5 ms·

Hmmm. The story I keep hearing is companies switching from Slack to Teams, not because Teams is better, but because it's more or less integrated into O365 and h

by akeck 8y ago

Hmmm. The story I keep hearing is companies switching from Slack to Teams, not because Teams is better, but because it's more or less integrated into O365 and has various compliance certs already. 7.1B seems a bit high when competing with MS.

chrismeller 8y ago
Ugh. Have you tried using Teams? I’m forced to now and I want to kill cute, fuzzy woodland creatures every single day. Simply integrating with 365 isn’t enough to justify its use for anyone who knows any better.
- nwsm 8y ago
  I missed the part where you detailed any of your problems with it.
  - chrismeller 8y ago
    Hold on to your butts... 1. Click the icon to open it. Flip to another app. Multiple times during startup it will steal focus as I'm trying to do other things. 2. Flip back to another app during #1? It'll sit at "Loading Teams..." for. F'ing. ever. You won't get any notifications during this phase. You will not show up as online. 3. When it does load, I'm always 2 months back in chat conversation and have to spend 2 minutes scrolling down to the current time to see if there's anything new. 4. There is no way to skip to latest... 5. Notifications don't integrate with anything, they are custom. They are quirky and peculiar. There have been times that _none of them_ come through - no badge, no notification, no mobile push notification, no nothing - if I hadn't flipped to the app I would have no idea I got any messages at all. And yes, these are direct messages that I have notifications turned on for. 6. Uploading files is annoying as F. Drag and drop into the message. I have to click into the message input box to even start adding any other text (seems like an obvious transition to me)... when it finishes uploading you might get kicked back out of the text box because it wants to ask if this is the same file as you uploaded before. 7. When focusing on the app I'm never, read _never_, placed into the input box, even if I just saw a notification (miraculously!) that I'm trying to reply to. (Skype also has this same problem.) 8. Defaults to emailing you _for every F'ing thing under the sun_. It's an F'ing chat app, why are "you're missing the conversation!" emails the default? 9. Navigation is a clusterF. Three layers of vertical panes of navigation (ala Slack). Then add on top of that horizontal navigation _in every single one_. And not just a fixed number of tabs as navigation, you never have any idea what it's going to look like because... 10. "Integrations" is just BS. All they mean in Teams is a new tab you can add to the horizontal navigation in #9. 11. Any of their logic regarding recent conversations, recent groups, etc. and what should be displayed in the left navigation is crap. I've only got one team that I use, but I have to expand that single team to get the other "chats" in it? You've got thousands of pixels of vertical real estate here, why do I have to constantly expand the _one thing_ in the list? 12. The "wiki" has no navigation by default, you have to try and figure out (amongst the 15 different layers of navigation) where to expand to find the pages in it. Hardly a wiki, and even the editing tools are quirky and annoying - things disappear and reappear at random. And that's just off the top of my head. This is seriously the _worst_ chat app I have ever used in my life. Some random team at MS took Skype and decided to take the worst UX features of it and make a Slack clone. The fact that they started pushing this to businesses as part of 365 should involve mass firings. Edit: Formatting and a word... and a number.
- marcinzm 8y ago
  >Simply integrating with 365 isn’t enough to justify its use for anyone who knows any better. But compliance may be. For example, Slack charges a lot of money and requires a lot of users for actual HIPAA compliance (as in signing a BAA, everything else is marketing fluff). Teams, from what I can tell, comes with a BAA out of the box.
  - chrismeller 8y ago
    Slack charges what, $12/user/month for the full version with compliance and auditing included? Yeah, that's $12 more than you were spending, but companies that care about compliance really shouldn't be that cash-focused (I know, I know). It's hard to deny Teams when it's already bundled with 365 that we're spending $25/user/month on, but if anyone has ever used both it becomes _immediately_ obvious that it's worth the money. That's the whole approach MS is going for, and something that's very very hard for Slack to combat.
    - laurentb 8y ago
      to be clear, Teams comes with one of the lowest O365 packages at a meagre $5/user/month (if i'm not mistaken on the price)... that's a big difference against Slack.
    - marcinzm 8y ago
      >Slack charges what, $12/user/month for the full version with compliance and auditing included? The $12/user version does NOT include a signed BAA which means it is not HIPAA compliant for all intents and purposes. Like I said, anything without a BAA that says it's HIPAA is useless marketing fluff designed to confuse people. Only the Enterprise Grid product is eligible for a BAA and I believe even then there's some large minimum contract fee.
pcmaffey 8y ago
The potential for deep Github integration too.
- drb91 8y ago
  What does a deep integration between a chat app and a vcs provider mean?
  - Avshalom 8y ago
    At least three more powerPoint slides about synergy when selling to bosses.
  - scrumbledober 8y ago
    I've already had a slack channel at most companies I've worked for that had our CI spit out information about pushes and pulls on GitHub, and I always mute those first thing.
paulie_a 8y ago
Integrations with O365 might be a feature for some but a lot of people have abandoned that ecosystem entirely. I can't think of a single person that uses it professionally or personally.
rch 8y ago
We honestly tried to like Teams but ended up with Slack, I think partially since everyone (including me) was already using it for other projects. Remember MS tried to push Yammer to businesses as well, so not everything they do works out.
ruffrey 8y ago
I have used slack, hipchat, irc, and many other chats over the years for dev teams. Joined a new small company and we are struggling really hard with MS Teams. Teams is unique in how it "ticks all the boxes" but has enough small flaws and unfinished implementations that it makes for a really, really awful tool. There are fundamental problems with the software. To name a few: - The notifications are wildly inconsistent - sometimes I'll get 5-6 email notifications for a single message that I already saw, sometimes I'll get email + app notifications for messages I am currently viewing, sometimes I'll get no notifications via email or app, for stuff that happened when I was offline. - The way every message is like a new "post" and there can be replies - this is a unique idea, but just really bad to use in practice. When people reply to a post, it gets bumped to the bottom, so posts end up out of order. Also, all the replies to the post automatically get collapsed, making it really annoying to find anything. - The mac app decided to stop displaying new messages (for WEEKS) in certain channels including our service errors channel - I finally gave up and can only use it on the web. - the O365 file integration regularly crashes the browser and mac app. We share a lot of spreadsheets and this just sucks. Sharepoint sync on the mac breaks all the time. It spins and fails to track updates. - O365 collaboration in the browser is brittle, especially disappointing compared to where Google Docs was 5+ year ago. - The Teams search cannot find documents by name. - The messages seem to be backed by email files in sharepoint, which makes a mess in sharepoint (not that it isn't kinda a mess already). After using the google suite at many companies for many years, and having the standard on-prem microsoft stuff, I have to say Teams is not a viable solution for a software team. Teams "ticks all the boxes" but the execution can't compare to Slack.
tpaschalis 8y ago
My experience with MS Teams contradict what I've mostly seen on HN. Coming from a Linux background, I had lost touch with the Microsoft ecosystem for the most part of a decade and would actively avoid Microsoft related stuff. When I got a new job, I had to use the whole SharePoint/O365/Teams stack, instead of Slack, in medium-sized teams. It feels much more lightweight and responsive, chat history and search works way better than Slack (for now, at least), and is miles ahead of Skype in terms of not dropping messages, and you know, actually allowing you to chat and call. I'm not using the O365 integration extensively, and generally view/edit documents as they're supposed to (files), but in the cases I've needed to make some changes in an Excel file, I didn't have any issues. Of course it suffers from all the problems that an ephemeral, short-term memory chat application does in an organization, but that's to be expected. Edit : Not affiliated with MS in any way. If I can answer any questions, let me know.
- maturz 8y ago
  I've been using teams since launch, it's a step up from Skype for business (mostly, they have for some reason decided to drop support for talking with regular Skype). I would say tho that they are still lacking a lot of important features. You can see a lot of examples of this here: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com They can also be very slow getting around to fixing things even if they are very important. They only just recently fixed so status works and notifications stopped working for more than a week without getting fixed (patched this week).

by akeck 8y ago

chrismeller 8y ago

Ugh. Have you tried using Teams? I’m forced to now and I want to kill cute, fuzzy woodland creatures every single day. Simply integrating with 365 isn’t enough to justify its use for anyone who knows any better.

nwsm 8y ago
I missed the part where you detailed any of your problems with it.
- chrismeller 8y ago
  Hold on to your butts... 1. Click the icon to open it. Flip to another app. Multiple times during startup it will steal focus as I'm trying to do other things. 2. Flip back to another app during #1? It'll sit at "Loading Teams..." for. F'ing. ever. You won't get any notifications during this phase. You will not show up as online. 3. When it does load, I'm always 2 months back in chat conversation and have to spend 2 minutes scrolling down to the current time to see if there's anything new. 4. There is no way to skip to latest... 5. Notifications don't integrate with anything, they are custom. They are quirky and peculiar. There have been times that _none of them_ come through - no badge, no notification, no mobile push notification, no nothing - if I hadn't flipped to the app I would have no idea I got any messages at all. And yes, these are direct messages that I have notifications turned on for. 6. Uploading files is annoying as F. Drag and drop into the message. I have to click into the message input box to even start adding any other text (seems like an obvious transition to me)... when it finishes uploading you might get kicked back out of the text box because it wants to ask if this is the same file as you uploaded before. 7. When focusing on the app I'm never, read _never_, placed into the input box, even if I just saw a notification (miraculously!) that I'm trying to reply to. (Skype also has this same problem.) 8. Defaults to emailing you _for every F'ing thing under the sun_. It's an F'ing chat app, why are "you're missing the conversation!" emails the default? 9. Navigation is a clusterF. Three layers of vertical panes of navigation (ala Slack). Then add on top of that horizontal navigation _in every single one_. And not just a fixed number of tabs as navigation, you never have any idea what it's going to look like because... 10. "Integrations" is just BS. All they mean in Teams is a new tab you can add to the horizontal navigation in #9. 11. Any of their logic regarding recent conversations, recent groups, etc. and what should be displayed in the left navigation is crap. I've only got one team that I use, but I have to expand that single team to get the other "chats" in it? You've got thousands of pixels of vertical real estate here, why do I have to constantly expand the _one thing_ in the list? 12. The "wiki" has no navigation by default, you have to try and figure out (amongst the 15 different layers of navigation) where to expand to find the pages in it. Hardly a wiki, and even the editing tools are quirky and annoying - things disappear and reappear at random. And that's just off the top of my head. This is seriously the _worst_ chat app I have ever used in my life. Some random team at MS took Skype and decided to take the worst UX features of it and make a Slack clone. The fact that they started pushing this to businesses as part of 365 should involve mass firings. Edit: Formatting and a word... and a number.
marcinzm 8y ago
>Simply integrating with 365 isn’t enough to justify its use for anyone who knows any better. But compliance may be. For example, Slack charges a lot of money and requires a lot of users for actual HIPAA compliance (as in signing a BAA, everything else is marketing fluff). Teams, from what I can tell, comes with a BAA out of the box.
- chrismeller 8y ago
  Slack charges what, $12/user/month for the full version with compliance and auditing included? Yeah, that's $12 more than you were spending, but companies that care about compliance really shouldn't be that cash-focused (I know, I know). It's hard to deny Teams when it's already bundled with 365 that we're spending $25/user/month on, but if anyone has ever used both it becomes _immediately_ obvious that it's worth the money. That's the whole approach MS is going for, and something that's very very hard for Slack to combat.
  - laurentb 8y ago
    to be clear, Teams comes with one of the lowest O365 packages at a meagre $5/user/month (if i'm not mistaken on the price)... that's a big difference against Slack.
  - marcinzm 8y ago
    >Slack charges what, $12/user/month for the full version with compliance and auditing included? The $12/user version does NOT include a signed BAA which means it is not HIPAA compliant for all intents and purposes. Like I said, anything without a BAA that says it's HIPAA is useless marketing fluff designed to confuse people. Only the Enterprise Grid product is eligible for a BAA and I believe even then there's some large minimum contract fee.

pcmaffey 8y ago

The potential for deep Github integration too.

drb91 8y ago
What does a deep integration between a chat app and a vcs provider mean?
- Avshalom 8y ago
  At least three more powerPoint slides about synergy when selling to bosses.
- scrumbledober 8y ago
  I've already had a slack channel at most companies I've worked for that had our CI spit out information about pushes and pulls on GitHub, and I always mute those first thing.

paulie_a 8y ago

Integrations with O365 might be a feature for some but a lot of people have abandoned that ecosystem entirely. I can't think of a single person that uses it professionally or personally.

rch 8y ago

We honestly tried to like Teams but ended up with Slack, I think partially since everyone (including me) was already using it for other projects. Remember MS tried to push Yammer to businesses as well, so not everything they do works out.

ruffrey 8y ago

I have used slack, hipchat, irc, and many other chats over the years for dev teams. Joined a new small company and we are struggling really hard with MS Teams. Teams is unique in how it "ticks all the boxes" but has enough small flaws and unfinished implementations that it makes for a really, really awful tool. There are fundamental problems with the software. To name a few: - The notifications are wildly inconsistent - sometimes I'll get 5-6 email notifications for a single message that I already saw, sometimes I'll get email + app notifications for messages I am currently viewing, sometimes I'll get no notifications via email or app, for stuff that happened when I was offline. - The way every message is like a new "post" and there can be replies - this is a unique idea, but just really bad to use in practice. When people reply to a post, it gets bumped to the bottom, so posts end up out of order. Also, all the replies to the post automatically get collapsed, making it really annoying to find anything. - The mac app decided to stop displaying new messages (for WEEKS) in certain channels including our service errors channel - I finally gave up and can only use it on the web. - the O365 file integration regularly crashes the browser and mac app. We share a lot of spreadsheets and this just sucks. Sharepoint sync on the mac breaks all the time. It spins and fails to track updates. - O365 collaboration in the browser is brittle, especially disappointing compared to where Google Docs was 5+ year ago. - The Teams search cannot find documents by name. - The messages seem to be backed by email files in sharepoint, which makes a mess in sharepoint (not that it isn't kinda a mess already). After using the google suite at many companies for many years, and having the standard on-prem microsoft stuff, I have to say Teams is not a viable solution for a software team. Teams "ticks all the boxes" but the execution can't compare to Slack.

tpaschalis 8y ago

My experience with MS Teams contradict what I've mostly seen on HN. Coming from a Linux background, I had lost touch with the Microsoft ecosystem for the most part of a decade and would actively avoid Microsoft related stuff. When I got a new job, I had to use the whole SharePoint/O365/Teams stack, instead of Slack, in medium-sized teams. It feels much more lightweight and responsive, chat history and search works way better than Slack (for now, at least), and is miles ahead of Skype in terms of not dropping messages, and you know, actually allowing you to chat and call. I'm not using the O365 integration extensively, and generally view/edit documents as they're supposed to (files), but in the cases I've needed to make some changes in an Excel file, I didn't have any issues. Of course it suffers from all the problems that an ephemeral, short-term memory chat application does in an organization, but that's to be expected. Edit : Not affiliated with MS in any way. If I can answer any questions, let me know.

maturz 8y ago
I've been using teams since launch, it's a step up from Skype for business (mostly, they have for some reason decided to drop support for talking with regular Skype). I would say tho that they are still lacking a lot of important features. You can see a lot of examples of this here: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com They can also be very slow getting around to fixing things even if they are very important. They only just recently fixed so status works and notifications stopped working for more than a week without getting fixed (patched this week).