5 Non-Microsoft Apps We Use

Mitch Herrema (00:07):

Hey everyone, welcome back to Make Others Successful, a podcast where we aim to make you successful in your workplace, and in turn, cascade that down to others and make them successful, and hopefully go on forever and ever. Uh, I'm Mitch Herrema and I'm joined here by Matt Dressel. And we're turning to the tables a little bit. I'm gonna have Matt interview me on this episode just to give him a little bit of a break.

Matt Dressel (00:36):

As Mitch said, this is Matt Dressel. I am going to be talking with Mitch today about, uh, some of the tools which we use in our business that are not Office 365. So some of these, there are direct tools that are available in Office 365, but we either choose or chose in the past not to use them or they're just not supported in the Office 365 toolkit. So, so

Mitch Herrema (00:58):

Believe it or not, as much fanboy as Matt here is, he uses some non-Microsoft tools,

Matt Dressel (01:06):

And that is true.

Mitch Herrema (01:07):

He hates it every day, but we're, we're still here.

Matt Dressel (01:09):

I wouldn’t say that. I would say that I would say I am, it's

Mitch Herrema (01:14):

His mission to eliminate those tools. I'll say that.

Matt Dressel (01:17):

Yeah. If Microsoft would do some things to make it so thatI can not have to have another thing, it would be really nice. Yep. So, Mitch, what's the first one you wanna talk about?

Mitch Herrema (01:25):

Uh, one of my favorites that we use is Calendly. Yeah.Okay. So how this came about was we were, I think it was when we were looking to interview people for positions and I was kind of heading up that effort and I was pretty tired of looking at my calendar and trying to match it up to their calendar. And with so many applicants and everything going out, it's a lot to manage. And so I said, What can I use in order to simplify that? And it went even farther than that because when you get to the later stages in interviews here, it requires multiple people at the interview. And so I didn't wanna manage that plus and, and have to manage so many people's calendars. So what Calendly is, is a tool that you can set up an event that you name it, you give it a description, and you basically say, Hey, I want these people to be involved with the meeting. And it generates a link for you. And you could say, Hey, go grab some time on my calendar. That's been super useful. And Matt, you've started to use it for other things. Well,

Matt Dressel (02:32):

We as a business, Yeah. So like we use it in a lot of different ways. And another perspective on how we started it wasn't you, but we were right around the same time or right around the time that, uh, Bookings came out, which is a Microsoft product that allows you to schedule, uh, do something very similar. Um, create pages that you can access and can use that to find time on someone's calendar. And also, Microsoft released another product called Fine Time, and there was another one I think as well. They've, they've produced a couple different products. We started using those for like sales, like we were gonna use them like yeah, Schedule 30 minutes, uh, consultation with, with Matt or with Mike or with somebody else, Right. And you could do pooling and all sorts of stuff, but Bookings had problems. Uh, it wasn't a great interface.

Matt Dressel (03:17):

It had other problems. And so at the same time we were doing the hiring piece, we kind of said, Hey, what's another tool besides what's in a bookings Yep. That we could do this with? And Calendy was something we tried out. And largely, me personally, there's a lot of things about Calendy that are really great. It is annoying that it's not built in, right. That you have to pay for a subscription and go access it and everything else. But the features and the ability to ask someone to go schedule time with you is really good. It's convenient. It's convenient for me. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Um, and so yeah, we use it for project scheduling, for sales scheduling. Like anytime we need to schedule a number of people, uh, that are outside of our organization and inside of our organization, we try to use Calendly as much as we can.

Mitch Herrema (03:59):

Yeah. Even meetings with clients where we know we have a project team on our end and we set that up once and we can, we say, Hey, here's a link to grab 30 minutes with us, and they can kind of look at their calendar and decide what, what works for them. And it's super convenient. Uh, one other note on the bookings front, I had someone ask me recently why I use Calendly instead of Bookings. And the the one thing that I'm pretty positive bookings doesn't do that I had to research was collective events. So it does it where you can add a group to an event, but when someone schedules that event, it selects one person from the group.

Matt Dressel (04:38):

That's how it's intended to be. I it's supposed to be like around Robin, right? So the intention is, you know, like an from like in a sales scenario, I have a group of five sales people if you wanna request a thing, if I'm the next one, the list, I'm the one that gets that calendar event. That's one of the ways it works. But honestly, Bookings has gotten better since we started initially using it. It's gotten better. I would tell you the main reason is the usability and the ease of use is just better with Calendly. Sure. Like I said before, I would love if, if Microsoft would build some of those features into bookings because having a separate tool, a separate app, a separate that I have to authorize access to my calendar, like it's.

Mitch Herrema (05:15):

Yeah. That's sometimes on occasion breaks and you gotta go back in.

Matt Dressel (05:18):

Yeah. If you reset your password or if if the token that they have expires, you have to go reset it. Like that's annoying. Yeah. Uh, the other thing that's interesting about it is it does create a weird, like from a sales perspective, it does create a weird imposition, which is the, honestly is a big problem with all of these tools. Like all of the stuff that Microsoft does, all of the, even the newer stuff, the fine time and everything, instead of you taking charge and saying, I'm gonna schedule this meeting, you're basically saying, I need you to go do something to get time with me. Right?Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And it sets up an interesting paradox or paradigm with like, I'm trying to sell you something, but you have to go schedule time with me. Yeah. Not the other, like it's the

Mitch Herrema (05:55):

Its on them for sure to,

Matt Dressel (05:57):

But the reality is that solve, it solves so many problems about, Oh, I scheduled it. But between the time that we agreed on the time and when you actually send the invite, it's like, I have a meeting now

Mitch Herrema (06:06):

And like I I try to look at it as a convenience thing where that person gets to say, Oh wow, I get to pick

Matt Dressel (06:12):

Anytime that works for

Mitch Herrema (06:13):

Me, works

Matt Dressel (06:13):

For me. And it truly is any time. Right.

Mitch Herrema (06:15):

Which you can put up whatever rules around

Matt Dressel (06:19):

That. Yeah. It's, it's anytime that you have allowedRight. You can even, like, if, even if you have a full day that's free, you can say, I only wanna do it for between these three hours and these three hours in the morning and the afternoon. Right?

Mitch Herrema (06:30):

Right. That's one thing about find time that bugs me a little bit, which is you basically have to say, Hey, here's some options. And,

Matt Dressel (06:38):

And you have to choose the

Mitch Herrema (06:38):

Options. It matches up the calendars and you pick the options and it just takes that manual intervention to basically not allow them to pick whatever time works for them. You're kind of self, you're selecting some for them and maybe

Matt Dressel (06:53):

You'll get it right, maybe you won't.

Mitch Herrema (06:54):

Right. And so I, I like being able to just say, Go grab what whatever time you want. And the other thing with find time is that it's only for one offs. It's not like, here is my standard link to go grab 30.

Matt Dressel (07:08):

Cause that's what's booking's for.

Mitch Herrema (07:09):

Right. So a little bit messy on, on that end, but we love Calendly and it makes a lot of things easier and we'll see if Microsoft ever

Matt Dressel (07:18):

Makes something as good close as

Mitch Herrema (07:19):

The Gap.

Matt Dressel (07:20):

Yeah. Okay. So we've gone through calendar. What's next?What's another thing that my

Mitch Herrema (07:24):

Next favorite non-Microsoft tool that we use is Web flow.Web Flow is a tool that you basically can build websites. It's a smart designer friendly CMS that you can use to build websites. You can kind of think along the lines of like Square Space and, um, tools like that where you get to build websites. Web flow is a little bit more customizable with being able to actually select a lot of the, the deeper properties of what's in a website and be able to really customize them complete with CMS functionality and eCommerce and all those things. Microsoft just doesn't have,

Matt Dressel (08:01):

That's not their space. They don't, they aren't, they aren't in that space at all. Right.

Mitch Herrema (08:05):

They, they have something that is more recent. They announced Power Pages, which I think our initial thought on that was, Oh, they're just rebranding Power Apps portals, but it's different. They, they claim it as another thing being added to the Power Platform. And it is a website builder essentially. And I took a brief look at it and it looks a lot like the SharePoint page builder. Like you add the different sections and little widgets in there and you can connect it to dataverse if you have information in dataverse that you want to use and effectively build a website. So we'll keep our eye on that and see how that goes. But I imagine there's along way to go to make it as in depth as some of the other website builder tools that people might be used to.

Matt Dressel (08:54):

Yep. I would agree with that. I, I can tell you, like for me, we come from a background of being devs, right. Hardcore developers. And you know, when we built our first website, it was, we're building the HTML css, like everything from scratch. And with our starting to use web flow, we've paid basically said, nope. If we're doing a custom website, we're gonna do it on webflow. We have the ability to customize how we want if we need to, but there's so much that's just built in and works and works well. Works good. Yeah. Um, you know, we've built a couple customer websites on it. We've built our own, you know, we're not in the building a thousand custom websites for people, but if we need to do it, that's the technology that we would use for sure.

Mitch Herrema (09:35):

Yeah. And I'll say, I, I think I said it in a previous episode. I was resistant at first to this because I liked my hands in the code and, and having full control when I had to give some of that up. But it's been great.

Matt Dressel (09:47):

Yeah. I like, the only other thing I would say about it is the, it's also been very nice to not have to manage a server. Like it's a, it's a cloud based solution that just does all of that for us, right? Yep. We don't have to think about anything but the content that matters for our business, the design and the content that we're entering, Right? That's it.

Mitch Herrema (10:05):

Outside of buying a domain. Yeah.

Matt Dressel (10:07):

Yeah. And

Mitch Herrema (10:09):

Wiring,

Matt Dressel (10:09):

Yeah. Configuring it the first time.

Mitch Herrema (10:11):

It's all done with, with webflow and it's nice.

Matt Dressel (10:15):

Yep. So web flow, We've done websites and we've done Calendly. Well, what's next?

Mitch Herrema (10:21):

Whimsical? Oh, I think you, you like this one, Matt? He, I think he was slow to adapt it a little bit, but I've seen him start to use it for other things. And I'll just share what it is really quick. It's basically a, a modeling tool, so a whiteboardish type of product where you can drop on notes or just organize ideas and build flow charts and stuff like that. And it's really fast at building and really flexible and has been really helpful.Even in an instance where a client of ours was talking us through their process, I was furiously on my own computer building this process flow while they're actually describing it. And by the end of the meeting I could pull it up and show them, Hey, is this what you're talking about? And it was, it was pretty close and it was really great to have a tool that could generate that quick,

Matt Dressel (11:11):

You can think of Visio, you can think of Whiteboard, you can think of a lot of different things out there in the Microsoft stack that does this. There's a bunch of other tools that are non Microsoft as well that do it. And I would say that I have been every year more disappointed with Visio and with, uh, and honestly with Whiteboard in a lot of ways. Yeah.

Mitch Herrema (11:30):

It's getting better, but it's not

Matt Dressel (11:31):

The ease of use and the ability for us to make something that looks pretty without a lot of work. Right. Yeah. And that's, it's disappointing, right? Like with Visio, I like, I was used Visio a lot for a longtime and it just, you know, it's, it takes time, it takes work. Till relatively recently you had to have an installed application on your desktop. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, you know, it's just not as nice. And so I find myself using whimsical anytime I wanna just plop some stuff on a, on a page and organize some things and like you said, map out something that I wanna, I wanna look at. I almost always export it as a image or something and then put it into another document or something. I'm never really sharing the whimsical directly with customers or anything like that, but it creates nice visuals.

Mitch Herrema (12:14):

Yep. You can share it though. Like, you can, you can allow people to go poke around and add comments and whatnot, which is really nice.The other thing I'll say is we don't pay for it right now. We do not. There's a threshold where you can have like

Matt Dressel (12:26):

A thousand objects. 3000

Mitch Herrema (12:27):

I think it's 3000 objects and we're like riding the line and, and with every new thing that we had we're like, do we delete an old one or do we need to pony up and pay for this thing? But I can imagine a day where we will and it's been nice to, to have

Matt Dressel (12:41):

For sure. Okay. So what is the next item that you're most excited about that we don't use in Office 365?

Mitch Herrema (12:49):

Well, this one, it wasn't necessarily one that I sought it out, but we were working with a marketing firm and he recommended we use ActiveCampaign for our email and newsletter and, and automation on our website. And so Active Campaign is just that, it's a tool where you can build a newsletter, list a client list or contact list that you wanna create email campaigns for. And it even goes a couple steps farther into like the CRM world if you want to, or if you wanna do forms. So we use it a lot for the forms on our website where if a new lead comes in or maybe you wanna download one of our resources, if you've gotten our Power Apps theme template or something like that, or our Modern Workplace Scale, you had to fill out a form that went through ActiveCampaign. And we have a little automation set up on the back end that says, Okay, send them this email now that will give them the link to be able to download this thing. And then most of our resources will follow up in a few days and say, Hey, how did that go? And ask them what they think of it and see if there's anything we can do to help in a Microsoft shop. I feel like we would normally gravitate towards Dynamics for this,

Matt Dressel (14:02):

Right? Yeah, probably. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Dynamics would be part of it. But I mean, I, you know, Dynamics is a big thing. Yeah. Uh, we're wanting to use it targeted for just the thing that it's really good at. Um, and so I think that's part of it. Also, it's really easy to get into Dynamics is, like I said, it's a whole

Mitch Herrema (14:18):

Thing. I found someone on LinkedIn posts the other day where they basically, they were pretty proud of it, but they mapped out all of the products and dynamics according to different categories. And there was something like 80 mm-hmm. <affirmative>, like obnoxious amount, like, uh, so much mental load for someone to actually conceptualize how to use that all sort of product. Yeah. And I think I found the same thing when I, for research for this episode. I went and poked around what tools and dynamics could we use?And it's not, uh, like, Hey, get started here with like a small sample. It's very business speak. Yep. And uses phrases like, unlock your customer data todo this. It's, it just didn't feel like, Hey, you wanna send out newsletters, wanna automate forms. It just, it's because

Matt Dressel (15:06):

It's because of the way they're doing it. Like, and it's not the, like, Dynamics isn't the only one that has this problem. I thinkSalesforce has a similar problem. I think like a lot of these solutions have this problem where they do a lot of things, but they have a very difficult time talking about any smaller thing. You know, it really is all or nothing, right?Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, like you're talking about a lot of work to get it going. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> kind of just is what it is.

Mitch Herrema (15:32):

Yeah. Do you know how much it would cost if we wanted to use Dynamics

Matt Dressel (15:35):

For us individually? I think we, because of our partner status, we get a certain number of seats of, I forget, I think it's, I think it is the, like the sales end of it. Yeah. For free. Like, Gotcha. So we could do,I think it's up to nine or 10 licenses, which maybe would be all we would need.We could start to do something. Yeah. But it's not all of Dynamics by any means. Not even close. It's just sales focused, I believe.

Mitch Herrema (15:57):

Yeah. So short, short story, active campaign felt much more approachable and we, we were on, uh, MailChimp before that, and so we migrated our contacts over there and it's been pretty good. I will say there's an aspect of Active Campaign where they clearly like spun up a little server for you and you have a unique url and it can be a little bit touchy sometimes it doesn't feel like I'm on a big platform, I'm just logged in as my user. It kind of feels like we have our own instance

Matt Dressel (16:29):

Own thing. Yeah.

Mitch Herrema (16:29):

And it, I don't know if it suffers because of that or not, but it, it just feels like, I don't know, like there's not enough horsepower sometimes.

Matt Dressel (16:36):

Hmm. Interesting. Would we have one more that we wanna go

Mitch Herrema (16:39):

Through? Yeah. Our last one. Last

Matt Dressel (16:41):

One. Okay. Gonna your favorite. This is the, this is my favorite one. Yeah. I've been waiting for this

Mitch Herrema (16:44):

One. You guys, Uh, this is like the bane of my existent. I think the only reason why we use Slack is because I'm here. Otherwise we would be on Teams. But there's a lot of context around why a Microsoft 365 consulting shop uses Slack.

Matt Dressel (17:00):

So to be clear, we don't use Slack. We use Slack andTeams. Yeah.

Mitch Herrema (17:04):

Okay. So the truth that's true. We, we've been telling that line of using Teams more for certain projects and

Matt Dressel (17:12):

Well, even if we didn't, like, the reality is that Slack sucks for file management. Yeah. So like, we do use Slack. We started usingSlack before there was a Teams, It was probably right before,

Mitch Herrema (17:22):

Or it was like a data like Teams

Matt Dressel (17:24):

Was not, I don't think it was released fully yet, but it was, there was something they were just moving away from, uh, Skype for business and like, there's just no question at that time, you could not run a business on Teams, you just couldn't mm-hmm. <affirmative> at best. It was, you know, <laugh>, it was a replacement for Skype for Business, andSkype for Business was not that great, honestly. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>,uh, for what we would want to use it for. And so Slack was what we started using. Slack is a good product, right? Like it has a lot of great things about it related

Mitch Herrema (17:53):

To, I'm so glad we have this recorded <laugh>

Matt Dressel (17:55):

Related to chat primarily. Yeah. Right? Like it is a great tool for chatting. The user experience for chatting is good and solid and well thought out, right? Yeah. But that's about where it stops. If you want to do more advanced collaboration, file management, like all of these things, especially initially it wasn't there. And even today it's not really there. We have pretty much since the beginning always used teams for file management and then we link those things in Slack because initially we weren't paying for Slack, and so files would go away, then we started paying for Slack. And even if you do, if you're trying to collaborate on something, you can't edit it in Slack. So you end up with more versions and more versions, more versions of the same file. Right. So, as you said, I do think you are probably the main reason we're still using Slack, because I think most everybody else would be good enough using Teams and it would be okay, there are still features in team in Slack that are more convenient and easier to use than Teams, but there's also a bunch of stuff in Slack that you can't do and that doesn't work for that.

Matt Dressel (19:02):

Great. Yeah. Specifically around file management, like all of the team, the team focus things. So it's a, it's an interesting topic. Yeah.We're using both.

Mitch Herrema (19:11):

Yeah.

Matt Dressel (19:12):

Actively,

Mitch Herrema (19:13):

Proudly <laugh>. Sure. So my, my thoughts on Slack versus Teams is I always found Slack to be more of like a, it leaves room for fun and Teams was built more like enterprise first and button up all your buttons and, and didn't leave as much room for fun. And even just little things like you can add custom emojis, right? It sounds silly, but it's kind of awesome that you can have custom emojis show up by your messages. Like some people get a lot of satisfaction out of that. We have one client who has a kind of a motto on their website that we have attached to. And so we grabbed a picture from that website and made it into a little emoji. And so anytime anyone wants to say Sure thing, it's kind of a silly emoji that we can put on there. And it's, it's fun. And another thing is that I struggle with Teams conversation style. You,

Matt Dressel (20:10):

You, you and I think about this very differently. Yes.

Mitch Herrema (20:12):

Every conversation in teams warrants a conversation,

Matt Dressel (20:17):

Any conversation in a channel. Yes. That's what you're supposedly

Mitch Herrema (20:22):

Talking chat is is stream of consciousness. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, but in a channel, Yes. Anytime that someone sends a message, it is built in a way that is, it's designed for someone to respond directly to that message and encapsulate that conversation.

Matt Dressel (20:36):

What's really interesting about this is when Teams was initially launched, it didn't work that way. And every, and almost everybody hated it because they had, when you entered and you got the new message, you would, you would create a new thread every time, but because of the default thread and you had like a box down below where you could start a message and a box up above where you could have a message and it was like really confusing. And so they simplified it to be more in line with what you're talking about. And also they have this weirdness where chats are different than channel messages, right? Yeah. And they're very different way approaches to how those work. Yeah. I don't like the way Slack works by default in that you have to choose to go into a threaded conversation, because I find most of the time we're having a threaded conversation. Like it is a conversation that is meant to be kept together. Yeah. And then it gets messed up.

Mitch Herrema (21:25):

Yeah. The amount of times where we kind of catch ourselves and we're like, Oh man, we're creating a bunch of noise for everyone. Let's, let's jump into a thread and close the loop in there. It's definitely happened and we gotta be mindful of that. But I'll just say, I am much more like, Hey,I'm gonna drop this thought in here in a channel and see what people think of it. And I'm like, I don't feel like it has enough weight to be like, Hey, let's have a conversation about this thing.

Matt Dressel (21:49):

Yeah. At, at the same time, I would say what we do do today in Slack only works cuz we're such a small organization. Yeah. If we had a hundred people, the number of channels and the noise and the, it, I, it would be very, very, very difficult. Yeah. Which is why one of the benefits and the attractions of teams is that now I have multiple teams and I can choose to invite people to different teams. And it's not the same as a private channel, right? Yeah. Like I can have five channels within a, a team that have their own meaning. Right. But at the same time, like I just said, that's a benefit. The notification management in teams is like, it's fine if you understand it and you're being purposeful, out of the box. It sucks. Yeah. Like the default settings, like if you just never change them and never choose to be purposeful about any of it, it's terrible.

Mitch Herrema (22:38):

Still to this day, they enabled, Well originally they only had their own like homegrown notification system. Yeah. And now you can use the system notificaion like your, you're built in Windows. Yep. It'll look like an normal notification or Mac. But with my Mac, I click the checkbox that says show message preview. And it never shows a preview. All I ever get from Teams isMatt Dressel sent a message in this channel. I never get to see what he actually the

Matt Dressel (23:07):

Details

Mitch Herrema (23:07):

Are. Yeah. Versus Slack is just, it's, it's there. And you can have, have that controller and see what if you want, but there's just weirdness like that. And I'm like, Oh man, what's, what's going on here? Why does this not actually do what it's supposed to do? The other thing I'll callout is I feel like at least on Mac, Slack is way less resource intensive. It's a lot more lightweight.

Matt Dressel (23:29):

Yes. So I would say in general, across all platforms,Okay, Slack is way less resource intensive, but Slack is also doing way less.Yes. Like that's, Yes. That's the, you know, you don't have apps that can be embedded in a Slack channel that are like full apps that you can open up and do stuff and you don't like, it's

Mitch Herrema (23:45):

Slack relies on integrations and like a bookmark kind of system. Yep. And that's about it.

Matt Dressel (23:51):

Which, which is interesting because like the bookmark thing I think is a direct, uh, I'm gonna say direct and I don't really mean direct, but I'm sure that that came from the fact that in teams you can have tabs at the top. Right? For sure. It's their implementation of something that does similar. And they've been going back and forth on this the whole like all the time back and forth trying to like Slack added calling which teams had that from the get go where like that's the primary thing that it did was calling and all that stuff. Cause it was replacing Skype for Business, right? Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. But it's really interesting to see the two go back and forth in their feature sets.

Mitch Herrema (24:24):

Yep. And last thing I'll call out is we don't use Slack for video calls. We use teams exclusively for video calls, but we do use Slack for huddles sometimes, which is like a, you're in this channel, flip this little switch and you jump into a huddle. I personally really like that feature. It's, it feels a lot less formal then. Like, schedule a meeting, start a meeting and invite someone to a meeting. Um, it's, it's a huddle Right. Even more playful language, but it's definitely not a team's meeting.

Matt Dressel (24:54):

Yeah. So I love the convenience of a huddle. I hate the lack of traceability and understanding of what's going on. Sure. Like I oftentimes go back and try to figure out what happened in a day so I can, you know, cause we track hours. We're trying to understand how much we spent doing stuff with a huddle. There's nothing, there's not a log in the thread. There's nothing that tells you that you had a huddle. It just happened and then it ended. Right. If Teams had the ability to do like their meet now without the meet now, and then I gotta click a button and click a button and give it a title and invite some, like in all of that craziness mm-hmm.<affirmative> that still did the types of things that you can do in a, in a meeting. It would be like, that would be amazing.

Matt Dressel (25:34):

Yeah. Um, because for me it would give me both worlds. Right. I would have the traceability in all of the other things that I use togo figure out what I've done throughout the day. Yep. Um, and you, it's doe snot a big, that's not a huge thing. Right. Cause you're a hundred percent right. Like I open it up and what do I do? Do I do an individual call? Do I do a meet now within a channel? Do I do a meet now? Otherwise? Which all results in like if you don't do a call, it all results in an actual meeting. It's part of the challenge. Right. Yep.

Mitch Herrema (26:00):

Last, last thing. The audio quality is so different. At least to me when I jump from a team's call to a huddle, like it's crystal clear in the huddle versus teams, like they must have a different audio processor or something. I much prefer that along with the, the ducking. So when people are trying to talk over each other, teams is super aggressive and oftentimes I feel like I'm looking at someone where there's multiple people talking and one person's just getting drowned out and you, you can't even tell they're saying anything.

Matt Dressel (26:32):

Yeah. I think I'm not as sensitive to the audio quality. I think both of them have. Okay. Audio, audio quality. But I do think that, and I, I don't know what it is. I don't know whether or not it's because teams also allows for dial-ins cause you're in a meeting allows for phone dial-ins and all these other things that, that maybe some of the difference that is there. But I, there is a difference for sure. But to me they're both like, okay,

Mitch Herrema (26:54):

Hey, it's acceptable for

Matt Dressel (26:56):

Sure. I'm not, I'm not like super excited to be on a huddle and hate being on a team's meeting. Yeah.

Mitch Herrema (27:01):

Don't not

Matt Dressel (27:01):

Like that. But yeah, there is a difference. It

Mitch Herrema (27:02):

Just reminds me of when I first would like start using Discord or jump in a channel with, with people and I was like, whoa, Internet audio can sound this good when I'm used to team. Like there was just a clear difference and I wish they would level that up a little bit.

Matt Dressel (27:17):

Yeah. So one more thing about teams that I like that is a challenge for us and we've been begging, quite frankly Microsoft to solve and they've done, they've done things to improve it, but, you know, and I don't know that they'll ever fix it, but the ability to have seven different Slack things open in one, in one app and be able to switch between them instantaneously without any issue is uh, like a huge deal, right? Yeah. Um, because of what it is. I don't know that we'll ever that'll ever be solved, but it's definitely for people like us who would, might be in multiple tenants. So we might be involved in a team that's at a customer's team, team, a local team to our organization, another customer's team all at the same time. That experience is, is terrible quite frankly. Yeah. You know, effectively the only way to do it is to have multiple profiles in Chrome and basically have one dedicated for every version of teams that you want and be monitoring 'em all. Whereas Slack, I just add another to my

Mitch Herrema (28:10):

App workspace

Matt Dressel (28:11):

Yep. And I'm good to go.

Mitch Herrema (28:12):

Yeah. And like, I think you mentioned it a little bit, but like you almost never see a loading indicator in Slack. Like when you switch between things like, it's usually almost instantaneous, which I have not felt the same in teams. It kind of feels like, oh let me jog my memory.

Matt Dressel (28:28):

Yeah. Especially switching to like usually chats and like switching the basic stuff. It's not, it's, I think there probably is, it's not as fast, but it's not bad at all. But like opening the files tab Right. Or opening the notes tab, it's like not even close Yeah. To being the same. Right. And a lot of that has like, to be clear, uh, there is lots of reasons for that.Like, uh, Teams is doing so much more than Slack in those regards, but it doesn't change the experience. Right. It doesn't change the feeling that the end user has. Right. They don't care a lot of times about that. Whatever's going on behind the scenes, just why isn't it as fast. Right?

Mitch Herrema (29:04):

Yeah. I love that. One thing I think might help us in the future with teams is that like shared channel across different

Matt Dressel (29:13):

Yeah. Theoretically. The, the challenge is that again, it has a lot to do with the, the enterprise approach to things. In order for that to work, I have to work with an organization and have a agreement between my tenant and their tenant. Right. Which Slack, you don't necessarily need that. Or if you do, it's like super convenient. I invite somebody and it goes, Hey administrator of this other workspace, do you agree to allow such and such to have

Mitch Herrema (29:35):

Access? Click approve,

Matt Dressel (29:36):

Click approve. Right? Whereas in, in teams at, from what I understand, it's like, like call your administrator, have them call their administrator, set up a link. Like that's my understanding of it. Right. Which again, like the reason for that is at Microsoft you're not gonna do that. Right.Or at, you know, ABC Fortune 500 company, you're not gonna be, that's not how you're gonna do that. But for small organizations that want to be nimble and agile, you know, it would be way more convenient if you had that. Right. Yep.Which goes to a whole, like I believe that in the next year, two years, we'll probably switch. I would expect us to eventually switch. I don't know what the trigger's gonna be for that. Like, we already are doing projects and teams probably teams

Mitch Herrema (30:20):

Probably me quitting.

Matt Dressel (30:20):

No, that's not gonna be it. But like, I think well eventually we will. I just don't know what the trigger is gonna be for us to finally do it all the way because we have so much content in, in Slack, it's a big Yeah. You know, we're not gonna spend the time and the effort to transfer between the two. So when we cut over, it's gonna be that stuff's lost. Yeah. Which makes, which lets the whole concept behind these services that get your content and then you, you have to get momentum to have to want to shift. Mm-hmm.

Mitch Herrema (30:46):

<affirmative>. Okay. I think we've talked enough about Slack and Teams. I'm glad we saved that one for the end cuz it was a little long-winded, but I I I wanted to like close with last episode, we talked about how to choose the right tool for mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. Your business. This kind of relates to that because we had to choose tools to do these things at one point and I thought it would be fun to share where we landed.

Matt Dressel (31:10):

Yeah. And like you're right that it's directly applicable.So we've, when we have call conversations with customers about modernizing their workspace, we don't just talk about Office 365 tools. So we had a project recently that, you know, we had to do a deep comparison between MS Forms and ProSoft and like other forms, uh, solutions. Um, and we strongly actually could considered and promoted using the non-Microsoft solution. Yeah. But the customer ultimately said, No, no, no, I don't want to have another expenditure.I don't have another cost. I, we'll just, we'll deal with the limitations of MS forms. Yeah. And like, that's the type of thing we do all the time because we're not out here just trying to sell all only Microsoft stuff. Right. You know, we, that's not our stick. Our stick is to try to make you successful and with whatever tool makes sense. Yep. Now, 90% of the time that's gonna be a Microsoft product because, and even in this case, what we were just talking about, ultimately it was the Microsoft product because it was the cheapest option. Right? Yeah. But that doesn't mean it's the only thing we're considering. Yeah. And neither should you, you shouldn't just consider the Microsoft products <laugh>.

Mitch Herrema (32:16):

Cool. I think that wraps us up today. I am glad we went on this long. I was a little bit worried that it would be a little bit light, but have no doubt Matt can dress it up. Yeah, he can, he can keep it coming. So thanks for your time today and we'll see you guys next time.

Matt Dressel (32:31):

Cool. Bye everybody.

Mitch Herrema (32:33):

Hey, thanks for joining us today. If you haven't already subscribed to our show on your favorite podcasting app, so you'll always be up to date on the most recent episodes. This podcast is hosted by the team members of Bulb Digital and special thanks to Eric Veeneman for our music tracks and producing this episode. If you have any questions for us, head to makeotherssuccessful.com and you can get in touch with us there. You'll also find a lot of blogs and videos and content that will help you modernize your workplace and get the most out of Office 365. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.

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