Note
This article provides key product insights tailored for business decision-makers, focusing on essential features and benefits to support strategic decisions and operational success. It is not a how-to guide.
Comparing Teamslink and Slack Guest Account
Collaboration platforms, such as Slack, provide uninhibited collaboration within the enterprise. But, increasingly large enterprises are using more than one Team Collaboration solution. And when you look outside the company to customers, partners, or suppliers, the number of collaboration platforms in use becomes even more diverse.
Slack provides Guest Account as an alternative to interoperability. The Guest Account allows your Slack users to invite ANY external users with a business or consumer email account, such as Gmail, to participate as a guest in your Slack with full access to team chats, meetings, and files.
Slack offers two types of Guest Accounts:
Multi-Channel – These guest users can access messages and files in selected channels.
Single-Channel – These guest users can access messages and files in a single channel.
Though this sounds like an easy way to provide external access for your organization, there are limitations and security risks that you need to consider before enabling Guest Account across your organization.
Let’s walk through the risks of enabling Guest Accounts on your Slack.
Security and Access Control
Both types of Slack Guest Accounts do not offer strong security measures like password complexity check, password expiration, and Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). Slack admin portal does allow Slack admins to de-activate guest users.
As a result, hackers like to prey on Slack guest users with weak passwords to rummage through your channels. Most security experts view Slack Guest Account as a risk to their infrastructure.
Licensing Limitations
Single-Channel guest users are free. However, there is a limitation of 5 single-channel guest users per paid Slack user. In other words, a company with 1,000 Slack licenses can only send out 5,000 single channel guest invitations.
There is no limitation on multi-channel guest users. However, you are billed at the regular member prices. Depending on the pricing plan, Slack can bill you between $8 to $15/person per month. As a result, 1,000 multi-channel guest users can cost up to $15,000.
Teamslink for Slack Federation
Unlike a Slack Guest Account, Teamslink gives you user-level control on your federations - only valid Teams users can get access to Slack. It also allows you to track and control your users by federated domains.
To provide you with user-level control requires your users to add the Teamslink app on their Slack workspaces and send chat invitations.
Teamslink app takes advantage of the Slack Apps to provide a richer collaboration experience for both MS Teams and Non-MS Teams users:
Add external contacts
See external contacts’ profiles
Exchange chat and IM messages with external contacts
Invite external users to channels
Send messages with rich-text
Send messages with emoji reactions
Share files
The Teamslink Slack apps act as proxies for external contacts (non-Slack contacts) within a Slack workspace(s). These apps are generated in the Slack workspace to represent your users’ external contacts.
The Teamslink Slack App is not an executable code. It’s a registration of Teamslink within the Slack infrastructure. This registration provides Teamslink with an access token to call Slack API methods and listen to Slack events on behalf of the installed Teamslink apps.
Slack users only need to add the Teamslink app to their workspace, which is available from Teamslink for Slack.
Adding the Teamslink App to a Slack workspace allows Teamslink to create direct chat channels between the Slack user and their external contacts. Every message sent to this channel is translated, via Teamslink, to the protocol of the external contacts’ platform and vice versa. When external users send chat messages, Teamslink translates them to the Slack API call that sends the message to the corresponding Slack direct chat channel (DM). These messages are not stored anywhere on the Teamslink infrastructure.
Security
Teamslink only uses the Slack API to exchange messages with the Slack users. It does not store any of the messages.
For Teamslink to use Slack API, the Teamslink App and the apps representing external contacts will request the following permissions:
To receive messages and data
To send messages and notifications
To access user profile information
To send and receive messages, Teamslink uses authenticated and encrypted channels. The federated platform may use TLS-enabled SIP, XMPP, or HTTP protocol. The Slack users’ messages are transferred via the OAuth2-authenticated and TLS-enabled HTTP connection between Teamslink and the Slack Web API https://api.slack.com/web.
Privacy
The permissions given to the Teamslink apps allow Teamslink to:
Subscribe and listen to the Slack events, like when users post new messages to their respective Slack direct chat channel (DM), add emoji, invoke a slash command, modify or delete messages. For more information, see https://api.slack.com/events. To send messages and notifications
Retrieve and send messages to the Slack direct chat channel (DM). For more information, see https://api.slack.com/methods/im.history, https://api.slack.com/methods/chat.postMessage.
Slack Permissions model (see https://api.slack.com/events-api#permission_model) restricts Teamslink to only receiving events, retrieving, or sending messages to the Slack direct chat channel (DM) where your Slack users have added the Teamslink apps. Teamslink has no access to any kind of information (messages or files) shared in the Slack channels where your users have not added the Teamslink apps.
Teamslink collects different kinds of information, including personally identifiable ones. The following are the types of information Teamslink collects.
Database
Teamslink collects Slack workspace ID, Slack users’ ID, and profile information (name and email) and keeps them in its database. Teamslink only uses this information to route messages between different platforms and provide external contacts with their connected Slack users’ contact details.
Log Data
The Teamslink servers automatically record a log entry for each message they process. The log entry contains only the metadata without the message content. The metadata consists of the following fields:
Sender address (e.g., [email protected])
Receiver address (e.g., [email protected])
Message type (IM, Presence, typing, error)
Time and date of the message
Chat session ID
Management
Using the ConnecttoTeams Provisioning Portal, you can seamlessly connect different collaboration platforms within your company, or partners such as customers, partners, or suppliers outside your company. The ConnecttoTeams Portals provides customers with trailing 12 months of charts and graphs depicting the number of unique users, the number of messages exchanged, as well as detailed usage reports by internal and external federated domains and platforms.