Teams – You can now easily migrate from Slack to Teams (preview)

  If you are a company using both M365 services and Slack, there is good news as it is becoming easier (and cheaper – aka free ich ) to migrate your data from Slack to Microsoft Teams.

  For years, many company have been using both M365 services and Slack as Slack has been providing a bit more capabilities than Teams.

  The capabilities/features gap between Teams and Slack has been slowly reducing over the past years but from a cost optimization perspective that was still a big issue.

  Well, good news as now it is becoming easier and cheaper to migrate your data from Slack to Teams as Microsoft has just introduced a Slack to Teams migration capability.

  This new migration capability is going to help optimize cloud services cost management (licensing) as it will allow to move easily from Slack to Teams and reducing licensing cost.

While the migration tool is free, there will still be a bit of cost associated as it will require an Azure Storage account to store the Slack data before importing it to Teams but that will be a one time cost.

Limitations

At this stage, there is also few limitations:

• Only one Slack workspace can be connected to the migration tool at a time. To migrate more workspaces, disconnect the migration tool from the current workspace and then connect the migration tool to the next workspace.
• The migration tool currently only migrates Slack channel content. It doesn’t migrate content outside of Slack channels such as:
  • Direct Messages (one-on-one chats)
  • Group chats and related content
  • Workflows
  • Custom app integration
• The migration tool currently doesn’t support migrating Channel links (such as #channel_name). Unsupported content may be marked with a flag such as NOTMIGRATED or NOTSUPPORTED.
• The migration tool currently doesn’t support Slack archived channels. You can unarchive the Slack channel before performing the export to make it available for migration.
• The migration tool currently doesn’t support custom emoji reactions.
• Note a migration limitation as such but if a file attachment’s filename contains characters restricted by SharePoint, the migration tool replaces each restricted character with an underscore (“_”) character when migrating the file to Microsoft Teams.
  Slack channel canvas pages migrate into Teams channels as HTML file attachments. This This is an obvious limitation in any systems migration with the targeted limitations.

• The migration tool currently doesn’t support migrating attachment system metadata:
  • Created at
  • Created by
  • Last edited at
  • Last edited by

As for every migration there is always few data/metadata which are going to be a trouble.

Supported Content

After the limitations, let’s have a look as the supported content for migration:

• Slack channels
  • Public
  • Private
• Channel ownership and membership
• Channel message metadata
  • Created by
  • Created date
• Channel message content and formatting
  • Block quote
  • Bold, italics, and strikethrough
  • Lists
    • Bulleted
    • Ordered
  • Code
  • Code blocks
  • Standard emojis
  • GIPHY
  • Images
  • Links
  • @-mentions
  • Standard reactions
  • Threading
• File attachments

Migration Readiness

Before migrating from Slack to Teams, you first need to set the following pre requisites:

• Have the following permissions:
  • Slack
    • Permissions to export workspace, by default
      • Workspace owner
      • Workspace admins
      • Org owners
      • Org Admins
  • M365, any of the following roles:
    • Microsoft 365 Migration Administrator (recommended)
    • SharePoint Administrator
    • Global Administrator
• Have an Azure Storage account
  • Performance: Standard
  • Redundancy: up to you to define
  • REST API operations: Enabled
  • Anonymous access: Disabled
  • Authentication: Azure Active Directory authorization
  • Tier: Hot
  • Public network: Enabled
• Grant consent for the Teams migration tool in Entra ID (Grant consent for the Microsoft 365 Teams Migration app). NOTE the global administrator role is required for this one-time approval

From there you should be ready for the migration.

You can get the complete Slack to Teams migration steps from here.