Ready to perform your own Slack to Teams migration? Read our new guide here!
More organizations than ever are making the move from Slack to Microsoft Teams in recent years. We’ve facilitated hundreds of successful migrations varying in size and complexity by using our in-house migration tools. That said, every once in a while, we come across a migration that’s a little more specialized than others. Read on to learn how we approached our first Slack to Microsoft Teams migration as a service.
The Problem
A recent project concerned a client who wanted to migrate conversations from private channels in Slack to Microsoft Teams. Straightforward enough, right? Well, while the majority of our clients prefer exporting conversations in Slack channels as HMTL files, this format didn’t quite fit the use requirements of the client.
We typically recommend HTML because it both preserves the look and feel of the original conversations and also gives an accurate snapshot of the conversation history that’s more convenient for auditing purposes. However, the client didn’t like how this method required each conversation to be clicked on as an individual link and opened separately. They asked if there was another way.
The Solution
Changing the file type like this typically wouldn’t have been an issue, but the Slack API suddenly changed how to authenticate and retrieve private channels. This threw a wrench in our original plan and forced us to be agile and swiftly look for a different solution.
Seeing as we’ve been a proud partner of Microsoft for years, we reached out to them for support and to see if we could come up with a workaround.
By working hand-in-hand with Microsoft and our internal developers, we were able to carefully alter the code of our migration solution to create a tailored way to display channel conversations to the client’s end users. Specifically, we were able to use service accounts to show who posted a message so users could go back and see accurate records of who said what/when they said it.
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The Results
Slack changing its API ended up being nothing more than a minor hiccup in the grand scheme of things. We were able to develop the custom solution in just under two days and seamlessly push it to our client within the following two weeks. They were thrilled with the speed of the fix, but more than that they were happy to be able to access their content in a way that worked for them.
This ended up being the first time we’ve ever performed a Microsoft Teams migration-as-a-service of this type for a client, and that client is now going to be introducing AvePoint as their go-to Office 365 migration partner. Due to the positive feedback we’ve received, we’ve already started working on other custom migration solutions for even larger clients. If you’ve run into trouble when trying to migrate to Microsoft Teams get in contact and see how we can help.
