Slack Versus Sharepoint: Finding the Right Collaboration Solution

Two team collaboration tools that couldn't be more different: Slack, the hip, trendy new entry in the field, and Sharepoint, the stolid, aging workhorse tolerated by corporate America but viewed with disdain almost everywhere else.

But these two tools today have more in common than meets the eye?and deciding which of them is the right solution for your business might be more difficult than you imagine.

Sharepoint began life as a way for non-programmers to easily construct websites for sharing documents and communicating collaboratively. It was the original intranet, a networked server to deliver Internet-like services within a corporation, without an excess of technical configuration required.

Quickly adopted by corporate America, the platform was lost back among the dusty filing cabinets of enterprise-grade solutions, well-known by users and techs in the Fortune 500, but eschewed by startups and trendy social media properties.

But Sharepoint never went away to die. It has been kept active and updated by Microsoft, gradually evolving to incorporate many of the real-time collaboration features that other hot new hosted collaboration platforms were coming out with. In fact, for the most part, Sharepoint is now a hosted service, part of Microsoft's Office 365 platform; few users bother to set up the internal servers that once were required.

Slack, on the other hand, started as mostly a messaging application, just another in the many variations on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) that programmers have been developing since the dawn of the Internet. But it has been evolving in the other direction, adding features and archiving aspects to become more and more like Sharepoint.?

The persistent chat room feature of Slack has continued to dominate the product's feature set. Organized by topic, and able to be made private or offer direct messaging between users, they are the clearest remnant of the IRC origins of the platform.

But Slack's open API (Application Programming Interface) and growing popularity have made extensions for the product explode. The service integrates with Google Drive, Dropbox, Github, Zendesk, and a score of other third-party websites, services, and tools that can be usefully referenced from within a Slack chat. And the entire collection is easily searchable, making it a snap to pull up and reference old conversations or documents with sudden relevance.

Sharepoint relies less on extensions than on its own integrated services, developed slowly over the years in response to business demand. Many of the integrations available as third-party extensions to Slack are simply built-in to Sharepoint. And, jumping a little late onto the app bandwagon, Microsoft now offers mobile apps for Sharepoint, mirroring Slack's standard mobile apps.

Cost, perhaps surprisingly, is not much of a differentiator. Slack is ostensibly free, but the free version includes only a limited subset of features. The highest-tiered plan is $15 per user month. Contrast that with $10 per user per month for SharePoint Online and Microsoft suddenly looks like the better deal. But in practice, most SharePoint users will subscribe to a variety of Office 365 plans, at higher rates, but which include a variety of other services.

Your decision will probably come down to whether or not you otherwise subscribe to the Microsoft product ecosystem in your company. If so, Sharepoint is the obvious choice. Otherwise, Slack will probably be the best collaboration tool for you.?