If you use both Microsoft Teams and Slack, then you might love the latest feature - or app - that's come to Slack.
Collaboration and conferencing apps are popular right now due to the coronavirus pandemic, which is forcing workforces around the globe to do their jobs from home. In what appears to be an effort to help streamline your telecommuting experience during this difficult time, Slack is launching an app for its service that allows you to join a Microsoft Teams call directly from Slack.
To be clear, Slack is an app for mobile devices and computers. It has both free and premium tiers. No matter the tier, you can use Slack to chat and call others. It's primarily for enterprises, as it's ideal for teams that need to communicate when in-person conversations are not possible. Slack also offers mini-apps you can enable to extend and expand the capabilities of your Slack workspace.
The new Microsoft Teams Calls app for Slack lets you set Microsoft Teams as the default calling provider - if you don't want to use Slack to call people. It'll even let you see who’s already on a call and when it started before joining a meeting. Event reminders from the Outlook app for Slack will also support the ability to directly join Microsoft Teams calls. It may sound convoluted, but it's not.
Microsoft Office 365 Personal with teams
Once you've set up the app in Slack, you can easily start a call by using the command /teams-call. But the call itself isn't done entirely within Slack. If you join one from a Slack channel, the call will open up in Teams instead. So, you'll need to have both services running on your device.
Microsoft Teams is a direct competitor to Slack, offering much of the same functionality and targeting the same enterprise users as well.
Of course, it's not clear why you'd be using both Slack and Microsoft Teams, but if you are, this is the workaround for you. You can also call numbers via Zoom, Jabber, WebEx, RingCentral, and Dialpad directly within Slack.