6 ms·

Microsoft Teams gets a free version

53 points by djug 8y ago

Roritharr 8y ago
If only it had custom emojis... It's the one thing keeping us on Slack.
- Roritharr 8y ago
  Getting Downvotes here, but I wonder, aren't custom emojis important to anyones communication culture out there? We use them to signify specific states of acceptance for MRs for instance among other things.
  - andrewaylett 8y ago
    The question is: are you getting the down-votes for wanting emoji, or for the suggestion that you might want to move away from Slack?
- mmmagnum 8y ago
  Agreed. Emojis allow us to convey way more information than any text(s) could, and in less key strokes.
- vorpalhex 8y ago
  As silly as it sounds, emojis are surprisingly important in how people communicate. It's very hard for most folks to indicate emotions over text and emojis help support that. They've also been an effective way to communicate better across language barriers.
- otterpro 8y ago
  That was the case, at my previous workplace. We tried both Slack and Team but decided to go with Slack. We first started with Slack and found the custom emojis extremely useful, usually for indicating specific actions or status of a thread. Later on, when we had to decide between the two, most engineers and non-engineers wanted Slack. Also I found the slack UI/UX to be far more pleasant and inviting and more fun than Teams. I don't know why, but something seems to be off in the UI/UX for Teams.
Jedd 8y ago
> Once they’ve download teams, workplaces will be hooked into the Microsoft 365 suite. One of my absolute favourite comments ever on HN was by basch in 2017-04-20: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160809 It's a beautiful, heartfelt, almost entirely lowercase, description of the state of affairs of Microsoft's 'naming of things' (remember, there's only two hard things in computer science). This year I've had to fully (re)embrace the challenges of Microsoft's (re)naming, (re)branding, and (re)invigorating of some of their old products. Oh my.
- selimthegrim 8y ago
  James Mickens is doing a bad job of going incognito. Tanquam ex ungue leonem.
  - Jedd 8y ago
    Is that claw sufficient, though? It did feel like a carefully and beautifully crafted long-suffered rant -- but on the other hand, I've worked with people who've understood Microsoft products (and the renaming / rebranding / incompatibilities between then all, with that same (disturbing) level of understanding <sic> ... however it's rare to find someone with the ability to tie it all together that well.
    - jjtheblunt 8y ago
      parse error: missing ')'
    - basch 8y ago
      i sometimes wonder if i am more of a crazy person for a) believing in the existence of kafkaesque madness within their product suite, one that isnt quite actually as bad as i make it out to be or b) my delusion that no one at microsoft understands better than me how bad it really is. why is no one fixing this /sobs. Why is there no Steve Jobs esque person who stands up and says “look, usability is more important than features?” I ask this earnestly, how does ANY company actually successfully deploy Office 365 and use SharePoint OnLine cross platform? almost all my frustration comes from simply trying to coherently respond when someone asks an incredibly simple "how do i?" It is IMPOSSIBLE to communicate a correct+coherent+concise+laymen answer to an office 365 question. (Why doesnt my Office 365 Group Team Site Document Library aherm Group OneDrive, show up in my iOS OneDrive app? You didnt press FOLLOW in the SharePoint Web Interface...) I honestly dont think its as hard to fix as Microsoft seems to be making it. GIVE CLIENTS AND SERVERS DIFFERENT NAMES. Exchange/Outlook. SharePoint/OneDrive. Lync/Skype-Teams. IIS/Edge. SomethingServer/Windows. Do not deviate. FIX FUCKING FOLLOW/SYNC in OneDrive. I should be able to Right Click the system tray icon and see available group team site document libraries for sync. I should be able to see potential groups to sync in File Explorer. I should be able to select "sync this group to all my devices." Stop Driving people into a maze of webapps (owa, sharepoint, teams.) Maybe get rid of the word sync entirely. If I FOLLOW a group, it should appear in every Microsoft client I have. End this default program madness. If I set Acrobat or BlueBeam to my PDF viewer, leave it until I tell you otherwise. Never reset it to edge. Dont hide the interface to change it behind an ad for edge. My new favorite one is Windows setting Mail as my default mail app, when I have PAID for the enterprise Outlook product. Settings > Apps > Defaults > Mail > "Click > Outlook" > "Are you sure you dont want to try mail." Ill be honest and say this new "are you sure you dont want to try our product" when changing a default is borderline anticompetitive. Probably buy an Intranet Overlay company like Powell365 or Bonzai, and clean up the SharePoint/Yammer/Teams mess. Out of the box, there is no well integrated way for cross functional communication across companies. Yammer is a partially deserted Island, Teams isn’t for big groups of people who don’t know each other to create consensus. Microsoft still doesnt own UserVoice. Microsoft's products are so inefficient at helping teams communicate and gather feedback, that they turn to a third party product. Microsoft has actually done a decent job of merging Microsoft Accounts and AAD Accounts. They’ve eliminated the Outlook Groups app. Skype for Business is still one of the most confusing renames in history. Start using PRO as the high end name for everything. OneDrive Pro, Skype Pro, Word Pro, Surface Pro, OneNote Pro, Windows Pro, Teams Pro. Make Pro a feature that gets turned on in each client, not a separate program.
johnernaut 8y ago
One of the biggest frustrations I've had after switching from Slack -> Teams is the lack of support for syntax highlighting or 'code snippets.' Also, I can search for past comments, etc.. but for some reason it doesn't take you back in time to view the context around them - it only shows you the exact search result.
- plurby 8y ago
  If you use web client then it takes you back in time. It's the limitation of the desktop client for some reason.
  - johnernaut 8y ago
    Interesting - thanks for the heads up.
Volundr 8y ago
But still no Linux version unfortunately, despite it being the #4 most requested feature (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams/Native-Linux-client/m-p/30124#M973 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams/Nativ...). This is hugely painful for my organization, were a significant number of the devs use Linux. The IM feature works fine on the web, but audio only works under specific circumstances, and screen sharing doesn't work at all, effectively excluding these users.
- maturz 8y ago
  You could try something like this in the meantime: https://rambox.pro/ https://rambox.pro/ https://meetfranz.com/ https://meetfranz.com/
codesections 8y ago
This seems like a poorly chosen headline from TechCrunch. Not being someone who keeps up with Microsoft chat programs, on first reading it I though "Teams at Microsoft get a free version of what?"
- stephengillie 8y ago
  Teams is a Slack competitor, where cat gifs don't seem as cool, for some reason.

53 points by djug 8y ago

Roritharr 8y ago

If only it had custom emojis... It's the one thing keeping us on Slack.

Roritharr 8y ago
Getting Downvotes here, but I wonder, aren't custom emojis important to anyones communication culture out there? We use them to signify specific states of acceptance for MRs for instance among other things.
- andrewaylett 8y ago
  The question is: are you getting the down-votes for wanting emoji, or for the suggestion that you might want to move away from Slack?
mmmagnum 8y ago
Agreed. Emojis allow us to convey way more information than any text(s) could, and in less key strokes.
vorpalhex 8y ago
As silly as it sounds, emojis are surprisingly important in how people communicate. It's very hard for most folks to indicate emotions over text and emojis help support that. They've also been an effective way to communicate better across language barriers.
otterpro 8y ago
That was the case, at my previous workplace. We tried both Slack and Team but decided to go with Slack. We first started with Slack and found the custom emojis extremely useful, usually for indicating specific actions or status of a thread. Later on, when we had to decide between the two, most engineers and non-engineers wanted Slack. Also I found the slack UI/UX to be far more pleasant and inviting and more fun than Teams. I don't know why, but something seems to be off in the UI/UX for Teams.

Jedd 8y ago

> Once they’ve download teams, workplaces will be hooked into the Microsoft 365 suite. One of my absolute favourite comments ever on HN was by basch in 2017-04-20: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160809 It's a beautiful, heartfelt, almost entirely lowercase, description of the state of affairs of Microsoft's 'naming of things' (remember, there's only two hard things in computer science). This year I've had to fully (re)embrace the challenges of Microsoft's (re)naming, (re)branding, and (re)invigorating of some of their old products. Oh my.

selimthegrim 8y ago
James Mickens is doing a bad job of going incognito. Tanquam ex ungue leonem.
- Jedd 8y ago
  Is that claw sufficient, though? It did feel like a carefully and beautifully crafted long-suffered rant -- but on the other hand, I've worked with people who've understood Microsoft products (and the renaming / rebranding / incompatibilities between then all, with that same (disturbing) level of understanding <sic> ... however it's rare to find someone with the ability to tie it all together that well.
  - jjtheblunt 8y ago
    parse error: missing ')'
  - basch 8y ago
    i sometimes wonder if i am more of a crazy person for a) believing in the existence of kafkaesque madness within their product suite, one that isnt quite actually as bad as i make it out to be or b) my delusion that no one at microsoft understands better than me how bad it really is. why is no one fixing this /sobs. Why is there no Steve Jobs esque person who stands up and says “look, usability is more important than features?” I ask this earnestly, how does ANY company actually successfully deploy Office 365 and use SharePoint OnLine cross platform? almost all my frustration comes from simply trying to coherently respond when someone asks an incredibly simple "how do i?" It is IMPOSSIBLE to communicate a correct+coherent+concise+laymen answer to an office 365 question. (Why doesnt my Office 365 Group Team Site Document Library aherm Group OneDrive, show up in my iOS OneDrive app? You didnt press FOLLOW in the SharePoint Web Interface...) I honestly dont think its as hard to fix as Microsoft seems to be making it. GIVE CLIENTS AND SERVERS DIFFERENT NAMES. Exchange/Outlook. SharePoint/OneDrive. Lync/Skype-Teams. IIS/Edge. SomethingServer/Windows. Do not deviate. FIX FUCKING FOLLOW/SYNC in OneDrive. I should be able to Right Click the system tray icon and see available group team site document libraries for sync. I should be able to see potential groups to sync in File Explorer. I should be able to select "sync this group to all my devices." Stop Driving people into a maze of webapps (owa, sharepoint, teams.) Maybe get rid of the word sync entirely. If I FOLLOW a group, it should appear in every Microsoft client I have. End this default program madness. If I set Acrobat or BlueBeam to my PDF viewer, leave it until I tell you otherwise. Never reset it to edge. Dont hide the interface to change it behind an ad for edge. My new favorite one is Windows setting Mail as my default mail app, when I have PAID for the enterprise Outlook product. Settings > Apps > Defaults > Mail > "Click > Outlook" > "Are you sure you dont want to try mail." Ill be honest and say this new "are you sure you dont want to try our product" when changing a default is borderline anticompetitive. Probably buy an Intranet Overlay company like Powell365 or Bonzai, and clean up the SharePoint/Yammer/Teams mess. Out of the box, there is no well integrated way for cross functional communication across companies. Yammer is a partially deserted Island, Teams isn’t for big groups of people who don’t know each other to create consensus. Microsoft still doesnt own UserVoice. Microsoft's products are so inefficient at helping teams communicate and gather feedback, that they turn to a third party product. Microsoft has actually done a decent job of merging Microsoft Accounts and AAD Accounts. They’ve eliminated the Outlook Groups app. Skype for Business is still one of the most confusing renames in history. Start using PRO as the high end name for everything. OneDrive Pro, Skype Pro, Word Pro, Surface Pro, OneNote Pro, Windows Pro, Teams Pro. Make Pro a feature that gets turned on in each client, not a separate program.

johnernaut 8y ago

One of the biggest frustrations I've had after switching from Slack -> Teams is the lack of support for syntax highlighting or 'code snippets.' Also, I can search for past comments, etc.. but for some reason it doesn't take you back in time to view the context around them - it only shows you the exact search result.

plurby 8y ago
If you use web client then it takes you back in time. It's the limitation of the desktop client for some reason.
- johnernaut 8y ago
  Interesting - thanks for the heads up.

Volundr 8y ago

But still no Linux version unfortunately, despite it being the #4 most requested feature (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams/Native-Linux-client/m-p/30124#M973 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams/Nativ...). This is hugely painful for my organization, were a significant number of the devs use Linux. The IM feature works fine on the web, but audio only works under specific circumstances, and screen sharing doesn't work at all, effectively excluding these users.

maturz 8y ago
You could try something like this in the meantime: https://rambox.pro/ https://rambox.pro/ https://meetfranz.com/ https://meetfranz.com/

codesections 8y ago

This seems like a poorly chosen headline from TechCrunch. Not being someone who keeps up with Microsoft chat programs, on first reading it I though "Teams at Microsoft get a free version of what?"

stephengillie 8y ago
Teams is a Slack competitor, where cat gifs don't seem as cool, for some reason.