Teams is characterized as an application with few constraints and intrinsic limitations that are not without impact on the organization of communication.
A "Team" in Teams is a group of "Channels" welcoming users to share documents, chat and other applications. These "Channels" can be "Standard", "Private" (a subset of Team members) or "Shared" (a subset of Team members or not).
Teams has only one "Team" level (all of the same type) and one "Channel" level. Teams and Channels are therefore organized "flat".
GoFAST, on the other hand, has a concept of Collaborative Spaces.
Two significant differences with Teams enable better organization:
- Collaborative Spaces are categorized according to the nature of use and the type of collaboration (Intra-department, Inter-department, External, ...),
- and, above all, they are hierarchically unlimited, with sub-spaces and sub-spaces of sub-spaces, each with differentiated access rights.
As far as Space types are concerned, there are :
- "Organization", which can represent the organizational chart and collaboration with members of the same department (for example, Organization/Resources/IS).
- "Group", representing projects, geographical sites, or themes that bring together members of several departments.
- "Public", encompassing all members except those considered "external".
- "Personal", corresponding to the user's personal space and therefore reserved strictly for his/her use.
- "Extranet", allowing exchanges with members external to the entity, such as suppliers, customers, partners, etc.
Within a Space, there may be sub-Spaces (which may themselves have others), as well as simple "directories". In the final analysis, directories are just a way of classifying, while subspaces have their own access rights.
However, unlike a "Channel" for Teams, it is not possible to associate a Conversation Room with a "directory" or to include members other than those of the space. To do this, a Subspace must be created on GoFAST. This structuring choice is designed to fit in better with a company's organization, and helps limit the influx of solicitations compared with completely open forums.
GoFAST naturally provides a clear organization for collaborative work, as illustrated here:
To do the same in Teams, where there is no grouping by type, nor Sub-Channels, we'd have a much flatter and therefore longer tree structure. The absence of sub-channels is particularly problematic from the 3rd level upwards (in this case, the "Olympic Swimming Pool" and "Green ZAC" collaborative development spaces).
With Teams, you end up with :
We can immediately see that in Teams, the lack of typing on the 1st level is problematic, but more so on the 2nd level. For example, the "Amenagements" projects are on the same level as the "Projects" projects, as it is not possible to create a sub-channel (with a sub-set of members on the "Projects" level).
Multiply the problem by hundreds of collaborative spaces and the difference in clarity and organization between Teams and GoFAST becomes enormous.
Of course, there are still many functional differences between Teams and GoFAST which we'll cover later.
In another article, we'll outline how to migrate from Teams to GoFAST while improving the overall organization.