Switching in an afternoon

Most teams assume consolidating their tools is a quarter of work. In practice the technical part takes an afternoon and the human part takes about two weeks. It helps to know which is which.

Import

Whatever chat tool you use now gives you a standard export. We take it and rebuild the structure: channels stay channels, threads stay threaded, files come across, and membership maps to your directory rather than to email addresses.

The thing to check is threading. A flat import turns every reply into a top-level message and quietly destroys the record you were trying to keep. If a migration tool cannot tell you what it does with replies, assume the worst.

Connect

Three connections cover most teams: your code host, your drive, and your CRM. Each takes about ten minutes, and each one is what makes search worth having. A workspace connected to nothing is just a nicer chat app.

Index

This is the part that runs without you. Enterprise search builds its index across everything you connected, including the contents of your files, and the agent builds its memory alongside it. On a few years of history it takes hours, not days, and the UI tells you what is not indexed yet rather than pretending.

Invite

SCIM provisions everyone from your directory. Nobody creates a password, which means nobody creates a bad one, and deprovisioning works on the day someone leaves rather than the day someone remembers.

The two weeks

The human part is habit. For a fortnight people post in both places, because that is what they know. What ends it is usually search: someone finds a two-year-old decision in four seconds in front of other people, and the argument is over.

We ran both tools for eleven days. The last message anyone sent in the old one was a link to the new one.