What’s the Most Important Factor When Choosing Business Messaging Software? I'm in the process of selecting a business messaging platform for team collaboration (and possibly customer communication down the line). There are tons of options out there, each with pros and cons — so I’d love your input! Some tools I’m looking at: 1) Slack – Popular, polished, but pricey at scale 2) Microsoft Teams – Strong for MS365 users 3) MirrorFly – White-label SDK/API for messaging, calls, self-host 4) SaaS Rocket.Chat – Also open-source and highly customizable Let me know what worked best for you, or what to avoid! Looking for real-world input before locking in a solution.

Ensure your platform of choice can support your records program.

Realistically the most important factor can vary considerable based on your industry sector and the needs of your business users. For example, is legal disclosure or FOIA a factor for you? Have you done any business analysis and/or use case development? What needs is the solution intended to serve? Meetings? Internal real-time chat? Communication with customers? Ability to retain and discover messages?

As a Microsoft house the decision to use Teams was an easy one.  We find Teams works well across the MS ecosystem for the enterprise and we especially see new value recently upon adding CoPilot (limited to specific personas for now) since it can natively pull in an individuals message history as a data source to improve drafting of new messages.

I've been a part of a couple different organizations where Teams and Slack live in an uneasy co-existence. Teams is much more Enterprise 'governable', but Slack's extensibility from a software engineering perspective (into observability, etc.) lends itself towards IT use. In my current org we've found ourselves trying gerrymander boundaries around communities.