5 ms·

Global availability of Microsoft Teams

38 points by happy-go-lucky 10y ago

dovdovdov 10y ago
It's like Slack, but with extra CIA. ;)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- skrebbel 10y ago
  Source?
- 0xFFC 10y ago
  There is no question about CIA being in it ;) But how do you know for sure slack does have less CIA ?
- IsmaOlvey 10y ago
  So it's like Slack, period.
cwyers 10y ago
All of the file-sharing features are tied into "OneDrive For Business," which isn't OneDrive and is just some Sharepoint garbage. The new sync client helps a lot, but it doesn't work for the sharing part at all, which is what Teams uses. It's a huge liability for Teams until Microsoft can make OneDrive For Business not terrible. And when I evaluated it, it was missing any kind of snippet support, which I consider a dealbreaker (some workflows may not think this way, which is fine).
- seahckr 10y ago
  They will probably fix it over time, and also closely integrate with everything else, like LinkedIn, O365, Word / PPT / Task Tracking etc..
  - mrmondo 10y ago
    I highly doubt that, the yammer, SharePoint, onedrive, O365 etc... integration is abysmal and every product seems to get worse as they seem to tie them together with silly string behind the scenes.
  - cwyers 10y ago
    With as long as I've been using OneDrive For Business -- yeah, they'll probably fix it over time. It's been getting fixed over time. It's just happening really slowly, and I wouldn't be optimistic about it getting fixed on a timeline I cared about.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- mrmondo 10y ago
  You mention onedrive, funny (perhaps not) story: I've seen 5~ situations at different organisations where malware in the form of cryptolocker spreads through onedrive destroying everyone's files and connected computers more often than not, also interestingly I've seen onedrive completely mess up its versioning system and rid the organisation at hands files dated and resulting in days if not weeks of re-work. I can't believe these things seem to go unreported as if I've seen it (at least) 5 times others must have witnessed it many more, onedrive seems like one the carrier of bad all that is bad and vulnerable in the Microsoft ecosystem. Note: I am not some anti-corp / anti-ms fanboy, I'm simply stating what I've witnessed which I have not with other platforms.
  - tallanvor 10y ago
    I assume the organizations were using ODB as on-prem only? If they were using it with SharePoint Online they could request a point in time restore. --With on-prem solutions, they have to be managing their own backup strategy, which many companies are horrible at. In this respect, I don't think it's really any different than it would be with Dropbox or another cloud provider, although I suppose they could have tools that require less manual intervention to do the restore?
    - mrmondo 10y ago
      No, at least three of them were online / part of the O365 bundle (fumble if you ask me), it was an absolute nightmare dealing with Microsoft support, the level of incompetence they showed two of the times (when I was involved) was astounding, I'd heard bad things but it was next level and what made it worse is they were paying for the service, both with money and with the downtime while they were messed around both by the initial disruption and the messing around with the seemingly endless running with Microsoft support engineers, finally files were restored but the damage from the downtime and time spent on trying to get the vendor to deliver the cost to the business in at least one of the cases (I'm under an NDA for the one) was immeasurable but large. They experienced had previously experienced many problems with MS support and with the O365 (completely online / hosted) platforms it is enough that they're now underway evaluating alternatives, it might be the same products but on-prem or something entirely different but I am not involved in that process.
- dantiberian 10y ago
  They did the same thing with Skype for Business, which is just Lync, warmed over.
  - thewhitetulip 10y ago
    Skype for business is bad, you can't do simple things like share a file through the chat, you have to send an email attachment.
    - discordance 10y ago
      Yeah, there are some glaringly simple things Skype For Biz has trouble doing. Try to figure out how to view your chat conversation history. The established standard UX across IM apps is that you click on the contact you are interested in, and scroll up in the chat window to view your old IMs. Not on Skype for biz.
    - NetStrikeForce 10y ago
      I have stability issues with Skype for business, but I share files daily with colleagues. Are you sure that's not some restriction put on by your IT department?
      - thewhitetulip 10y ago
        That might be the case :)
TorKlingberg 10y ago
So Teams is clearly Microsoft's answer to Slack. But, how does it relate to Skype for Business (Lync)? It doesn't seem to interoperate much.
- douche 10y ago
  Teams will snipe any incoming Skype for Business IMs that you receive before you can accept the toast on your real Lync client, which is always fun... It's either got the Skype for Business Web SDK or raw UCWA jammed in there to log you into Skype, deal with presence, and handle messaging.
- sequence7 10y ago
  Teams is built on top of Skype for Business/Lync, Groups and OneDrive for Business. Under the hood they're the same platform I'd expect that as Teams matures the ability to interoperate will improve
cmsd2 10y ago
We've had preview access at work. It seems nice enough and I'm looking forward to playing with the APIs. It does still rely on the other o365 components for features, which just shows up how janky lync and sharepoint can be. we've had slack and irc and hipchat. honestly I don't care which chat system we use as long as internally we can all come to some kind of agreement. That speaks more to our er diverse user-group than the quality of any given chat system though. I haven't been able to log in from a linux system unfortunately. The browser user-agent detection barfs on both chrome and firefox for me.
tremon 10y ago
Meh. I've tried to use it, but I quickly filed it in the "totally useless" bin: the amount of windowdressing vs actual content is staggering. I'm not exaggerating that in a 1680x1050 window, I get maybe 6 lines of content, the rest is spacing and navigation. Then there's the abysmal threading features: conversations are collapsed by default, and are not kept in chronological order. When trying to read back a conversation, you're constantly working the mouse to click folds or scroll back and forth. The icing on the cake was its memory and cpu usage: it got so bad (with only 4 teams joined) that my entire laptop slowed to a crawl. I uninstalled it and told my colleagues to just send me e-mails if they really want my feedback. I'm dreading the day my company makes its usage mandatory.
iDemonix 10y ago
My work is a bit of a mess, we've historically never been that joined up of a business, but on the same floor we have people using Skype, Skype for Business, Slack and Teams. Skype - Actively getting people to move away from this, fairly easy as new people in to the business don't setup accounts, everyone has experience with Skype, it's not a business tool. Skype for Business - Clunky, conversation history is there, then disappears, sometimes it appears in your Outlook (in our case in a folder), sometimes it doesn't. Feels like a half-baked platform, but as my office is very Office365/MS-in-the-cloud they force it upon us. Teams - Better than SfB, but still not usable. It tries to do everything, such as integrate planners, to do lists and so on. It dresses up as a business tool, then it has 'make your own meme' generators, which makes it seem a bit of a confused app. My biggest bug bear is when you're viewing a conversation, if someone replies to an old message, the entire message thread then appears as the 'newest'. I've missed countless conversations because of the funky ordering of chat. Slack - Awesome. A bit memory hungry, but a really well thought out app in terms of UX. Does exactly what you need it do, clicking a username does what you expect, as does mentioning and so on. You can apply themes, tons of plugins and extra stuff. Whilst Slack is everyones preferred app, the business refuse to pay for it as they pay for Office365. wORK are, for that reason, promoting both Teams and SfB, because Teams has planners and so on, but SfB has somewhat usable VOIP. Anyone slightly technical uses Slack though on the free plan, it's just a lot better and features like Code Snippets are great for tech teams. There are a subset of us that are thinking of moving to IRC, which has the added feature that PMs and managers can't figure it out.
- fs111 10y ago
  I still don't get why everybody is hyping slack so much. I have used MSN, skype, hangouts, MS office messenger thing, IRC, hipchat and slack in my professional life and it is really all the same. You chat, you send files, you make calls. Nothing stands out really. What is so great about slack, that everybody is going nuts over it?
  - Navarr 10y ago
    At low volume that's true. Slack stays easy to use, keep up with, &c at high volume - which is what I like about it. IRC and Slack are nearly the same, but IRC comes with some overheads of finding or setting up a server, figuring out your own backlog, &c
dade_ 10y ago
Just keep adding to the sludge! More proprietary protocols and islands! The biggest problem with "Unified Communications" in business is effortless federation with your vendors and customers. Teams just makes a bigger mess, but then so does Slack and Cisco Spark. So add a Web conference tool or two (I have WebEx and Skype for Business conferencing), but the audio is annoyingly poor on S4B business. Don't forget our phone system, SharePoint, OneDrive and Yammer. And while you are at it, have you kept up on LinkedIn and Twitter? To communicate with international colleagues, you will also also need Whatsapp. Perhaps you are working at a company with Google Apps with Hangouts, and may your deity of choice help you if you have Salesforce Chatter (A torrent of mental diarrhea) Of course bots are the future because I always wanted a text interface, or better yet, an ASR/TTS interface because I like practicing my English with a 3 year old. This is a cluster and it is quickly getting worse. None of these companies are actually trying to help. So far as I can tell, they just want to grow their adoption numbers, try to preserve some revenue as long as they can and maybe kill the PSTN, but I can't even make a phone call between any of these systems. Then, with one small blip an entire system goes down, so I have to call you and send a email with the file you need. XMPP is dead, SIP/SIMPLE isn't appropriate for IRC/Slack type apps. WebRTC is great for clients, but what about the backend, and federation? I love what I see with Riot, and I appreciate Google trying to move forward with the IMS replacement of SMS (Good luck explaining that one to the public, let alone market it...) While all of these companies will babble on endlessly about being open and committed to international standards bodies, real time communication applications are where they are at their worst.

It's like Slack, but with extra CIA. ;)

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
skrebbel 10y ago
Source?
0xFFC 10y ago
There is no question about CIA being in it ;) But how do you know for sure slack does have less CIA ?
IsmaOlvey 10y ago
So it's like Slack, period.

All of the file-sharing features are tied into "OneDrive For Business," which isn't OneDrive and is just some Sharepoint garbage. The new sync client helps a lot, but it doesn't work for the sharing part at all, which is what Teams uses. It's a huge liability for Teams until Microsoft can make OneDrive For Business not terrible. And when I evaluated it, it was missing any kind of snippet support, which I consider a dealbreaker (some workflows may not think this way, which is fine).

seahckr 10y ago
They will probably fix it over time, and also closely integrate with everything else, like LinkedIn, O365, Word / PPT / Task Tracking etc..
- mrmondo 10y ago
  I highly doubt that, the yammer, SharePoint, onedrive, O365 etc... integration is abysmal and every product seems to get worse as they seem to tie them together with silly string behind the scenes.
- cwyers 10y ago
  With as long as I've been using OneDrive For Business -- yeah, they'll probably fix it over time. It's been getting fixed over time. It's just happening really slowly, and I wouldn't be optimistic about it getting fixed on a timeline I cared about.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
mrmondo 10y ago
You mention onedrive, funny (perhaps not) story: I've seen 5~ situations at different organisations where malware in the form of cryptolocker spreads through onedrive destroying everyone's files and connected computers more often than not, also interestingly I've seen onedrive completely mess up its versioning system and rid the organisation at hands files dated and resulting in days if not weeks of re-work. I can't believe these things seem to go unreported as if I've seen it (at least) 5 times others must have witnessed it many more, onedrive seems like one the carrier of bad all that is bad and vulnerable in the Microsoft ecosystem. Note: I am not some anti-corp / anti-ms fanboy, I'm simply stating what I've witnessed which I have not with other platforms.
- tallanvor 10y ago
  I assume the organizations were using ODB as on-prem only? If they were using it with SharePoint Online they could request a point in time restore. --With on-prem solutions, they have to be managing their own backup strategy, which many companies are horrible at. In this respect, I don't think it's really any different than it would be with Dropbox or another cloud provider, although I suppose they could have tools that require less manual intervention to do the restore?
  - mrmondo 10y ago
    No, at least three of them were online / part of the O365 bundle (fumble if you ask me), it was an absolute nightmare dealing with Microsoft support, the level of incompetence they showed two of the times (when I was involved) was astounding, I'd heard bad things but it was next level and what made it worse is they were paying for the service, both with money and with the downtime while they were messed around both by the initial disruption and the messing around with the seemingly endless running with Microsoft support engineers, finally files were restored but the damage from the downtime and time spent on trying to get the vendor to deliver the cost to the business in at least one of the cases (I'm under an NDA for the one) was immeasurable but large. They experienced had previously experienced many problems with MS support and with the O365 (completely online / hosted) platforms it is enough that they're now underway evaluating alternatives, it might be the same products but on-prem or something entirely different but I am not involved in that process.
dantiberian 10y ago
They did the same thing with Skype for Business, which is just Lync, warmed over.
- thewhitetulip 10y ago
  Skype for business is bad, you can't do simple things like share a file through the chat, you have to send an email attachment.
  - discordance 10y ago
    Yeah, there are some glaringly simple things Skype For Biz has trouble doing. Try to figure out how to view your chat conversation history. The established standard UX across IM apps is that you click on the contact you are interested in, and scroll up in the chat window to view your old IMs. Not on Skype for biz.
  - NetStrikeForce 10y ago
    I have stability issues with Skype for business, but I share files daily with colleagues. Are you sure that's not some restriction put on by your IT department?
    - thewhitetulip 10y ago
      That might be the case :)

TorKlingberg 10y ago

So Teams is clearly Microsoft's answer to Slack. But, how does it relate to Skype for Business (Lync)? It doesn't seem to interoperate much.

douche 10y ago
Teams will snipe any incoming Skype for Business IMs that you receive before you can accept the toast on your real Lync client, which is always fun... It's either got the Skype for Business Web SDK or raw UCWA jammed in there to log you into Skype, deal with presence, and handle messaging.
sequence7 10y ago
Teams is built on top of Skype for Business/Lync, Groups and OneDrive for Business. Under the hood they're the same platform I'd expect that as Teams matures the ability to interoperate will improve

cmsd2 10y ago

We've had preview access at work. It seems nice enough and I'm looking forward to playing with the APIs. It does still rely on the other o365 components for features, which just shows up how janky lync and sharepoint can be. we've had slack and irc and hipchat. honestly I don't care which chat system we use as long as internally we can all come to some kind of agreement. That speaks more to our er diverse user-group than the quality of any given chat system though. I haven't been able to log in from a linux system unfortunately. The browser user-agent detection barfs on both chrome and firefox for me.

tremon 10y ago

Meh. I've tried to use it, but I quickly filed it in the "totally useless" bin: the amount of windowdressing vs actual content is staggering. I'm not exaggerating that in a 1680x1050 window, I get maybe 6 lines of content, the rest is spacing and navigation. Then there's the abysmal threading features: conversations are collapsed by default, and are not kept in chronological order. When trying to read back a conversation, you're constantly working the mouse to click folds or scroll back and forth. The icing on the cake was its memory and cpu usage: it got so bad (with only 4 teams joined) that my entire laptop slowed to a crawl. I uninstalled it and told my colleagues to just send me e-mails if they really want my feedback. I'm dreading the day my company makes its usage mandatory.

iDemonix 10y ago

My work is a bit of a mess, we've historically never been that joined up of a business, but on the same floor we have people using Skype, Skype for Business, Slack and Teams. Skype - Actively getting people to move away from this, fairly easy as new people in to the business don't setup accounts, everyone has experience with Skype, it's not a business tool. Skype for Business - Clunky, conversation history is there, then disappears, sometimes it appears in your Outlook (in our case in a folder), sometimes it doesn't. Feels like a half-baked platform, but as my office is very Office365/MS-in-the-cloud they force it upon us. Teams - Better than SfB, but still not usable. It tries to do everything, such as integrate planners, to do lists and so on. It dresses up as a business tool, then it has 'make your own meme' generators, which makes it seem a bit of a confused app. My biggest bug bear is when you're viewing a conversation, if someone replies to an old message, the entire message thread then appears as the 'newest'. I've missed countless conversations because of the funky ordering of chat. Slack - Awesome. A bit memory hungry, but a really well thought out app in terms of UX. Does exactly what you need it do, clicking a username does what you expect, as does mentioning and so on. You can apply themes, tons of plugins and extra stuff. Whilst Slack is everyones preferred app, the business refuse to pay for it as they pay for Office365. wORK are, for that reason, promoting both Teams and SfB, because Teams has planners and so on, but SfB has somewhat usable VOIP. Anyone slightly technical uses Slack though on the free plan, it's just a lot better and features like Code Snippets are great for tech teams. There are a subset of us that are thinking of moving to IRC, which has the added feature that PMs and managers can't figure it out.

fs111 10y ago
I still don't get why everybody is hyping slack so much. I have used MSN, skype, hangouts, MS office messenger thing, IRC, hipchat and slack in my professional life and it is really all the same. You chat, you send files, you make calls. Nothing stands out really. What is so great about slack, that everybody is going nuts over it?
- Navarr 10y ago
  At low volume that's true. Slack stays easy to use, keep up with, &c at high volume - which is what I like about it. IRC and Slack are nearly the same, but IRC comes with some overheads of finding or setting up a server, figuring out your own backlog, &c

dade_ 10y ago

Just keep adding to the sludge! More proprietary protocols and islands! The biggest problem with "Unified Communications" in business is effortless federation with your vendors and customers. Teams just makes a bigger mess, but then so does Slack and Cisco Spark. So add a Web conference tool or two (I have WebEx and Skype for Business conferencing), but the audio is annoyingly poor on S4B business. Don't forget our phone system, SharePoint, OneDrive and Yammer. And while you are at it, have you kept up on LinkedIn and Twitter? To communicate with international colleagues, you will also also need Whatsapp. Perhaps you are working at a company with Google Apps with Hangouts, and may your deity of choice help you if you have Salesforce Chatter (A torrent of mental diarrhea) Of course bots are the future because I always wanted a text interface, or better yet, an ASR/TTS interface because I like practicing my English with a 3 year old. This is a cluster and it is quickly getting worse. None of these companies are actually trying to help. So far as I can tell, they just want to grow their adoption numbers, try to preserve some revenue as long as they can and maybe kill the PSTN, but I can't even make a phone call between any of these systems. Then, with one small blip an entire system goes down, so I have to call you and send a email with the file you need. XMPP is dead, SIP/SIMPLE isn't appropriate for IRC/Slack type apps. WebRTC is great for clients, but what about the backend, and federation? I love what I see with Riot, and I appreciate Google trying to move forward with the IMS replacement of SMS (Good luck explaining that one to the public, let alone market it...) While all of these companies will babble on endlessly about being open and committed to international standards bodies, real time communication applications are where they are at their worst.