phased approach with relay architecture dramatically lowers execution risk. You can prove the model in a single department before expanding. Guided support from a team that's done this before minimizes it further. Big-bang migrations are no longer the only option.

The Conversation Worth Having

The question isn't really "Teams or Slack." It's whether you want to keep paying for a platform that became the default through bundling, or intentionally choose one that fits how your organization works and is built for the agentic era ahead.

That's a different conversation. And for a lot of companies, Microsoft's unbundling decision finally made it possible to have it.

If this is a conversation you're having internally or want to start, reach out to us. We're happy to help you think through it.