At Cloud Voice Solutions we offer both Cisco Webex and Teams. You might be working out whether Teams of Webex is better for you. If your workflow relies on shared documents, this post outlines the main differences.
Similarities Between Teams and Webex
Teams and Webex have similar spaces functionality, where you where department or topical chat can be siloed away neatly.
Document sharing and collaboration.
Teams hosts documents independently of users, in folders connected with channels in Teams, such as ‘Marketing,’ ‘Admin,’ or General or whatever you have setup. Teams is really a replacement for the old server model, with lots of modern improvements. Many businesses are using Teams to get rid of expensive and archaic network infrastructure in their offices.
Webex doesn’t support this out of the box. It allows you to send a document, by uploading it to a chat or space, but that really means making a copy of the document. This is not the ideal workflow for business that want to collaborate remotely. But for businesses that don’t regularly share access to documents, this may not be a dealbreaker.
Webex Goole Drive Integration
That said, Webex is highly extensible. You can, for example, integrate Google Drive and open and edit shared documents directly in Webex. This effectively replicates Teams Basic functionality, where you are given web versions of Office Apps. If your organisation is already using Google Drive, this might be an excellent way to avoid migrating your documents. Google Drive has it’s own license costs, so this might not be ideal if you’re setting something up out of the box, but if you’re trying to maintain continuity, it’s an easy option.
There are a host of other document management integrations available, including One Drive and Sharepoint, the two building blocks that make up Team’s file functionality.
Teams and Webex Desktop Apps Compared
It’s worth mentioning that the Mac experience in Webex is better than Teams. Teams feels very slow and bloated at the time of writing, to the extent that I feel it’s more comfortable to use in a browser. Webex feels lighter and snappier, as if it were made for the platform. The Teams desktop app also uses far more battery than the Webex one, which even has a native m1 optimised release.
In other ways they are similar. You can add third party apps to spaces easily, make audio and video calls, and join meetings.
Featured image courtesy Vadim Bozhko.