Comment by taegee

In this case we didn't need a long term solution for searchable data on Slack.

We did the migration in stages, basically this:

    - Provide access to Teams
    - Create all of the new teams / channels there
    - Make Slack read-only but still keep the lights on
    - Allow folks to search and reference historic data as needed with Slack
    - Ensure everyone was moved over to Teams and felt ok enough using it
    - Remove access to Slack
    - Perform Slack export / PDF creation of important channels
    - Attach Slack PDFs to important Teams channels
    - Cancel Slack subscription

In the end, most people never even needed to use the PDFs because they got everything they needed out of Slack before access was removed, but they are there for peace of mind and a last resort.

We also took this as an opportunity to stop using chat as a source of truth for long lived information. Anything that should be stored long term made its way somewhere else (Jira, Confluence, etc.).

PDF is the worse, it has its use-cases but is so painful to use programatically.

Well as per the article (and my own experience), the free tier only gives you public channels. The paid tier gives you everything: public/private channels, group chats (called MPIMs), and one-to-one DMs.

So yes, it breaks "privacy" (not that you should expect privacy when using a work Slack account).

Admins can break DM privacy on most company accounts.

IIRC, you have to do something called a "compliance export," which just like any other compliance feature (SSO, HIPAA BAA, audit logs, etc.) usually requires the highest plan. It's designed to add some extra friction so admins can't just add themselves to a DM from the main UI like they could with a channel, but it is possible.

If you think anything you do on your work computer or saas accounts is private I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

We had dozens of channels with almost 10 years of business information in them.

Over time the business gravitated towards putting anything long lived into other sources but since migrating off Slack was essentially a kill switch on our data we wanted to make sure we had ways to access this historic data if needed.

There's no way non-developers were going to parse JSON files for text. We wanted a quick and dirty way to attach the archived PDF file for a channel as a file attachment to the new Teams channel. It gave everyone peace of mind that they could find anything later.

It all worked out in the end and was worth the few hours of dev time to make the 1 off script.

Btw I wasn't the one responsible for making the tech choice to use or leave Slack for Teams. I was the one who was tasked to help with the migration and help make things as streamlined as possible for the business to switch.

One of the biggest pain points was going back to a bunch of Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, etc. sources and finding + updating the links to Slack to be screenshots of the conversation. Another one was converting a bunch of Slack app / webhook integrations over. Teams is absolutely horrendous for this compared to Slack.

Human readable format at rest, I assume.

Used it for about 2 years at a growing startup. What I liked:

* Threads are way better than in Slack. They're top level instead of just a bolted on afterthought. This means all your various conversations scale way better and are way easier to find than in Slack. I can't overstate this enough, it's a killer feature and genuinely improves the overall organisation of your communications

* Font size is just slightly smaller. My eyesight isn't what it used to be, but I still think they get the balance of legibility and information density spot on, whereas Slack feels cartoony in comparison.

* Search felt a little better, I can't exactly put my finger on why or how, just that finding things in Slack always feels comparable to the iOS Mail search feature: very basic.

Drawbacks:

* There are less out of the box integrations I think.

We're selfhosting it! If it runs on our infrastructure, we can't be extorted like this again

Is that using Jitsi or whatever it is? I thought that was third party? I actually set that up for work before realising that we all hate voice/video calls and would just prefer to type. :P