7 ms·

Ask HN: Is anyone using Microsoft Teams?

53 points by tuyguntn 10y ago

We are considering moving from Slack to Microsoft Teams, if anyone is using it here, can you share your experience with it?

lucb1e 10y ago
Sounds like a good question for https://reddit.com/r/sysadmin https://reddit.com/r/sysadmin I don't mind the discussion here, I just feel like you might reach a more specific and bigger audience there.
herghost 10y ago
I'd be interested to know why any smaller orgs / teams might consider moving since I see this as Microsoft's way of cashing in the on the Enterprise market who are loosely aware of Slack but entirely comfortable with having it blocked.
donmatito 10y ago
My opinion(1), after playing a while with MS Teams: The pros : the product is quite good, let say it is good enough and much better than the status quo of relying on emails or Whatsapp. It is integrated with the Office suite, and if I understand correctly, will be free for pro Office users. It has a handful of very interesting product decisions, like threaded replies and iframe apps. The cons : MS Teams is not as polished as Slack, the UI (especially of the chat area) is not as clear. The installation/onboarding is not as fluid. They have less apps and integrations (obviously, this is just the beginning). My guess : MS Teams will not even begin to make a dent in the almost 100% market share of Slack among startups, agencies and similar small, agile groups. The whole Office ecosystem is simply to heavy, the UX is not as great, and some integrations might be missing. On the other hand, it might win big in the entreprise segment, where Slack is less present, and where being in the Office family is not seen as a drawback but actually an sign of solidity (1) I am an independent dev, working on an app for their platform, so this is an educated guess based on my testing. I will enable Teams to connect with each other or with Slack teams through shared chat (www.smooz.io/microsoft).
- pducks32 10y ago
  Yea I think you describe it well there as "heavy" it doesn't feel agile. The whole concept that a single login is more fluid only has a little validity because when you login to a suite of apps you feel so overwhelmed. Logging into slack means you're logged into slack. Pretty simply and light.
  - donmatito 10y ago
    Yes. I wouldn't know where to start, if I wanted to open a Team with some friends. But in organizations where they already have an Office subscription, and an IT dept to manage the tenants and accounts ? People will love it :-)
- kminehart 10y ago
  I'm not sure that they're actually trying to go for Slacks user base, I think they're targeting the same people they targeted for Lync and Skype for Business.
  - jacques_chester 10y ago
    Or rather, they are preventing enterprise leakage to Slack, in anticipation that Slack will continue trying to expand into adjacent markets. Mind you, the only reason anyone in bubbleville has heard of Teams is because Slack had that expensively cringetastic reaction.
  - donmatito 10y ago
    I agree
- Spooky23 10y ago
  The problem with the product is that it really exists to keep big companies on the O365 E3+ plans. Microsoft's big focus now is to retain subscription revenue. Skype and OneDrive are shit and MS is trying to bulk up the ecosystem around these products. If you work for a big company, you're not going to get approval to POC Slack, Dropbox, Webex, etc as long as you're stuck with the Microsoft all you can eat subscription. Slack is a killer threat because it displaces email. Exchange has always been the glue that holds the biggest Microsoft cash cow together.
sergiotapia 10y ago
I can't even find their pricing page. Clicking Free Trial and they are already asking me for information when I don't even know what it costs. I guess it's startup unfriendly and only marketed for enterprise. What made you want to switch from Slack to Microsoft Teams? How large is your team? Curious to see the responses to this thread.
- oduis 10y ago
  The trick is that it's is part of Office365, you can't buy it separately. But for a few bucks you get a coherent suite of many products, Microsoft Teams just being one of them. So it does not have to be greater than Slack, just good enough, since you bought it anyway with your Office365 subscription.
tiernano 10y ago
Yea. We moved to it in the office. We used ryver for a while, looked at slack, but, given we are on office365 and are a Microsoft shop, it was an easy move. So far, so good.
rarrrrrr 10y ago
Microsoft is smart to build their own Outlook killer, and they certainly succeeded in freaking Slack out[1]. We (SpiderOak) evaluated teams as competitive research when building Semaphor [2] (our own end-to-end encrypted alternative to Slack/HipChat.) I found Teams to be a credible offering. It's shortcomings are mostly about being very new (e.g. no linux client yet, some unpolished UI associated with window resizing.) The O365 integration is nice. The client seems to be built using Electron and TypeScript, and if the pace of development maintains I expect it will be a serious threat to Slack. Of course Slack and Teams require trusting the vendor with your unencrypted content. [1] https://spideroak.com/articles/slacks-morning-after https://spideroak.com/articles/slacks-morning-after [2] https://spideroak.com/solutions/semaphor/business/tour https://spideroak.com/solutions/semaphor/business/tour
- mdekkers 10y ago
  Wow, what a negative, condescending article.
  - gumby 10y ago
    I first thought this was a flip comment and then read the article so I could laugh at mdekkers. I was the dumb one: spideroak's article actually is amazingly condescending.
    - rarrrrrr 10y ago
      For context: it's in response to Slack putting a very condescending 1 page ad in the NYT addressed to Microsoft. http://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/theres-a-major-problem-with-slacks-full-page-ad-in-the-new-york-times.html http://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/theres-a-major-problem-with...
- leksak 10y ago
  Did you look at Mattermost?
hiby007 10y ago
I think slack should charge on per user basis for any number or team, instead of having to pay for the same user in two different teams. I also think there should be cheaper/better competitor for slack in the market.
- gkoberger 10y ago
  You won't get cheaper AND better. There's already a ton of competition. Cheaper exists (everything from IRC to HipChat to Mattermost to dozens of Slack clones[1]); you're more than welcome to use any of those. The reason people don't is because Slack is the best (great UI, works well, lots of integrations, network effect, etc). [1] http://blog.capterra.com/the-top-13-slack-alternatives/ http://blog.capterra.com/the-top-13-slack-alternatives/
  - hiby007 10y ago
    I agree, Slack is the best out there, I as a customer would always like competition than monopoly. Good Competiton always benefits customers.
  - it33 10y ago
    Hi @gkoberger, Mattermost team here. Thanks for the mention. I'd share that Mattermost has gotten popular as a Slack-alternative recently. There's hundreds of contributors and we're now available in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Dutch and Russian--whereas Slack is English-only. Also, the open source community has added many features Slack doesn't offer, like threaded messaging, multi-team accounts, markdown support, etc. See: https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-open-source-alternative/ https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-o... Right now, Mattermost is most popular among IT organizations looking for an open source, private cloud messaging solution they can control and customize, and we're branching out from there.
darklajid 10y ago
We're using it. It is bad. Company just started to introduce Salck, MS announced this thing and we had to jump ship because everything they deliver is considered flawless in certain circles. The mobile app is crap. There's no Linux client. No 3rd party integration that I've seen so far. Lots of bugs and I highly doubt that this project will move/improve at a VS Code level. A beta for your corporate communication needs. The only upside? It might replace "Skype for Business" which is worse than almost anything else. Sorry for the rant, but this is a very active issue in my day to day business right now. If I could, I'd stay the hell away from Teams.
- apapli 10y ago
  You do know it is still in preview right? Also I use the web client and it works for me, although have to agree it would be nice if the mobile app had access to some of the tabbed content. What else is wrong with the mobile app from your perspective? Finally, here is the API reference if you want to look at it: https://dev.office.com/microsoft-teams https://dev.office.com/microsoft-teams I am looking forward to when they integrate Flow with Teams. That could make things interesting, given all the 3rd party apps that Flow supports now.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - darklajid 10y ago
    I know that it is in preview, which is why I'm so upset about the idea of adopting it at this point. Seriously: I'm ranting about this product because it is unfinished and unpolished, but obviously the blame for adopting this thing lies in this company. I wouldn't criticize it that much if I'd be able to watch the painful first steps as a bystander.. You use the web client? I assume you mean teams.microsoft.com? The URL that I see nowhere in my notifications etc? Every notification mail links to a landing page that wants me to download a "native" client (even if none exists for the platform I'm on). Notifications also never include any details: They say "Look, you missed stuff on our service. Come back!" instead of actually.. providing any information. The web client has quite some bugs, a fun one is opening a document (which embeds a 365 viewer, I guess) and resizing the window. Last I checked the document view cannot grow. Lots and lots of issues like that. That API site? Yes, I've seen that. I think last time I checked you had to submit your stuff to let MS decide if it'll be part of a non-existent future "app store" thing. At least for Office365 hosted instances?
apapli 10y ago
Yes, adoption is still an issue for us as it is in a pre-release phase and we have too many options (yammer, email, outlook groups, slack etc) but it's very promising. Once they officially launch it that will help (hopefully) provide a clearer product direction. It's pretty feature rich for an app in "preview". It's also free, and I like the tabbed experience. Bringing in Microsoft Planner, some document libraries and PowerBI makes for a pretty compelling story. Microsoft haters will never use it, but plenty of digital teams may get forced to use it if their IT team have already purchased Office365. And it's not that bad once you forget it was made by Microsoft. Slack ought to be worried.
- basch 10y ago
  >we have too many options (yammer, email, outlook groups, slack etc) and thats the million dollar problem. year after year microsoft announces a new product / "best practice" as THE way to collaborate. The sharepoint team is clawing back power after being pushed behind the scenes for a bit. How can you be confident enough to move forward with groups when the sync client just started working, and they already are pushing out something new that is nearly identical!
pvdebbe 10y ago
Our company bought into Office 365 ecosystem and Teams was a natural choice to try. We haven't used Slack or similar tool before. Well, Teams allows discussions, but at least in November its built-in Skype for Business (SfB) client worked exactly like the other SfB clients work: not at all well with others. (Serious issues with race conditions on how the server sends the messages to what client, with several listening clients everything turns into a mess!) Given that it wasn't working for us to run ordinary SfB plus Teams, we had to drop it. Can't say I'm overly depressed over this decision... ;) If Teams's SfB client gains the features the original SfB lacks, or alternatively if Teams would allow to disable SfB part of the software altogether, it might have been workable. I personally didn't like the intrinsic delays the chat process have unlike say IRC (feels very much realtime even though the delays are there under the surface). There's no info on what updates Teams has seen so we've kept to our original comm channels for the time being.
- basch 10y ago
  >(Serious issues with race conditions on how the server sends the messages to what client, with several listening clients everything turns into a mess!) This makes the mobile client nearly unusable in its current incarnation. I can be sitting on Facebook on my desktop and Messenger on my phone and alternate each sentence between each device. I cannot pick up my phone and continue a Skype for Business conversation I was just having on my desktop. Cant transfer the existing conversation at all. It is almost, nearly, surprising how ill conceived and poorly executed the experience is. I end up switching back to outlook when a person and I want to have a conversation while we constantly bounce between devices, because our email works and syncs everywhere perfectly.
  - pvdebbe 10y ago
    SfB (Lync) is terribly done in terms of the client-server architecture. Messages don't get consistently saved for offline recipients, the issues with several listening clients. For a business communications application, it sure seems a lot less suitable for business/corporate use than Skype Personal. Yammer's another fiasco. Teams, on the other hand, might turn out to be very decent but the SfB integration brings it down.
ndespres 10y ago
After using Slack on my team for about a year to get away from the annoyances of Lync/Skype for Business, management made us shut it down for not being an approved product/not defined by company policy/contributing to team fragmentation across other depts who weren't on it. Fair enough, I guess. We turned on Teams as it comes with our existing Office 365 subscription and we are much likelier to get approval to use it for cost and "Microsoft is a known quantity" reasons. I was excited for something that would finally help us transition into using anything better than Lync compabywide. So I was disappointed with the chat experience, the notifications, the way my colleagues still using Lync wouldn't consistently get my messages, and the way groups vs private messages are displayed. We all found it really frustrating to use.
pducks32 10y ago
I once did Client work that required certain data protection practices. Can anyone speak to Microsofts draw in that regard. Is it up to the standard you need if you work at a hospital or something like that?
px1999 10y ago
We're slowly rolling it out to individual product teams in our small (~50 people) ms-based dev organisation. Things are going reasonably well. We'd have picked slack over teams in a minute, though it has compliance issues making it unusable for us - slack is just more polished and has a lot more that you can get out of the box / with plugins. That said, teams still has some great features for us, so we'll stick with it for at least 2017. We've tried a few similar options before (primarily group chat) but they all had gaps / issues that resulted in them being not as useful/used as we'd have liked. There are still a couple of massive gaps in teams for us: * No on-premise TFS integration * It seems that Office 365 is all or nothing - we can't tie the o365 account to our primary email address without it messing up external email routing. If you're trying to replace a culture of email + some IM + files tucked away in some document management system that don't get updated as frequently as they should, it's a good start. If you've already got good communication then it's less valuable.
- donmatito 10y ago
  Good enough product vs crappy status quo + massive Office userbase = will probably end well for them :-)
  - px1999 10y ago
    That's pretty likely. If people don't know how to use collaborative tools, they get frustrated and give up, so a successful product can't alienate its userbase. Skype teams is familiar enough for the email generation to use, but still improves slightly on communication. There's a huge market out there that's scared of Slack etc, but will love Skype Teams.
anondevel0per 10y ago
I switched from slack after 4 years and I honestly can't say I've missed any features.
anondevel0per 10y ago
I switched from slack after 4 years and I honestly can't say I've missed any features.

53 points by tuyguntn 10y ago

We are considering moving from Slack to Microsoft Teams, if anyone is using it here, can you share your experience with it?

lucb1e 10y ago

Sounds like a good question for https://reddit.com/r/sysadmin https://reddit.com/r/sysadmin I don't mind the discussion here, I just feel like you might reach a more specific and bigger audience there.

herghost 10y ago

I'd be interested to know why any smaller orgs / teams might consider moving since I see this as Microsoft's way of cashing in the on the Enterprise market who are loosely aware of Slack but entirely comfortable with having it blocked.

donmatito 10y ago

My opinion(1), after playing a while with MS Teams: The pros : the product is quite good, let say it is good enough and much better than the status quo of relying on emails or Whatsapp. It is integrated with the Office suite, and if I understand correctly, will be free for pro Office users. It has a handful of very interesting product decisions, like threaded replies and iframe apps. The cons : MS Teams is not as polished as Slack, the UI (especially of the chat area) is not as clear. The installation/onboarding is not as fluid. They have less apps and integrations (obviously, this is just the beginning). My guess : MS Teams will not even begin to make a dent in the almost 100% market share of Slack among startups, agencies and similar small, agile groups. The whole Office ecosystem is simply to heavy, the UX is not as great, and some integrations might be missing. On the other hand, it might win big in the entreprise segment, where Slack is less present, and where being in the Office family is not seen as a drawback but actually an sign of solidity (1) I am an independent dev, working on an app for their platform, so this is an educated guess based on my testing. I will enable Teams to connect with each other or with Slack teams through shared chat (www.smooz.io/microsoft).

pducks32 10y ago
Yea I think you describe it well there as "heavy" it doesn't feel agile. The whole concept that a single login is more fluid only has a little validity because when you login to a suite of apps you feel so overwhelmed. Logging into slack means you're logged into slack. Pretty simply and light.
- donmatito 10y ago
  Yes. I wouldn't know where to start, if I wanted to open a Team with some friends. But in organizations where they already have an Office subscription, and an IT dept to manage the tenants and accounts ? People will love it :-)
kminehart 10y ago
I'm not sure that they're actually trying to go for Slacks user base, I think they're targeting the same people they targeted for Lync and Skype for Business.
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  Or rather, they are preventing enterprise leakage to Slack, in anticipation that Slack will continue trying to expand into adjacent markets. Mind you, the only reason anyone in bubbleville has heard of Teams is because Slack had that expensively cringetastic reaction.
- donmatito 10y ago
  I agree
Spooky23 10y ago
The problem with the product is that it really exists to keep big companies on the O365 E3+ plans. Microsoft's big focus now is to retain subscription revenue. Skype and OneDrive are shit and MS is trying to bulk up the ecosystem around these products. If you work for a big company, you're not going to get approval to POC Slack, Dropbox, Webex, etc as long as you're stuck with the Microsoft all you can eat subscription. Slack is a killer threat because it displaces email. Exchange has always been the glue that holds the biggest Microsoft cash cow together.

sergiotapia 10y ago

I can't even find their pricing page. Clicking Free Trial and they are already asking me for information when I don't even know what it costs. I guess it's startup unfriendly and only marketed for enterprise. What made you want to switch from Slack to Microsoft Teams? How large is your team? Curious to see the responses to this thread.

oduis 10y ago
The trick is that it's is part of Office365, you can't buy it separately. But for a few bucks you get a coherent suite of many products, Microsoft Teams just being one of them. So it does not have to be greater than Slack, just good enough, since you bought it anyway with your Office365 subscription.

tiernano 10y ago

Yea. We moved to it in the office. We used ryver for a while, looked at slack, but, given we are on office365 and are a Microsoft shop, it was an easy move. So far, so good.

rarrrrrr 10y ago

Microsoft is smart to build their own Outlook killer, and they certainly succeeded in freaking Slack out[1]. We (SpiderOak) evaluated teams as competitive research when building Semaphor [2] (our own end-to-end encrypted alternative to Slack/HipChat.) I found Teams to be a credible offering. It's shortcomings are mostly about being very new (e.g. no linux client yet, some unpolished UI associated with window resizing.) The O365 integration is nice. The client seems to be built using Electron and TypeScript, and if the pace of development maintains I expect it will be a serious threat to Slack. Of course Slack and Teams require trusting the vendor with your unencrypted content. [1] https://spideroak.com/articles/slacks-morning-after https://spideroak.com/articles/slacks-morning-after [2] https://spideroak.com/solutions/semaphor/business/tour https://spideroak.com/solutions/semaphor/business/tour

mdekkers 10y ago
Wow, what a negative, condescending article.
- gumby 10y ago
  I first thought this was a flip comment and then read the article so I could laugh at mdekkers. I was the dumb one: spideroak's article actually is amazingly condescending.
  - rarrrrrr 10y ago
    For context: it's in response to Slack putting a very condescending 1 page ad in the NYT addressed to Microsoft. http://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/theres-a-major-problem-with-slacks-full-page-ad-in-the-new-york-times.html http://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/theres-a-major-problem-with...
leksak 10y ago
Did you look at Mattermost?

hiby007 10y ago

I think slack should charge on per user basis for any number or team, instead of having to pay for the same user in two different teams. I also think there should be cheaper/better competitor for slack in the market.

gkoberger 10y ago
You won't get cheaper AND better. There's already a ton of competition. Cheaper exists (everything from IRC to HipChat to Mattermost to dozens of Slack clones[1]); you're more than welcome to use any of those. The reason people don't is because Slack is the best (great UI, works well, lots of integrations, network effect, etc). [1] http://blog.capterra.com/the-top-13-slack-alternatives/ http://blog.capterra.com/the-top-13-slack-alternatives/
- hiby007 10y ago
  I agree, Slack is the best out there, I as a customer would always like competition than monopoly. Good Competiton always benefits customers.
- it33 10y ago
  Hi @gkoberger, Mattermost team here. Thanks for the mention. I'd share that Mattermost has gotten popular as a Slack-alternative recently. There's hundreds of contributors and we're now available in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Dutch and Russian--whereas Slack is English-only. Also, the open source community has added many features Slack doesn't offer, like threaded messaging, multi-team accounts, markdown support, etc. See: https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-open-source-alternative/ https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-o... Right now, Mattermost is most popular among IT organizations looking for an open source, private cloud messaging solution they can control and customize, and we're branching out from there.

darklajid 10y ago

We're using it. It is bad. Company just started to introduce Salck, MS announced this thing and we had to jump ship because everything they deliver is considered flawless in certain circles. The mobile app is crap. There's no Linux client. No 3rd party integration that I've seen so far. Lots of bugs and I highly doubt that this project will move/improve at a VS Code level. A beta for your corporate communication needs. The only upside? It might replace "Skype for Business" which is worse than almost anything else. Sorry for the rant, but this is a very active issue in my day to day business right now. If I could, I'd stay the hell away from Teams.

apapli 10y ago
You do know it is still in preview right? Also I use the web client and it works for me, although have to agree it would be nice if the mobile app had access to some of the tabbed content. What else is wrong with the mobile app from your perspective? Finally, here is the API reference if you want to look at it: https://dev.office.com/microsoft-teams https://dev.office.com/microsoft-teams I am looking forward to when they integrate Flow with Teams. That could make things interesting, given all the 3rd party apps that Flow supports now.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- darklajid 10y ago
  I know that it is in preview, which is why I'm so upset about the idea of adopting it at this point. Seriously: I'm ranting about this product because it is unfinished and unpolished, but obviously the blame for adopting this thing lies in this company. I wouldn't criticize it that much if I'd be able to watch the painful first steps as a bystander.. You use the web client? I assume you mean teams.microsoft.com? The URL that I see nowhere in my notifications etc? Every notification mail links to a landing page that wants me to download a "native" client (even if none exists for the platform I'm on). Notifications also never include any details: They say "Look, you missed stuff on our service. Come back!" instead of actually.. providing any information. The web client has quite some bugs, a fun one is opening a document (which embeds a 365 viewer, I guess) and resizing the window. Last I checked the document view cannot grow. Lots and lots of issues like that. That API site? Yes, I've seen that. I think last time I checked you had to submit your stuff to let MS decide if it'll be part of a non-existent future "app store" thing. At least for Office365 hosted instances?

apapli 10y ago

Yes, adoption is still an issue for us as it is in a pre-release phase and we have too many options (yammer, email, outlook groups, slack etc) but it's very promising. Once they officially launch it that will help (hopefully) provide a clearer product direction. It's pretty feature rich for an app in "preview". It's also free, and I like the tabbed experience. Bringing in Microsoft Planner, some document libraries and PowerBI makes for a pretty compelling story. Microsoft haters will never use it, but plenty of digital teams may get forced to use it if their IT team have already purchased Office365. And it's not that bad once you forget it was made by Microsoft. Slack ought to be worried.

basch 10y ago
>we have too many options (yammer, email, outlook groups, slack etc) and thats the million dollar problem. year after year microsoft announces a new product / "best practice" as THE way to collaborate. The sharepoint team is clawing back power after being pushed behind the scenes for a bit. How can you be confident enough to move forward with groups when the sync client just started working, and they already are pushing out something new that is nearly identical!

pvdebbe 10y ago

Our company bought into Office 365 ecosystem and Teams was a natural choice to try. We haven't used Slack or similar tool before. Well, Teams allows discussions, but at least in November its built-in Skype for Business (SfB) client worked exactly like the other SfB clients work: not at all well with others. (Serious issues with race conditions on how the server sends the messages to what client, with several listening clients everything turns into a mess!) Given that it wasn't working for us to run ordinary SfB plus Teams, we had to drop it. Can't say I'm overly depressed over this decision... ;) If Teams's SfB client gains the features the original SfB lacks, or alternatively if Teams would allow to disable SfB part of the software altogether, it might have been workable. I personally didn't like the intrinsic delays the chat process have unlike say IRC (feels very much realtime even though the delays are there under the surface). There's no info on what updates Teams has seen so we've kept to our original comm channels for the time being.

basch 10y ago
>(Serious issues with race conditions on how the server sends the messages to what client, with several listening clients everything turns into a mess!) This makes the mobile client nearly unusable in its current incarnation. I can be sitting on Facebook on my desktop and Messenger on my phone and alternate each sentence between each device. I cannot pick up my phone and continue a Skype for Business conversation I was just having on my desktop. Cant transfer the existing conversation at all. It is almost, nearly, surprising how ill conceived and poorly executed the experience is. I end up switching back to outlook when a person and I want to have a conversation while we constantly bounce between devices, because our email works and syncs everywhere perfectly.
- pvdebbe 10y ago
  SfB (Lync) is terribly done in terms of the client-server architecture. Messages don't get consistently saved for offline recipients, the issues with several listening clients. For a business communications application, it sure seems a lot less suitable for business/corporate use than Skype Personal. Yammer's another fiasco. Teams, on the other hand, might turn out to be very decent but the SfB integration brings it down.

ndespres 10y ago

After using Slack on my team for about a year to get away from the annoyances of Lync/Skype for Business, management made us shut it down for not being an approved product/not defined by company policy/contributing to team fragmentation across other depts who weren't on it. Fair enough, I guess. We turned on Teams as it comes with our existing Office 365 subscription and we are much likelier to get approval to use it for cost and "Microsoft is a known quantity" reasons. I was excited for something that would finally help us transition into using anything better than Lync compabywide. So I was disappointed with the chat experience, the notifications, the way my colleagues still using Lync wouldn't consistently get my messages, and the way groups vs private messages are displayed. We all found it really frustrating to use.

pducks32 10y ago

I once did Client work that required certain data protection practices. Can anyone speak to Microsofts draw in that regard. Is it up to the standard you need if you work at a hospital or something like that?

px1999 10y ago

We're slowly rolling it out to individual product teams in our small (~50 people) ms-based dev organisation. Things are going reasonably well. We'd have picked slack over teams in a minute, though it has compliance issues making it unusable for us - slack is just more polished and has a lot more that you can get out of the box / with plugins. That said, teams still has some great features for us, so we'll stick with it for at least 2017. We've tried a few similar options before (primarily group chat) but they all had gaps / issues that resulted in them being not as useful/used as we'd have liked. There are still a couple of massive gaps in teams for us: * No on-premise TFS integration * It seems that Office 365 is all or nothing - we can't tie the o365 account to our primary email address without it messing up external email routing. If you're trying to replace a culture of email + some IM + files tucked away in some document management system that don't get updated as frequently as they should, it's a good start. If you've already got good communication then it's less valuable.

donmatito 10y ago
Good enough product vs crappy status quo + massive Office userbase = will probably end well for them :-)
- px1999 10y ago
  That's pretty likely. If people don't know how to use collaborative tools, they get frustrated and give up, so a successful product can't alienate its userbase. Skype teams is familiar enough for the email generation to use, but still improves slightly on communication. There's a huge market out there that's scared of Slack etc, but will love Skype Teams.

anondevel0per 10y ago

I switched from slack after 4 years and I honestly can't say I've missed any features.

anondevel0per 10y ago

I switched from slack after 4 years and I honestly can't say I've missed any features.