What to expect on Microsoft Teams

Compare what incident.io does on Microsoft Teams with what it does on Slack.

incident.io runs the whole incident lifecycle on Microsoft Teams. You declare incidents, get a channel for each one, assign roles, post updates, page on-call responders, run Investigations, and write postmortems, without leaving Teams.

An organization has one primary communications platform. Choose Slack or Microsoft Teams when you sign up. You can’t run both at once, so talk to your support contact before you move between them. See why incident.io requires a communications platform.

What works the same

Most of incident.io doesn’t touch your communications platform, so it behaves identically on either one: postmortems, status pages, Insights, custom fields, incident types, severities, incident roles, and follow-ups.

These do post to your platform, and work on both:

Capability	Slack	Microsoft Teams
Announcement rules	Yes	Yes
Workflows posting to a channel	Yes	Yes
Incident calls	Yes	Yes, started from the dashboard or automatically
Syncing platform users into the Catalog	Yes	Yes

How you drive incident.io

In Slack, you drive incident.io by talking to it: /inc and its subcommands, tagging @incident, and reacting to messages with emoji.

In Microsoft Teams, our bot posts notifications and doesn’t take messages back. You drive incident.io from the buttons and forms on the messages it posts, from the incident.io tab in the incident channel, and from the dashboard and mobile app.

Capability	Slack	Microsoft Teams
Slash commands such as /inc	Yes	No
Sending the bot a message or tagging it	Yes	No, the bot posts notifications only
Buttons, forms, and editing a message in place	Yes	Yes
An incident.io tab in the incident channel	No	Yes
Emoji shortcuts on messages	Several	Pin only
Interactive tutorials	Yes	No

Incident channels

Capability	Slack	Microsoft Teams
A channel for each incident	Yes	Yes, created inside a team you’ve installed incident.io into
Choosing where the channel goes	Anywhere in the workspace	Pick the team with an expression. Teams doesn’t let a channel move between teams, so the choice is fixed at creation
Incidents without a channel	Yes	Yes
Renaming and archiving channels	Yes	Yes

See choosing where incident channels are created for how the team expression works.

Private incidents

Private incidents work on both platforms. In Slack, a private incident gets a private channel; in Teams they use a group chat.

While Microsoft Teams has private channels, they are severely limited, so private incidents live in chats instead.

Capability	Slack	Microsoft Teams
Granting access to people and teams	Yes	Yes
Where a private incident runs	Private channel	Private group chat
Making an incident private after it’s started	Yes, with privileged access on an Enterprise Grid workspace	No. Decide privacy when you declare the incident
Turning a private incident back into a public one	Yes, a Slack admin makes the channel public and the incident follows	No
Threaded replies inside the private conversation	Yes	No, chats do not support threads
Private streams	Yes	No
Channel notifications for private alerts	Private channels only, public channels are skipped	Not supported

Private incidents need one extra permission, Chat.Create, which lets us make new group chats and nothing else. See permissions in Microsoft Teams.

Messages in the channel

Capability	Slack	Microsoft Teams
Ephemeral messages, visible only to you	Yes	No. Every message we post is visible to everyone
Adding a message to the timeline	Pin it in Slack, or react with :pushpin:, :bookmark:, :round_pushpin: or :star:	React with the pin emoji in an incident channel
incident.io pinning its own messages	Yes	No
Threaded replies	Full	In incident channels
Link previews for incident.io links	Configurable	Not configurable
Follow-up messages	Thread on the message they came from	Post to the channel

AI and suggestions

Capability	Slack	Microsoft Teams
Talking to @incident	Tag it in the incident channel	In the incident.io tab, the dashboard, or the mobile app. You can’t tag it in a channel
AI summaries and suggested updates	Yes	Yes
Rule-based suggestions	Yes	No
Investigations reading the incident channel	Yes	Yes
Connecting other channels as an Investigations source	Yes	No
Change events built from chat	Yes	No

Streams

Streams work on Teams, but you create and manage them from the dashboard. They don’t get a channel of their own.

Capability	Slack	Microsoft Teams
Creating a stream	Yes	Yes, from the dashboard
A channel for each stream	Yes	No. We announce the stream in the parent incident’s channel instead
Stream roles and updates	Yes	Yes
Calls on a stream	Yes	Yes
Private streams	Yes	No

On-call and reporting

On-call reaches people the same way on both platforms.

Capability	Slack	Microsoft Teams
Escalation DMs on Slack or Teams	Yes, on by default	Yes, on by default
Push notification, SMS, phone call, WhatsApp, and email	Yes	Yes
Escalating to a channel	Yes	Yes
Alert routes notifying a channel	Yes	Yes, except for private alerts
Shift reminders before a shift starts	Yes	Yes
Reassigning an escalation	Yes, in chat	Yes, the button opens the dashboard form
Syncing a schedule to a user group	Yes	No
Scheduled Insights report delivery	A Slack channel, or email	Email

On Teams, reach whoever is on-call by starting an escalation rather than by mentioning a group.

FAQs

Can we use the incident agent on Microsoft Teams?

Yes. It drafts updates, creates follow-ups, changes severity, answers questions about the incident, and queries your telemetry.

A few of its abilities are Slack only, so check what @incident can do for the current list.

Related

• Installing incident.io in Microsoft Teams
• Permissions in Microsoft Teams
• Using private incidents in Microsoft Teams
• Securing incident.io in Microsoft Teams