24 ms·

The Horror of Microsoft Teams

544 points by rekoros 7y ago

pixelbath 7y ago
I could add so much to this, and in fact, recently closed a text file enumerating issues I had with Teams because I felt it wasn't a good use of my time, since I felt like I was the only one having problems with it. A few more points, in case anybody in the Teams team is reading: 1. Implement filters. Filters for teams, filters for channels, filters for search results. I can't filter my Files by file type, so it's a mishmash of Word documents, OneNotes, Excel, Microsoft Project files, and PDFs. I can't even filter by channel, or search within a specific channel. 2. Search results: Implement filters, as above, but add the ability to sort by anything other than Date Modified. Unless I know a good portion of the document name or it's been modified recently, I'm forced to scroll through the list. 3. Skype integration: We already use Skype for Business. Why is Teams also reporting my missed Skype calls in addition to Outlook and Skype telling me the same? 4. Meetings: Is Outlook transitioning to an email-only client, or are we just going to have all functionality replicated across Teams/Skype/Outlook? 5. T-Bot: I've got this entity in my Chat sidebar; I guess it's the Teams version of Slackbot? Anyway, it sits there saying "What can I help you with today?" Slackbot gives me an example question to begin interacting with it, but T-Bot has the entry window greyed out with the text "Sending new messages to this bot has been disabled." It's not clear whether that's a Teams thing, or something my org did, but why is it even there if I can't interact with it? While we're on Chat, there's a bunch of people listed in here that I sent a couple one-off emails to. I talk to more people than this; where are those? Why aren't they pulled from my Skype calls? 6. Calls: I see some contacts from one of my Skype groups, but it's also got contacts who a) I've already removed from that list, and b) don't even work at this company anymore. They're still crowding out the people I actually interact with regularly. 7. API integrations: I'm not even sure where to begin. Teams uses the Microsoft Graph API, which requires use of the Azure portal, and if you're already familiar with all that it might work for you. For the rest of us just trying to write a simple Python script integration (a la Slack webhook), it's a bit much. I'm sure I could think of more, but this non-blog-post is already long enough.
- EpicEng 7y ago
  #3 Skype is discontinued and Teams is the replacement. That's likely why.
  - late2part 7y ago
    T-Bot = Clippy v4
  - pixelbath 7y ago
    That is truly unfortunate. Skype isn't great, but it's specialized and far better than Teams.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    Also, #4 is because of #3. The weird Meetings tab in Teams is a better version of a Skype for Business tab that almost no one used directly (also called Meetings and using the exact same icon), and having that tab in Teams now is directly a part of the Skype for Business migration.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  #5: That's an organization decision to disable the T-Bot. Though why they disabled chatting with it and also disabled removing it from your Chat list (which is also something that orgs have power over) is a fascinating question of organization settings micromanagement. #7: Teams support incoming and outgoing webhooks, very similarly to Slack, but as with so many other things, access to them can be enabled/disabled by organization settings.
- Corrado 7y ago
  An old employer of mine used Teams and my biggest problem was just sending messages to other people. For example, when typing in a chat message you can accentuate (bold, italic, etc.) certain pieces of text. However, if you go back and edit that text it removes the style and you have to really work to get it back. I can't remember exactly, but most of the time I would delete all the text and re-type it.
heroprotagonist 7y ago
For extra fun, block access to the telemetry endpoint and watch Teams' memory footprint bloat to crazy levels as the data accumulates and re-attempts the sending. There's some fun inspecting this data, too..
- lowdose 7y ago
  A real Easter egg?
- SpaceManNabs 7y ago
  I don't use the windows partition on my laptop for this reason. Once Unity and my steam has Linux support, I never looked back. Only issue is Matlab sometimes.
  - 6thaccount2 7y ago
    What are you using Matlab for? Ever try Octave, Scilab, or Julia?
  - osamagirl69 7y ago
    Out of curiousity, what issue do you have with matlab under linux? I have found its linux version to be one of the most stable commercial/nonfree programs I have used under linux (ubuntu/centos).
    - stinos 7y ago
      Not OP but if I wouldn't rm ~/matlab_crash_dump* regularly it would be hundreds of them. Can't really pinpoint the problems, but most of the time it's graphics related. Possibly because it gets used remotely over VNC or X2Go, not sure. In comparison the windows version over RDP has like 0 problems, running pretty much the same code.
- addicted 7y ago
  I've been wondering why Teams has become completely unreliable when I use it at home. If what you're saying is true it could be my recent pi-hole installation. I'm gonna test this.
umvi 7y ago
I think Teams is pretty good, but then again my company had been using Cisco Jabber prior to it.
- notus 7y ago
  > but then again my company had been using Cisco Jabber prior to it. Relative to that experience Microsoft Teams would be a significant improvement in user experience.
- wcoenen 7y ago
  I like Teams for a similar reason: it is replacing Skype for Business. Properly persisted group chat is a must have for remote teams, and SfB didn't really have that. Or actually it did ("chat rooms"), but it's one of those bolt-on features that requires cooperation of an administrator to set up. Impossible to get done in a big corporation. (Now if only if I could convince my colleagues to use Teams properly with N people in a channel instead of continuing to have N^2 one-to-one chats about the latest crisis...)
Insanity 7y ago
Teams is horribly unintuitive to use. The UI is much worse than Slack. Took me long to realise I was looking at the chat window and to follow along the threads..
- CharlesW 7y ago
  > The UI is much worse than Slack. In what way, have you found? I ask because I use both daily, and I like Slack better in some ways and Teams better in others.
  - Insanity 7y ago
    The chat feels so hard to follow
adzm 7y ago
I had the fun experience recently of having to rename a bunch of files that happened to have a # in the filename, since that character is forbidden in filenames that are uploaded into teams. Additionally, you can't seem to attach a .json file... though renaming it to .json.txt works. It's frustrating for sure. Thankfully they finally fixed some issues recently so I can copy chats out of Teams without running into too many problems. The most frustrating and immediate drawback is the low information density. It's gotten slightly better, but I can still see only about 20% of the information in a chat that I can with Slack. Also the automatic conversion of things like ;) to animated emoji... please give me an option to turn this off. You have to ctrl+z afterwards to just use the text.
- dagw 7y ago
  Additionally, you can't seem to attach a .json file... though renaming it to .json.txt works. It's frustrating for sure. Ran into something very similar during my (very) short stint doing Sharepoint development. I'm guessing it's some sort of limitation burried deep in some default MS code somewhere.
  - joshschreuder 7y ago
    One of the comments above says Teams sets up a Sharepoint site for each team to upload files, so it's probably the same limitation.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  We can't have people trying to collaborate on programming. That's hacker stuff that doesn't belong on the corp network.
mullingitover 7y ago
> "This means that if someone does @${channel_name} you will get an alert. MS have not implemented muting as a feature. Secondly, for all those automatic/admin channels, you can’t unsubscribe yourself (or at least not with the default policies). Brilliant, isn’t it? Unavoidable alerts that any idiot on any channel can annoy people with." At my last job we figured out the fastest way to get your company off Teams: add the CEO to a chatty channel.
- nevir 7y ago
  Our CEO gave up on slack long ago. Email is the best way to get their attention.
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    Slack and Teams are different. Slack has muting. Teams does not.
    - mullingitover 7y ago
      I'll note that we never actually acted on this plan. The idea came up when we were comparing the two. The designated Microsoft Guy at the office was pushing Teams, because it's free as in beer. However, the inability to mute or leave a channel was a big 'wtf' and I'm honestly shocked that two years later they still haven't fixed it. It was a show-stopper for us back then and still would be now.
      - arethuza 7y ago
        Why wouldn't you just Hide a Team you aren't interested in? I've hidden most of the Teams in our organisation because they aren't relevant to me.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - simonebrunozzi 7y ago
oneepic 7y ago
I think it's pretty, but it's also very, very, very notification-happy. My icon in my taskbar is almost constantly flashing with stuff I don't need to read, from teams I'm only remotely involved with. I just figured out I could turn the banners off last week, but still overall it's a very....loud application. Wish I could write some kind of filtering rules.
- Someone 7y ago
  The cynic in me says that’s how they got those “more than 13 million daily active users”, and there may be some truth in that. If your KPI is “daily active users”, and that’s measured by keys pressed and mouse clicks, getting everybody to click a few times is a win (for you)
Neil44 7y ago
I can believe they’re overtaking slack because they make Teams an aggressive default install with the Office 365 client, and it’s replacing Skype for Business.
- grezql 7y ago
  We use teams at work. Most people i know cant stand it. Its chatoix UI. 10 tabs on each «teams». Ive deleted the app. Whenever someone tags me i just open their browser app, reply and close. Even having the tab open sometimes causes cpu and memory spike and my laptop fans starts wirring. If they kill skype/lync for teams, MS is making a huge mistake. Lync and Outlook are the most distraction free softwares we use.
  - freeone3000 7y ago
    Skype for Business (Lync) was discontinued in July, and support will stop July 31, 2021.
    - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
      Hold up, what? I was using it until last week (I'm no longer with that company), and it was the semi-de-facto IM solution, because the entire team isn't on Slack, and worked well enough to serve our needs- the person we want to talk to is at another location right then (we moved around a lot) and we needed to talk to them. Discontinuation is news to me.
    - senectus1 7y ago
      yeah thats not quite right: Microsoft announced that Skype for Business online will retire on July 31, 2021. They still sell the product, and the hybrid/on premises solution is going to be around for a while. MS Teams will replace the "Online" only. There is no "on Premises" solution for Teams so S4B will be around a while I think.
  - delfinom 7y ago
    Lync itself is decent from a UX standpoint. But holy fucking batman, the backend for Lync is an absolute nightmare to setup and maintain. I wouldn't blame Microsoft for wanting to get rid of Lync just to be rid of it.
codeape 7y ago
IMO, MS Teams works pretty well. Not as good as Slack, but not horrible.
bartread 7y ago
I don't know. A lot of these issues (and I must admit I totally lost interest at the point I got to the complaints about message threading, although I did skim to the end[1]) are really personal preference. Take message threading as an example: we use it all the time and it works well. I actually prefer it to Slack threads. My main beefs with Teams are: - Performance: it's just far too damn slow to switch views. - Awkward to switch back to a channel or another chat whilst on a Teams call. - Connectivity: it's better than it was at handling disconnection and reconnection but, overall, it's still a ####ing moron and a timesink - you're still forced to restart on occasion (which takes too damn long). One thing I do like: when our company switched from Slack to Teams[2] what I very quickly noticed, and what has persisted over the last year(ish) that we've been using it, is the much higher SNR. Maybe it's that Teams isn't so fun to use but, whatever the reason, there's just way less distracting guff being posted and, perhaps to my surprise, it turns out I'm quite happy with that. Slack gives the appearance of productivity and collaboration without any of its substance. Teams, well, it's still an IM system and therefore always going to be subject to some level of wrath from me, but for the most part it feels like it does what it does well enough and doesn't try to be the centre of attention quite as much. [1] Where I was mildly irked to read, "Microsoft Teams is the solution that nobody asked for the problem that nobody had," in the conclusion. I mean, really, if you're going to say that you ought to be honest enough to acknowledge that you could say the same about any current gen IM app. I certainly never asked for software that would make it even easier for people to keep disturbing me when I'm in the middle of something else, and I know more than a few people who feel similarly. [2] Teams came with O365 and losing history with Slack was becoming a problem, but not one that felt like it was worth paying what Slack charge to solve: we felt like there were better ways to use that money, and overall - and after initial reticence - I'm happy with that decision.
- batoure 7y ago
  Yeah I weirdly agree with this comment the most i started facing a customer has been on teams since it came out I have been using for about 8 weeks after years of slack and I would say switching performance is my biggest beef. I don’t know why general performance wasn’t more of a discussion in this post since most of the big complaints are really tied to how your space is setup.
Clubber 7y ago
I prefer Teams to slack. I haven't used slack in a couple of years, so it may have improved since. For Teams, I like the built in screen sharing and the fact that you can share a window rather than a screen. I use 43" monitors so sharing full screen is impractical for someone viewing on a laptop. The voice / video "Teams meetings" are also pretty handy; we would do remote standup using that. I am also able to turn off audible notifications. I'm probably biased because I've been in Microsoft shops for years.
csours 7y ago
The lack of muting/do not disturb is why I just leave MS Teams off all the time.
- mastry 7y ago
  Teams does have a "Do not disturb" setting. Either right-click the taskbar icon or click your user picture in the app.
stuart78 7y ago
At my work, we use Teams a fair bit, and I'll go out on the limb to defend it (a limb I'm quite familiar with at this point ;) ). Thinking of it as a Slack alternative is, IMO, the wrong starting point. We barely use it for chat (as we have Slack as well). Instead, we use it as a file share and central information home. Each group within a team has a channel and we use the tabs to track meeting notes, embed external calendars, and more. And importantly, we use it for file sharing. Each channel is a root point for a team-specific folder. This is helpful because storing common docs there means they are perpetually available to collaborators, as opposed to OneDrive storage, which in my experience has been very hit or miss (sahre links expiring, etc. ). People can trust that team content is there. There are downsides. It took me a few months to find my 'optimal' usage pattern, I can't have channel-specific sharing, and it takes me a while to explain the above to people on the team. It is far from perfect, but it is better than sharing a bunch of files in email threads or maintaining unofficial google docs in a Microsoft world.
- inetknght 7y ago
  > we use it for file sharing File sharing: apparently still a problem almost four _decades_ after the Internet was invented.
  - evilotto 7y ago
    sharing information while controlling who gets to see it, who does not, making sure it is timely, making sure it is gone when it is no longer timely, and making sure all of these things continue to be the case is still a problem more than six _centuries_ after the invention of the printing press.
  - checktheorder 7y ago
    Heck, it's still a problem with direct connections. Take the average Windows PC. Take the average Android phone. Take a USB cable. Plug them in together. Now copy a few thousand MP3s from the PC to the phone using nothing but stock Explorer and watch the transfer rate drop to about 1/1000th of what the wired connection should be capable of, because Microsoft made sure to assign their most inept, incapable, dumbest employees when they designed MTP.
DubiousPusher 7y ago
It's interesting that Teams is often compared to email or chat. It's much more akin to a forum or bulletin board system. I've found this to be a pretty powerful thing to have at work. However, it does happen to fit my work groups use case very well. We work on lots of short term projects. Each of these we spin up a "team" for. These are 3D projects that require a lot of media sharing from a cross disciplinary which works fairly well in Teams. It's been a pretty happy addition over Outlook (barf) and Skype for Business aka Lync. Full disclosure, I work at MS. And I have never used Slack though would be glad to try it.
- late2part 7y ago
  Do folks on your team understand how poor your product is for users?
  - levythe 7y ago
    They said they work at MS, not that they work on Teams.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- rsynnott 7y ago
  > It's been a pretty happy addition over Outlook (barf) and Skype for Business aka Lync. Damning with incredibly faint praise, there.
m4tthumphrey 7y ago
My team were using HipChat and had to find an alternative when they sold off to Slack. They actually offered a really good discount to move over. But as the company already recently moved to O365 and Teams is free within that, I thought I'd give it a try. My team hated it, I tolerated it. Until one day I'd just had enough of the UX that Teams brings. The biggest issue was the threading; it truly beggars belief. We ended up using multi user IM messages instead of channels. Moving (and paying) for Slack was the best decision I made. That being said, the Teams UX will slowly and steadily improve. It will be interesting to see where we are in a few years. I hope to see both Teams and Slack support SIP, they surely must already be working on it.
- shermozle 7y ago
  > That being said, the Teams UX will slowly and steadily improve. That's not the Microsoft way. It'll accumulate features without ever deprecating bad features, not fundamentally improve. Look at Outlook. That terrible threading has its roots there. There'll be _someone_ out there who loves it, so it'll never go away.
  - vezycash 7y ago
    They've changed. Now they routinely redesign stuff. Add stuff that no one wants and cripple or remove those they want. And then make it slower. Outlook web is a perfect example. It's 10x slower since the last redesign and their exclusive killer feature - SWEEP no longer works for me.
    - evilotto 7y ago
      Have you sent feedback?
      - vezycash 7y ago
        Having lived through Windows phone's saga, Windows 8, 8.1, 10 and the first set of outlook.com redesigns, I know one this - their feedback tool is a placebo button, a self therapy session to get stuff off one's chest. Microsoft doesn't listen to feedback through their official channels. They might step back temporarily when there's overwhelming negative outcry from the news but they'll definitely attempt it again after a while.
robocat 7y ago
And Microsoft thinks it's a good idea to add an advert to use Teams into Windows (added to the autostarted program list, so you see the popup every time you restart Windows). Just shows that the OS is for Microsoft's benefit, not for your productivity.
- macns 7y ago
  Not to mention this thing kept installing itself even when I uninstalled it for the 5th time! I gave up!
  - tremon 7y ago
    There's a solution for that: create a file called "Teams." in %APPDATA%\Microsoft. The installer will absolutely try to install itself to %appdata% (instead of, say, %programfiles% or any admin-configurable path), and having a file there will prevent the installer from creating its installation directory.
goda90 7y ago
We recently switched from being a small team piloting Mattermost to using Teams as it rolls out to the whole company. We sorely miss Mattermost. It'll be nice to be able to reach more people in the company via chat than we could before, but everything about the UI is lacking, except maybe how replying works.
- B2B_human 7y ago
  I'm sorry to hear to hear about that! Just curious, What's better about the replying in Teams? (Disclosure: I work at Mattermost)
  - goda90 7y ago
    It groups the replies together with the original message even if other messages are coming into the channel. Maybe that's an option in Mattermost I never noticed. I think the biggest thing we miss is reacting with custom emojis. My team had a little internal culture forming around that.
bitL 7y ago
BTW, what happened to Outlook on iOS recently? Three months ago it was snappy, started immediately and notifications were cleared the moment messages were read; these days it takes ~5s to start, unread notifications stay for another ~5s after the message is read, confusing me about having new mail, and if the same mailbox is set up on two iOS devices, only one gets notifications. Is old Microsoft back?
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  And I still can’t set urgent priority on a reply
rsynnott 7y ago
It’s astonishing how bad Microsoft seems to be at things like this. I don’t really understand what’s going on in there.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  Microsoft used to be fairly decent at making software that was usable by ordinary people. Then they took over the Fortune 500 world after IBM crumbled, and promptly caught Enterprise Disease.
  - rsynnott 7y ago
    I think their problems with internet-y stuff in particular started before they became the new IBM. Outlook was still pretty awful in the 90s, say.
Wistar 7y ago
I just wish I could stop Teams from starting up every time I log in and without creating a Teams account. I looked up various solutions others have come up with and it is seemingly very convoluted.
- deathhand 7y ago
  This is an issue with SAML pass through and should be fixed soon. Not a Microsoft developer or even read the road map before posting this comment. Ouook, Zoom, etc already do this and it would be foolish of M$ not to fix this soon.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
vbordo 7y ago
> "[caching/searching] is awful on any platform. It’s not clear what the bounds are for any search and only a very brief history is cached locally. Everything else has to be fetched remotely so scrolling is painful and searching glacial." I've felt this frustration with Teams and Slack. Effective search in any real-time messaging platform seems difficult to deliver. Has anyone else had this problem and found a good solution to it?
- inetknght 7y ago
  > Effective search in any real-time messaging platform seems difficult to deliver. Has anyone else had this problem and found a good solution to it? Log chats to text files and learn `grep`. Keep chat logs organized in a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly directory hierarchy. I think many people would be amazed at just how fast their disk can read tens or hundreds of MBs of chat logs; how fast `grep` can find what you're looking for.
  - vbordo 7y ago
    Interesting approach. I'll give it a try. Thanks for the suggestion.
- jimnotgym 7y ago
  Yes, Keep your chats short and to the point...I never even noticed there was a search feature
jimbobimbo 7y ago
My biggest grief with Teams is that it's impossible to shut off notifications. With pretty much everything turned off in its settings and being in Do-Not-Disturb mode it still blinks the icon and shows number of unread notifications in the taskbar. Just. No.
- walshemj 7y ago
  I use focus assist on and I don't get to bothered by teams at work (it is a small <35 person company though). And teams works better for a/v conference that whatever Microsoft has done to poor skype.
cryptozeus 7y ago
Interestingly we do not have issues like this within our company. Recently switched from emails to Ms team and have never used slack. We are pretty happy with ms team with for few reasons: screen share, seems video or audio call, great support on desktop and mobile app, connection with everything Microsoft like word, excel, onenote etc. we are greatly enjoying it.
- realPubkey 7y ago
  How big is your company? Have you tried the search 'feature'?
  - cryptozeus 7y ago
    I’d say about 200 people IT team. Our company culture is not very tightly interested with each other so may be there is less chatter around the company channels. At this point its email tool in chat format. I personally love it.
    - teknopaul 7y ago
      Have you tried any other chat system?
  - toxican 7y ago
    I just want to know who thought it was a good idea to return results with zero context around them and no way to jump to that point in a conversation. Right now the best you can do is search to find a date, then scroll up until you hit that date (which takes forever, since it lazy loads the convo one "screen" at a time)
    - rollthehard6 7y ago
      Oh yes, so much agree - almost completely pointless to search for something in a chat and only see the one line that contains the search terms, none of the context chat around it - dumb dumb dumb.
alkonaut 7y ago
We use it with some success on a medium team and it’s been pretty well received. That said: what we came from was Skype. No not the business kind, the regular one with blinking ads. Compared to that, Teams isn’t that bad. Nothing is. We evaluated Slack and a few others but the cost difference to slack when you already have a huge tab at Microsoft for their tools is pretty substantial if I remember correctly.
- atq2119 7y ago
  Frankly, the regular Skype is better than SfB: it has a fully featured Linux client.
- pluma 7y ago
  Same here. We're a small company (6-7 employees plus a handful of freelancers) and we previously heavily relied on regular Skype. We mostly chat one-on-one and use team chats mostly for general status updates. I'm working as a contractor so I also use Slack a lot but Slack was a terrible fit for our company and its GDPR compliance is extremely sketchy at best. Also the calling features are practically useless -- I haven't once managed to get anywhere near acceptable quality from that. And don't get me started on using Slack on dodgy wifi (which Slack seems to be either incapable or uninterested in fixing, if my conversations with Slack devs are anything to go by). If you're already on Office 365 and mostly Windows, Teams is a no-brainer. Slack is a replacement for IRC. Teams is a replacement for Skype for Business. There is a lot of overlap, especially in how Teams is covered in the press, but ultimately I feel there are more differences than commonalities, especially if you account for software like Mattermost and RocketChat.
baxtr 7y ago
As a long time hater and forced user of slack: how does Teams compare to slack? Should I be happy “that we at least have slack”?!
- entropea 7y ago
  Slack is better than Teams in my opinion, but Slack still suffers from things even IRC has advantages over. Teams UI is atrocious. IRC is free, has channel administration & granular permissions, a working & functional tab complete, many different clients with extremely low memory & cpu usage. The biggest problem with IRC though is not being able to read back without the use of a bouncer or something like paid IRCcloud.
bluedino 7y ago
Microsoft ruins Skype, then tries making their own communication tool. Ugh. What is it again that Microsoft is getting such accolades for? Visual Studio Code is fantastic. Github is great, but they bought that. Office 365? OneDrive? I'll give you those. Hosted Exchange is a thorn in my side. Internet Explorer and Edge are (were?) both a joke. I don't have any experience with Azure. Xbox is great. Their server products have been fine since Windows 2000. Windows 10 is a joke. The Surface line isn't anything special.
- wolfgke 7y ago
  > What is it again that Microsoft is getting such accolades for? Visual Studio Code is fantastic. Visual Studio is great.
  - Someone1234 7y ago
    For what? Legacy desktop developing? We used Visual Studio daily. Everyone I speak to wants to switch to VS Code because we're tired of the laggy mess that is Visual Studio 2019. Even with no addons it stutters and micro-freezes all day long with medium-large solutions. Somehow VS Code, an electron app(!), feels snappier than VS a native app. We're just waiting for feature party (and nothing special, just managing project files/solution files without editing the XML manually, better publishing, and similar C# debugging).
    - blub 7y ago
      VS is no longer a pure native app, it has a ton of .NET in it. In theory that should be as fast as native, in practice... you've seen it yourself. Nothing on Windows comes close to C++ for UI speed (or any other kind of speed).
- lowdose 7y ago
  > Microsoft ruins Skype, then tries making their own communication tool. Even some rumors MS is in the market to buy Zoom.
  - 7y ago
emptysongglass 7y ago
How is it that businesses get sold on these poor groupware solutions when they can: a. self-host open-source Zulip (or Matrix/Riot, which is not that good compared to plain old The Lounge IRC) totally free b. pay for hosted software that’s open-source so their information isn’t hostaged when they decide their solution is crap? I see these kinds of poor choices made all the time. People usually don’t want to do the research or a salesman walks into the office and they get sold a contract. It really bugs me because I think: these people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars for taking other smart people on a ride. Is making hundreds of thousands of dollars orthogonal to big picture thinking? Is there a position where someone hires me to walk into their office and save them thousands of dollars on unnecessary SaaS contracts? I’d do that job with glee.
- dflock 7y ago
  > self host ... totally free Self hosting stuff is work for someone, and either needs hardware or rented VMs - it's the opposite of "totally free". This is why this happens.
  - empath75 7y ago
    Not to mention the engineering hours spent managing it.
    - Aeolun 7y ago
      My experience with these things on AWS is that they are pretty much set up and forget.
  - Cyphase 7y ago
    > b. pay for hosted software that’s open-source
- crag 7y ago
  Have you ever worked in Corporate America? Many times the decision to use something like Teams is made in an office across the country. And usually, its made with the vendor's sales team involved. This happens in government too, all the time. You get an edict to use the software and the fun begins. I love the idea of including the CEO... have to remember that.
jimnotgym 7y ago
I like Teams. I picked it up really quickly. My team picked it up really quickly. The rest of the company started asking me for it, which was my plan. I like the Sharepoint integration, the Outlook meetings integration, the Planner integration. I like that it works with my mac users. Yes it could be a tad quicker... If you are getting too many messages it is your organisation that is broken, not your IM app. Most of the other complaints in this article are to do with the set up, which the writer mentions in some cases but not others. As a manager I am very happy that I can control who is added outside of the organisation, for instance.
scottlegrand2 7y ago
Reminds me a lot of the horror show that is Amazon chime, Amazon's alternative to slack. That said it had some half implemented good ideas, but whenever you found a bug in it, its AWS-based team pretty much told you where to shove that bug report.
stevesimmons 7y ago
Messages with a single emoji are displayed 4x the size, with animation that can't be turned off. Teams is just not a serious business tool...
dbg31415 7y ago
Teams does suck, but man... it's marginally better than Skype for Business. Skype for Business was so bad, you could send a message on your phone and you'd never see it on your desktop, and vise versa. Or you'd get bombarded with notifications on your phone while you were typing on your desktop. Microsoft would point to your local IT team's setup causing caching issues or what have you... and notifications were never in real-time, calls were impossible and would constantly drop people, and heaven help you if you ever changed your password; you'd sign in again only to find all of your messages had been erased and wouldn't ever re-download from the server. It was such a productivity loss for everyone and I'm guessing the only people who ever had a complete and sequential chat history of my chats were probably NSA employees who couldn't care less. It's absurd that Microsoft didn't just buy Slack when they had the chance. Building this in-house has forced a lot of people to use some really shitty software. https://www.inc.com/business-insider/bill-gates-passed-on-slack-microsoft-now-developing-competing-team-tool.html https://www.inc.com/business-insider/bill-gates-passed-on-sl...
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  What happened to Yammer?
  - Multicomp 7y ago
    Still around, just on the back burner
empath75 7y ago
This thread should give some much needed perspective on all the people who assume MS is going to destroy slack. I bet slack destroys outlook before teams destroys slack.
- GFischer 7y ago
  As many mentioned, it´s licensing. My team had Slack but Teams got rolled company-wide and we were forced to switch. IMO Teams is much worse but I guess it gets the job done not horribly enough.
- dagw 7y ago
  A few of us here at work were using free Slack and I asked about paying for Slack back in March. Got a hard No, since they where rolling out Teams over the summer and it was 'free' and easily integrated with all their other MS stuff. That is how they're going to win.
- tremon 7y ago
  Microsoft will destroy Slack the same way it destroyed Netscape: by pushing its own inferior product for free.
bob1029 7y ago
We currently use Teams and everyone on the team absolutely hates it. I am actively looking at alternatives such as mattermost or slack to get us onto something that doesn't run like complete garbage. Also, why did this have to be developed using electron? If Teams were a native application, or even written using something on the .NET-side, we would probably have about 20% the complaints we do today. Watching an application that is more-or-less responsible for managing basic text and image data on a continuously-paginated basis occupy nearly a gigabyte of memory is simply intolerable. Teams makes me want to write a clone just to prove how much better it could be. That is how bad Teams is. It makes me want to spend an entire month's worth of weekends writing a native clone that no one will ever use.
- opencl 7y ago
  There are already a bunch of native Teams/Slack/etc.-like applications. Matrix has a good number of native clients[1]. There's Ripcord[2] which supports both Slack and Discord. There's Matterhorn[3] for Mattermost. [1] https://matrix.org/clients/ https://matrix.org/clients/ [2] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ [3] https://github.com/matterhorn-chat/matterhorn https://github.com/matterhorn-chat/matterhorn
  - Jaruzel 7y ago
    What I want, is something that ISN'T a poor copy of Slack. We've lost the rich landscape of differing chat/collaboration clients, and now just have a mono-culture of Slack-Clones.
    - benparsons 7y ago
      That isn't true at all - Matrix has a rich and growing ecosystem of chat clients. For Slack clones, you're well stocked, but the links given to you by the parent shows there is much more out there.
      - Jaruzel 7y ago
        > Matrix has a rich and growing ecosystem of chat clients. Including ones that work on iOS and Android WITH Notifications? Not having that feature has been a blocker for me so far.
acollins1331 7y ago
Is there a reason that companies don't just use discord?
- bob1029 7y ago
  Is there an enterprise hosting option? Any open source options? If no, and no, there is your quick answer. Also, the target user base and UX of the application make it unsuitable for a wide range of business cases. I think something like Discord for Business could be an amazing opportunity for growth. This isn't the first time I've seen someone bring up the idea.
- dagw 7y ago
  Does it self host? Does it integrate with AD for authorization and authentication? What tools does it have to ensure GDPR compliance? Is it easy to centrally manage and for IT to set limitations for which users can do what?
- the_angry_angel 7y ago
  Off the top of my head; * No Active Directory/SAML/other SSO. * Gaudy/gamer orientated look-and-feel, messages and notifications is hard to sell to business. * No/Poor implementations of "Enterprise Features" (read: eDiscovery, DLP, etc.) Of those the first and second are arguably the most important as it is often a requirement for businesses of any size. The third is a bit more larger/enterprise-y business.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
Main issue killing me with Teams is that the desktop client can't be joined to two servers (at least, last time I checked). As a contractor, I have a Teams at my company and a Teams at my client, and I had to pick one, which is terrible.
- netpenthe 7y ago
  i think i'm joined to two now - had to be invited to second one
- castlecrasher2 7y ago
  There's a drop-down element in the top-right that lets you switch, but it's nothing as easy as Slack.
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    The drop-down lets me sign in and out of my one account, but I don't see a way to sign into another one. Similarly, there's a "Manage Teams" button I found, but you can't use it to add a team from another account/server there.
jackvalentine 7y ago
I had the misfortune of renaming a file that was shared in Teams and we were chatting about. This completely broke it so if you click on it you can see the chat but it won't open and has the error "This item might not exist or is no longer available". You can now only open it from Sharepoint and changing the name back didn't fix anything. Thanks teams.
deleted 7y ago
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throwaway7000 7y ago
Disclosure: Microsoft employee. Using a throwaway. Satya, please don't track me down and fire me. I've never agreed so heavily with a headline and disagreed so vehemently with the actual content. Some of this is right, but a big chunk is wrong and I think misses some of the most egregious horrors of Teams. I used Slack professionally before in a fairly large org (>200). Two things the author got wrong: First - things the author got wrong. Notifications are absolutely configurable by Channel - at least with the bits I'm on and how the internal Microsoft tenant is configured. Second, a huge portion of the things mentioned by the author are config switches that apparently his tenant admins decided to muck with (auto-adding to Teams, no outsiders, etc). The biggest complaint I have about this piece is it doesn't actually talk about some of the real, most egregious parts about Teams: Teams has atrocious search, performance (functionally and by footprint, and UI - which the author covered. On top of that, it seems clear that the Teams team didn't have a coherent vision for the user/grouping model, so channels are kinda treated like groups but so are channels? For instance, you can mention a channel from another channel. Wtf. This drives me insane on a daily basis. The development story is a mess. Not going into details here but if folks in the comments care to peruse the docs, I'd love to hear other folks' perspective. Other random complaints: - The emoji story is hilarious. There's a taskbar thing called "emoji" which are animated stickers (some of which are actually fantastic) but definitely aren't emoji. You used to be able to shortcode emoji (ie :smile:) and get a thing that looked like an emoji but still wasn't unicode emoji. AND you could use the actually emoji keyboard on your device to actually type unicode. So, 3 ways to get 3 separate sets of glyphs, all referred to as "emoji". Yes, I know this complaint is dumb but it shows a weird lack of attention to detail. - The formatting story is the union of every formatting concept ever. Quasi-markdown is supported inline, but its essentially an editor trick that triggers (what I assume is) richtext formatting. - This is ANOTHER thing trying to be the* dashboard in Microsoft's product suite. There are like... 7. PowerBI, Azure Devops, SharePoint... Teams... I'm sure I'm forgetting some. Which leads me to... - It was clear from early development that leadership wasn't fixated on "do one thing well" and were trying to be the sum of all productivity goals. The result is chat sucks, feels halfassed and there's a lot of stapled on shit that makes the experience gross. There are a lot of smart people on this team but the folks at the helm set things on a terrible course that misses the fundamentals, which is super depressing. As an aside, one thing I'm genuinely curious about from folks that use Slack in very large orgs (>500), how does Slack's usability scale?
Aeolun 7y ago
My company is switching to Teams right now, because Slack “does not have active directory integration”. I asked them if it wasn’t a better idea to just enable that then, but apparently the ability to actually use any corporate software is just not very high on their list...
evilotto 7y ago
At my org, you'd never know that slack has muting as an option. @here in a nontrivial channel gets you public humiliation, every possible "loud" reaction thrown at you (to the point of hitting the slack limit on reactions) and people publicly scolding you that you just notified 500 people in 12 different time zones.
- austinl 7y ago
  I can relate to this. We have a few thousand people in our general channel. The channel description is: Please do not use @ here in this channel. (You can mute this channel).
- bastawhiz 7y ago
  Workspace owners in Slack can set permissions on who can @here or @channel in a channel.
- Macha 7y ago
  Just mute it would be a valid option if slack allowed whitelisting @here/@channel, rather than blacklist Our slack instance has the opposite, a bot that explains how to mute in many "public" channels upon a here. As is I need to remember to do the same every time I join or get added to a channel or some inconsiderate person on the other side of the world will @channel at a dumb time.
- ck425 7y ago
  We used to have that, then there was a backlash and we're now far more tolerant. I'm not sure what the right balance is between not disturbing people and calling out folk (new joiners in particular) in from of the whole company.
Andrex 7y ago
Slack vs. Teams doesn't interest me as much as Teams vs. Hangouts Chat. Anyone here use both and can compare?
- evacchi 7y ago
  as a user of Hangouts Chat, reading this Teams description, they look terrible just the same. Misfeature-wise, they are very much alike.
mxuribe 7y ago
A Teams client for linux - meh. I mean, I guess I wouldn't mind it I guess (assuming I don't have to pay more for it per my office365 monthly fee), but i certainly don't seek it. On linux, I'm perfectly happy with libreoffice. However, what I do want is a native onedrive client for linux.
francisofascii 7y ago
Kind of related. I cannot login to Teams from home. Some sort of infinite redirect loop in both IE and Chrome on my home PC. It is pretty horrible.
- CharlesW 7y ago
  FWIW, I'm using Teams from home as I type this, and I've never seen this come up as an issue in our (large-ish) company's communications channels. I don't believe you're experiencing a Teams problem.
Solar19 7y ago
The Teams client is built on Electron? Why? Developers need to stop building slow applications. This is ridiculous. It's 2019 and software is slower than it was in the 90s. It must take an enormous number of CPU cycles to execute simple tasks in an Election-based app. It's just incredibly inefficient. I heard similar things about Slack – that it was built on Node, maybe Electron, and was dog slow, especially to open. It's frustrating that developers are bringing the slowness of the web to the desktop. Just build proper desktop applications using native desktop APIs.
- toxican 7y ago
  It's built on Electron and still no native Linux client. There's a web version, but you can't join meetings or screenshare. There are 3rd party wrappers for the web version that enable meetings, but you still can't screenshare. At the very least their web version needs to have parity with the desktop application. It's 2019, browsers can handle voice chat and screensharing!
  - pacoverdi 7y ago
    Well, there is an unofficial 'snap' package for Linux that enables all features including screen sharing. I don't remember the name but it must be easy to find. Edit: probably https://snapcraft.io/teams-for-linux https://snapcraft.io/teams-for-linux
    - briffle 7y ago
      you can view in a screen share, but not send your screen.
  - utopian3 7y ago
    Wow, I’m pretty sure Hipchat is built on Electron and has had all these features for years! Microsoft must really be struggling
    - rekoros 7y ago
      What’s Hipchat?
noddingham 7y ago
I'm sorry but you've got to at least spell check if you're going to put something on the internet for others to read. Regarding the content, "It can take half a day because of all the fiddly little options that are so easily forgotten". What? If you've really been a "long time" Outlook user, then this is 10 minutes. Half hour tops. But a half day? This makes me not take anything you say after that statement seriously. And your complaints about teams are related to admin policies. Believe it or not enterprises actually have admins and policies regarding their desktops and tools. Unfortunately this represents what I've come to expect from medium content.
vadym909 7y ago
Fortunately I live wo either of these im tools. I know I'd go crazy trying to live an 'always on' life. I doubt the numbers MS throws around though to show how they are succeeding. If they are bundling Teams with Windows or Office of giving it away for free with Office 365 or Outlook, they could claim every single Windows laptop and PC as an active user and soon be at 1B users. Technically correct but oh so wrong!
timoth3y 7y ago
I use both daily. I think the biggest problem with Teams can't be discovered by feature comparisons and performance metrics. Teams enables a company to "secure" the application in the same way other MS products can be. That makes the product easy to sell, but in practice, it prevents Teams from being an effective collaboration tool. If I want to create a new channel, I need to get approval from IT. If I want to invite a vendor to participate, I need to convince IT that the benefit of adding this particular vendor to Teams outweighs a raft of vague "security" concerns. In the end, it's not worth the trouble of asking and I end up setting up Slack channels instead. By creating a product that can satisfy the IT policies of their enterprise customers, Microsoft has unwittingly created a platform completely unsuited to flexible and open collaboration.
- choppaface 7y ago
  In my experience with Slack, vendors are always locked down. A good practice is to create a totally separate Slack instance where vendors and contractors can talk freely with employees. If non-emoloyees are on company Slack, they can pick up IP, be witnesses to harassment, be exposed to PII leaks, etc. Locking down channels is tough. As a company grows, there can be immense confusion when channels pop up all over (especially duplicates). Having some friction to creation can be helpful, but that could be simple public “shaming” instead of getting IT / HR in the mix. When HR thinks its job is to administrate, the company has lost its chance at having a real culture. It sounds like using MS Teams is like having HR administrate over everything you say at work.
  - timoth3y 7y ago
    That's effectively what I do as well, but we don't have a corporate Slack account. Teams is great for internal communications on long-running projects. It's well suited to that and I wouldn't substitute Slack. When used well, it cuts down on a ton of internal emails and status updates. I don't really blame IT for locking down Teams. It makes a lot of sense for all the reasons you mention and many more. It's just that by locking it down they prevent Teams from really being a challenger to Slack. It's not that Teams can't be configured to be just as useful as Slack, but enterprise IT best practices pretty much guarantees that it never will be.
dinofacedude 7y ago
I am going to have to use Microsoft Teams next semester at my college for project management class. Not looking forward to it. Especially since there is no Linux version, and Linux is the only OS I enjoy using.
- atq2119 7y ago
  Then be glad that it's at least not Skype for Business: Teams has a decent web client, SfB doesn't.
uglygoblin 7y ago
I'm not necessarily a fan of Teams but there's an unofficial Linux client that I use almost daily. It has some issues but mostly works. https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux
carlospwk 7y ago
Our Teams has Planner to do lists. Great, I thought, now our to dos are integrated into our chat platform. Then I tried to edit a comment I made on a card. Couldn't figure out, contacted our vendor only to find out it's NOT POSSIBLE! Googled it, tons of requests from years ago asking MS to implement edit and delete options for comments. Unbelievable.
fulafel 7y ago
Teams is replacing "Skype for Business", right? Horror must be relative. At least now with the Web clients MS-invested orgs might stop asking people to install virtual machines running Windows to videoconf / chat with them.
cleandreams 7y ago
We use it heavily but these aren't the features I dislike. In function Teams is a workflow browser but compared to real browsers it is very low functioning. No good bookmark system and ugh, no tabs. Even the back arrow doesn't scope properly, and anyway I find myself jumping around because I need multiple contexts. I find the meetings and phone to be fine. It does suck memory like a hog. Because it is a workflow browser I have to have the app open and also several browser accessed versions. That means my laptop slows down a lot.
nudpiedo 7y ago
To me that sounds like a “agile” failure. They were to agile for a design, to collect user feedback or any variable input, to fix the known problems, and to try a realistic set up as the client does.
mastazi 7y ago
Am I the only one noting the irony of criticising a piece of software by writing a post on Medium?
unixhero 7y ago
I like it. The reason is that in my situation, large enterprise corporate setting, it's the best I can get. Believe me it's been a breath of fresh air.
- seren 7y ago
  Same here, I don't feel that it is necessarily great, but it is not terrible either, and it is better for persistent goup chat that any group chat IM. I believe some teams have used Matterhorn or Slack internally but it was not necessarily 100% approved and not company wide Maybe, I should but I don't think that the using one solution versus another is such a game changer. People rarely fight about email clients either. Since we are subscribed to Office 365, I believe Teams is part of the package and it is likely an easier sell. Pretty clearly, it shows the power of Microsoft and bundle. Also, I am also glad that the "new" Microsoft is really focused on providing better tools, and not stuck with Office/Sharepoint only.
possiblelion 7y ago
The worst thing about Teams for me is the god-awful file managing solution. Everything shared actually goes in to the SharePoint backend, but changes made in Teams don't always carry over to SharePoint and vice versa. In addition, moving folders and files is such a broken and unintuitive pain, there's no way to do it inside Teams, you have to go to SharePoint in your browser. I'm sure everyone who has had the displeasure of using it agrees with me.
richdougherty 7y ago
Apart from the notification noise drowning out important messages I'd like the ability to select messages and copy them. Sadly if you drag and select you only get the bit of the Electron DOM that's currently visible on the screen. Vote here: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/31918531-allow-copying-whole-chat-conversations https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
donmb 7y ago
> I realise that WhatsApp doesn’t have a proper desktop client That's just not true. The Desktop app of Whatsapp is imo excellent.
junkri 7y ago
another annoying bug is the "John Doe is out of office and may not respond." message banner at chats which of course can't be turned off
marble-drink 7y ago
I've been using IRC since the 90s and Teams is a regression, plain and simple. I agree with all the points made in the article. But hey, at least it has "stickers" for children.
robdachshund 7y ago
Anyone else use discord for work communication? No one ever mentions it.
Multicomp 7y ago
My company rolled out teams but then did it in such a way or only the designated administrators can create channels... if you're not a designated administrator you can only do multi-party dm to dm chat. The effect was probably half intended which is to say only the various corp administrators actually used teams, the rest of us just ignore teams save for their randomly blasted 'app is being updated guys!...guys?' and continue to use our half-baked email threads or GroupMe groups or other shadow IT solutions because the Enterprise solution is so painful / pseudo insulting. Conversations.im / chatsecure / gajim all with an ejabberd server and omemo style encryption works a treat. GroupMe for group chats from legacy groups from before the xmpp days which we plan to migrate to xmpp and yeah we have no need of teams.
martijn_himself 7y ago
In my experience Teams is often used alongside other 'channels of communication and collaboration' which makes it a burden more than anything else. Ever since it was introduced it seems more like an unfinished tech experiment (but Slack felt the same to me). It seems to be designed with the aim of increasing productivity rather than making it easier to communicate with people.
cannonedhamster 7y ago
I'm an admin of both Slack and Teams. Almost all of this is due to how his org configured Teams. While there's some valid complaints, a lot of this comes down to IT not understanding the needs of their users or simply not caring about the needs of their users because of some stupid opaque management decisions. You can mute chats same as on Slack. You can be forced to autojoin same as in Slack. I have regular meetings with customers in Teams. While Slack is absolutely still better at what it does most of his horrible experience comes down to crappy settings by his IT. The mobile device integration is truly abysmal though. Hoping in apps requires you to install those apps as well to do simple things like project management. The whole point of hooking in an app is to not have to go directly to said app. We haven't had a problem with notifications either. Most of what's possible in locking down Teams is possible to do it Slack it's just not default.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nl 7y ago
Teams is like Sharepoint. It compares with the competition really well on paper, but the details suck the life out of you.
brynjolf 7y ago
Reading this thread [0] on their Uservoice shows that no progress has been done since August 2018 on notifications management for the end user. I'm sure they allow control when you create a channel but convincing the teammanager who very day pings the entire channel to say their work hours that day is impossible so that feature is more or less useless. The fact that you can praise coworkers with unicorns, being implemented before proper notifications, has made me go from believing in the future of Teams to now praising Slack. It is maddening. [0] https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/20592283-mute-a-channel-mute-chat-is-complete https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
jjwhitaker 7y ago
This sounds like ad administrative issue with how Teams are built and organized within Teams. It can be clean, simple, and effective when managed properly but user training is important.
kisna72 7y ago
My main frustration with Teams are: - Caching + searching : Their caching and searching is just terrible. It's surprising how hard it is to search older messages especially in a private group chat. scrolling up takes a long time. Images don't show up in the desktop app, so I have to open web app all the time. - Centralized control: I agree that Teams is designed for centralized control. some of it might be good, but its a communation software, and telling people how to communicate seems like it'd defeat the purpose. - Not being able to add External people: Agree with the OP, this is a pain. People in my org did this well with slack, but once we were asked to move to teams, we weren't collaborating with external folks the same way. - Chat and Teams are two different windows. WHen I am in private chat area, I never see new messages in Teams area. Notifications for chat work fine when I am in teams area. - Threading: I think threading is poorly implemented, since it collapses the thread when you reopen the app. I feel like it would be an excellent improvement over email if this came out before slack. But slack has shown what a good chat software can do, and teams falls short in many ways.
makecheck 7y ago
The problem for me is that people haven’t really clued into social norms for chat clients as it is, and poorly-implemented clients make this worse. Some people honestly seem oblivious to any current chat status, launching into complex questions and expecting immediate replies just because you seem alive right now. I’m sorry but once I’m “in conference call” or otherwise really busy, you should get the hint. I shouldn’t need a chat client that lets me be virtually invisible just to get work done. And generally, I hate chat for work. E-mail/bug-track is enough. I want to deal with things when I actually have time to deal with them, not when someone else assumes I have infinite availability.
NoxArt 7y ago
I could pardon a lot of stuff early on, but what worries me is that _development_ of Teams is horribly slow. Given how basic it still is there's almost no progress. Probably the worst thing for me is that Teams seem to be able to hold like 6 chat messages in memory, if I scroll to the past it starts loading and it takes about 5+ seconds to load 6 more. If I go back it starts to load the messages I just seen again. Performance-wise it's catastrophically bad

544 points by rekoros 7y ago

I could add so much to this, and in fact, recently closed a text file enumerating issues I had with Teams because I felt it wasn't a good use of my time, since I felt like I was the only one having problems with it. A few more points, in case anybody in the Teams team is reading: 1. Implement filters. Filters for teams, filters for channels, filters for search results. I can't filter my Files by file type, so it's a mishmash of Word documents, OneNotes, Excel, Microsoft Project files, and PDFs. I can't even filter by channel, or search within a specific channel. 2. Search results: Implement filters, as above, but add the ability to sort by anything other than Date Modified. Unless I know a good portion of the document name or it's been modified recently, I'm forced to scroll through the list. 3. Skype integration: We already use Skype for Business. Why is Teams also reporting my missed Skype calls in addition to Outlook and Skype telling me the same? 4. Meetings: Is Outlook transitioning to an email-only client, or are we just going to have all functionality replicated across Teams/Skype/Outlook? 5. T-Bot: I've got this entity in my Chat sidebar; I guess it's the Teams version of Slackbot? Anyway, it sits there saying "What can I help you with today?" Slackbot gives me an example question to begin interacting with it, but T-Bot has the entry window greyed out with the text "Sending new messages to this bot has been disabled." It's not clear whether that's a Teams thing, or something my org did, but why is it even there if I can't interact with it? While we're on Chat, there's a bunch of people listed in here that I sent a couple one-off emails to. I talk to more people than this; where are those? Why aren't they pulled from my Skype calls? 6. Calls: I see some contacts from one of my Skype groups, but it's also got contacts who a) I've already removed from that list, and b) don't even work at this company anymore. They're still crowding out the people I actually interact with regularly. 7. API integrations: I'm not even sure where to begin. Teams uses the Microsoft Graph API, which requires use of the Azure portal, and if you're already familiar with all that it might work for you. For the rest of us just trying to write a simple Python script integration (a la Slack webhook), it's a bit much. I'm sure I could think of more, but this non-blog-post is already long enough.

EpicEng 7y ago
#3 Skype is discontinued and Teams is the replacement. That's likely why.
- late2part 7y ago
  T-Bot = Clippy v4
- pixelbath 7y ago
  That is truly unfortunate. Skype isn't great, but it's specialized and far better than Teams.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Also, #4 is because of #3. The weird Meetings tab in Teams is a better version of a Skype for Business tab that almost no one used directly (also called Meetings and using the exact same icon), and having that tab in Teams now is directly a part of the Skype for Business migration.
WorldMaker 7y ago
#5: That's an organization decision to disable the T-Bot. Though why they disabled chatting with it and also disabled removing it from your Chat list (which is also something that orgs have power over) is a fascinating question of organization settings micromanagement. #7: Teams support incoming and outgoing webhooks, very similarly to Slack, but as with so many other things, access to them can be enabled/disabled by organization settings.
Corrado 7y ago
An old employer of mine used Teams and my biggest problem was just sending messages to other people. For example, when typing in a chat message you can accentuate (bold, italic, etc.) certain pieces of text. However, if you go back and edit that text it removes the style and you have to really work to get it back. I can't remember exactly, but most of the time I would delete all the text and re-type it.

heroprotagonist 7y ago

For extra fun, block access to the telemetry endpoint and watch Teams' memory footprint bloat to crazy levels as the data accumulates and re-attempts the sending. There's some fun inspecting this data, too..

lowdose 7y ago
A real Easter egg?
SpaceManNabs 7y ago
I don't use the windows partition on my laptop for this reason. Once Unity and my steam has Linux support, I never looked back. Only issue is Matlab sometimes.
- 6thaccount2 7y ago
  What are you using Matlab for? Ever try Octave, Scilab, or Julia?
- osamagirl69 7y ago
  Out of curiousity, what issue do you have with matlab under linux? I have found its linux version to be one of the most stable commercial/nonfree programs I have used under linux (ubuntu/centos).
  - stinos 7y ago
    Not OP but if I wouldn't rm ~/matlab_crash_dump* regularly it would be hundreds of them. Can't really pinpoint the problems, but most of the time it's graphics related. Possibly because it gets used remotely over VNC or X2Go, not sure. In comparison the windows version over RDP has like 0 problems, running pretty much the same code.
addicted 7y ago
I've been wondering why Teams has become completely unreliable when I use it at home. If what you're saying is true it could be my recent pi-hole installation. I'm gonna test this.

umvi 7y ago

I think Teams is pretty good, but then again my company had been using Cisco Jabber prior to it.

notus 7y ago
> but then again my company had been using Cisco Jabber prior to it. Relative to that experience Microsoft Teams would be a significant improvement in user experience.
wcoenen 7y ago
I like Teams for a similar reason: it is replacing Skype for Business. Properly persisted group chat is a must have for remote teams, and SfB didn't really have that. Or actually it did ("chat rooms"), but it's one of those bolt-on features that requires cooperation of an administrator to set up. Impossible to get done in a big corporation. (Now if only if I could convince my colleagues to use Teams properly with N people in a channel instead of continuing to have N^2 one-to-one chats about the latest crisis...)

Insanity 7y ago

Teams is horribly unintuitive to use. The UI is much worse than Slack. Took me long to realise I was looking at the chat window and to follow along the threads..

CharlesW 7y ago
> The UI is much worse than Slack. In what way, have you found? I ask because I use both daily, and I like Slack better in some ways and Teams better in others.
- Insanity 7y ago
  The chat feels so hard to follow

adzm 7y ago

I had the fun experience recently of having to rename a bunch of files that happened to have a # in the filename, since that character is forbidden in filenames that are uploaded into teams. Additionally, you can't seem to attach a .json file... though renaming it to .json.txt works. It's frustrating for sure. Thankfully they finally fixed some issues recently so I can copy chats out of Teams without running into too many problems. The most frustrating and immediate drawback is the low information density. It's gotten slightly better, but I can still see only about 20% of the information in a chat that I can with Slack. Also the automatic conversion of things like ;) to animated emoji... please give me an option to turn this off. You have to ctrl+z afterwards to just use the text.

dagw 7y ago
Additionally, you can't seem to attach a .json file... though renaming it to .json.txt works. It's frustrating for sure. Ran into something very similar during my (very) short stint doing Sharepoint development. I'm guessing it's some sort of limitation burried deep in some default MS code somewhere.
- joshschreuder 7y ago
  One of the comments above says Teams sets up a Sharepoint site for each team to upload files, so it's probably the same limitation.
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
We can't have people trying to collaborate on programming. That's hacker stuff that doesn't belong on the corp network.

mullingitover 7y ago

> "This means that if someone does @${channel_name} you will get an alert. MS have not implemented muting as a feature. Secondly, for all those automatic/admin channels, you can’t unsubscribe yourself (or at least not with the default policies). Brilliant, isn’t it? Unavoidable alerts that any idiot on any channel can annoy people with." At my last job we figured out the fastest way to get your company off Teams: add the CEO to a chatty channel.

nevir 7y ago
Our CEO gave up on slack long ago. Email is the best way to get their attention.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  Slack and Teams are different. Slack has muting. Teams does not.
  - mullingitover 7y ago
    I'll note that we never actually acted on this plan. The idea came up when we were comparing the two. The designated Microsoft Guy at the office was pushing Teams, because it's free as in beer. However, the inability to mute or leave a channel was a big 'wtf' and I'm honestly shocked that two years later they still haven't fixed it. It was a show-stopper for us back then and still would be now.
    - arethuza 7y ago
      Why wouldn't you just Hide a Team you aren't interested in? I've hidden most of the Teams in our organisation because they aren't relevant to me.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - simonebrunozzi 7y ago

oneepic 7y ago

I think it's pretty, but it's also very, very, very notification-happy. My icon in my taskbar is almost constantly flashing with stuff I don't need to read, from teams I'm only remotely involved with. I just figured out I could turn the banners off last week, but still overall it's a very....loud application. Wish I could write some kind of filtering rules.

Someone 7y ago
The cynic in me says that’s how they got those “more than 13 million daily active users”, and there may be some truth in that. If your KPI is “daily active users”, and that’s measured by keys pressed and mouse clicks, getting everybody to click a few times is a win (for you)

Neil44 7y ago

I can believe they’re overtaking slack because they make Teams an aggressive default install with the Office 365 client, and it’s replacing Skype for Business.

grezql 7y ago
We use teams at work. Most people i know cant stand it. Its chatoix UI. 10 tabs on each «teams». Ive deleted the app. Whenever someone tags me i just open their browser app, reply and close. Even having the tab open sometimes causes cpu and memory spike and my laptop fans starts wirring. If they kill skype/lync for teams, MS is making a huge mistake. Lync and Outlook are the most distraction free softwares we use.
- freeone3000 7y ago
  Skype for Business (Lync) was discontinued in July, and support will stop July 31, 2021.
  - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
    Hold up, what? I was using it until last week (I'm no longer with that company), and it was the semi-de-facto IM solution, because the entire team isn't on Slack, and worked well enough to serve our needs- the person we want to talk to is at another location right then (we moved around a lot) and we needed to talk to them. Discontinuation is news to me.
  - senectus1 7y ago
    yeah thats not quite right: Microsoft announced that Skype for Business online will retire on July 31, 2021. They still sell the product, and the hybrid/on premises solution is going to be around for a while. MS Teams will replace the "Online" only. There is no "on Premises" solution for Teams so S4B will be around a while I think.
- delfinom 7y ago
  Lync itself is decent from a UX standpoint. But holy fucking batman, the backend for Lync is an absolute nightmare to setup and maintain. I wouldn't blame Microsoft for wanting to get rid of Lync just to be rid of it.

codeape 7y ago

IMO, MS Teams works pretty well. Not as good as Slack, but not horrible.

bartread 7y ago

I don't know. A lot of these issues (and I must admit I totally lost interest at the point I got to the complaints about message threading, although I did skim to the end[1]) are really personal preference. Take message threading as an example: we use it all the time and it works well. I actually prefer it to Slack threads. My main beefs with Teams are: - Performance: it's just far too damn slow to switch views. - Awkward to switch back to a channel or another chat whilst on a Teams call. - Connectivity: it's better than it was at handling disconnection and reconnection but, overall, it's still a ####ing moron and a timesink - you're still forced to restart on occasion (which takes too damn long). One thing I do like: when our company switched from Slack to Teams[2] what I very quickly noticed, and what has persisted over the last year(ish) that we've been using it, is the much higher SNR. Maybe it's that Teams isn't so fun to use but, whatever the reason, there's just way less distracting guff being posted and, perhaps to my surprise, it turns out I'm quite happy with that. Slack gives the appearance of productivity and collaboration without any of its substance. Teams, well, it's still an IM system and therefore always going to be subject to some level of wrath from me, but for the most part it feels like it does what it does well enough and doesn't try to be the centre of attention quite as much. [1] Where I was mildly irked to read, "Microsoft Teams is the solution that nobody asked for the problem that nobody had," in the conclusion. I mean, really, if you're going to say that you ought to be honest enough to acknowledge that you could say the same about any current gen IM app. I certainly never asked for software that would make it even easier for people to keep disturbing me when I'm in the middle of something else, and I know more than a few people who feel similarly. [2] Teams came with O365 and losing history with Slack was becoming a problem, but not one that felt like it was worth paying what Slack charge to solve: we felt like there were better ways to use that money, and overall - and after initial reticence - I'm happy with that decision.

batoure 7y ago
Yeah I weirdly agree with this comment the most i started facing a customer has been on teams since it came out I have been using for about 8 weeks after years of slack and I would say switching performance is my biggest beef. I don’t know why general performance wasn’t more of a discussion in this post since most of the big complaints are really tied to how your space is setup.

Clubber 7y ago

I prefer Teams to slack. I haven't used slack in a couple of years, so it may have improved since. For Teams, I like the built in screen sharing and the fact that you can share a window rather than a screen. I use 43" monitors so sharing full screen is impractical for someone viewing on a laptop. The voice / video "Teams meetings" are also pretty handy; we would do remote standup using that. I am also able to turn off audible notifications. I'm probably biased because I've been in Microsoft shops for years.

csours 7y ago

The lack of muting/do not disturb is why I just leave MS Teams off all the time.

mastry 7y ago
Teams does have a "Do not disturb" setting. Either right-click the taskbar icon or click your user picture in the app.

stuart78 7y ago

At my work, we use Teams a fair bit, and I'll go out on the limb to defend it (a limb I'm quite familiar with at this point ;) ). Thinking of it as a Slack alternative is, IMO, the wrong starting point. We barely use it for chat (as we have Slack as well). Instead, we use it as a file share and central information home. Each group within a team has a channel and we use the tabs to track meeting notes, embed external calendars, and more. And importantly, we use it for file sharing. Each channel is a root point for a team-specific folder. This is helpful because storing common docs there means they are perpetually available to collaborators, as opposed to OneDrive storage, which in my experience has been very hit or miss (sahre links expiring, etc. ). People can trust that team content is there. There are downsides. It took me a few months to find my 'optimal' usage pattern, I can't have channel-specific sharing, and it takes me a while to explain the above to people on the team. It is far from perfect, but it is better than sharing a bunch of files in email threads or maintaining unofficial google docs in a Microsoft world.

inetknght 7y ago
> we use it for file sharing File sharing: apparently still a problem almost four _decades_ after the Internet was invented.
- evilotto 7y ago
  sharing information while controlling who gets to see it, who does not, making sure it is timely, making sure it is gone when it is no longer timely, and making sure all of these things continue to be the case is still a problem more than six _centuries_ after the invention of the printing press.
- checktheorder 7y ago
  Heck, it's still a problem with direct connections. Take the average Windows PC. Take the average Android phone. Take a USB cable. Plug them in together. Now copy a few thousand MP3s from the PC to the phone using nothing but stock Explorer and watch the transfer rate drop to about 1/1000th of what the wired connection should be capable of, because Microsoft made sure to assign their most inept, incapable, dumbest employees when they designed MTP.

DubiousPusher 7y ago

It's interesting that Teams is often compared to email or chat. It's much more akin to a forum or bulletin board system. I've found this to be a pretty powerful thing to have at work. However, it does happen to fit my work groups use case very well. We work on lots of short term projects. Each of these we spin up a "team" for. These are 3D projects that require a lot of media sharing from a cross disciplinary which works fairly well in Teams. It's been a pretty happy addition over Outlook (barf) and Skype for Business aka Lync. Full disclosure, I work at MS. And I have never used Slack though would be glad to try it.

late2part 7y ago
Do folks on your team understand how poor your product is for users?
- levythe 7y ago
  They said they work at MS, not that they work on Teams.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
rsynnott 7y ago
> It's been a pretty happy addition over Outlook (barf) and Skype for Business aka Lync. Damning with incredibly faint praise, there.

m4tthumphrey 7y ago

My team were using HipChat and had to find an alternative when they sold off to Slack. They actually offered a really good discount to move over. But as the company already recently moved to O365 and Teams is free within that, I thought I'd give it a try. My team hated it, I tolerated it. Until one day I'd just had enough of the UX that Teams brings. The biggest issue was the threading; it truly beggars belief. We ended up using multi user IM messages instead of channels. Moving (and paying) for Slack was the best decision I made. That being said, the Teams UX will slowly and steadily improve. It will be interesting to see where we are in a few years. I hope to see both Teams and Slack support SIP, they surely must already be working on it.

shermozle 7y ago
> That being said, the Teams UX will slowly and steadily improve. That's not the Microsoft way. It'll accumulate features without ever deprecating bad features, not fundamentally improve. Look at Outlook. That terrible threading has its roots there. There'll be _someone_ out there who loves it, so it'll never go away.
- vezycash 7y ago
  They've changed. Now they routinely redesign stuff. Add stuff that no one wants and cripple or remove those they want. And then make it slower. Outlook web is a perfect example. It's 10x slower since the last redesign and their exclusive killer feature - SWEEP no longer works for me.
  - evilotto 7y ago
    Have you sent feedback?
    - vezycash 7y ago
      Having lived through Windows phone's saga, Windows 8, 8.1, 10 and the first set of outlook.com redesigns, I know one this - their feedback tool is a placebo button, a self therapy session to get stuff off one's chest. Microsoft doesn't listen to feedback through their official channels. They might step back temporarily when there's overwhelming negative outcry from the news but they'll definitely attempt it again after a while.

robocat 7y ago

And Microsoft thinks it's a good idea to add an advert to use Teams into Windows (added to the autostarted program list, so you see the popup every time you restart Windows). Just shows that the OS is for Microsoft's benefit, not for your productivity.

macns 7y ago
Not to mention this thing kept installing itself even when I uninstalled it for the 5th time! I gave up!
- tremon 7y ago
  There's a solution for that: create a file called "Teams." in %APPDATA%\Microsoft. The installer will absolutely try to install itself to %appdata% (instead of, say, %programfiles% or any admin-configurable path), and having a file there will prevent the installer from creating its installation directory.

goda90 7y ago

We recently switched from being a small team piloting Mattermost to using Teams as it rolls out to the whole company. We sorely miss Mattermost. It'll be nice to be able to reach more people in the company via chat than we could before, but everything about the UI is lacking, except maybe how replying works.

B2B_human 7y ago
I'm sorry to hear to hear about that! Just curious, What's better about the replying in Teams? (Disclosure: I work at Mattermost)
- goda90 7y ago
  It groups the replies together with the original message even if other messages are coming into the channel. Maybe that's an option in Mattermost I never noticed. I think the biggest thing we miss is reacting with custom emojis. My team had a little internal culture forming around that.

bitL 7y ago

BTW, what happened to Outlook on iOS recently? Three months ago it was snappy, started immediately and notifications were cleared the moment messages were read; these days it takes ~5s to start, unread notifications stay for another ~5s after the message is read, confusing me about having new mail, and if the same mailbox is set up on two iOS devices, only one gets notifications. Is old Microsoft back?

selimthegrim 7y ago
And I still can’t set urgent priority on a reply

rsynnott 7y ago

It’s astonishing how bad Microsoft seems to be at things like this. I don’t really understand what’s going on in there.

smacktoward 7y ago
Microsoft used to be fairly decent at making software that was usable by ordinary people. Then they took over the Fortune 500 world after IBM crumbled, and promptly caught Enterprise Disease.
- rsynnott 7y ago
  I think their problems with internet-y stuff in particular started before they became the new IBM. Outlook was still pretty awful in the 90s, say.

Wistar 7y ago

I just wish I could stop Teams from starting up every time I log in and without creating a Teams account. I looked up various solutions others have come up with and it is seemingly very convoluted.

deathhand 7y ago
This is an issue with SAML pass through and should be fixed soon. Not a Microsoft developer or even read the road map before posting this comment. Ouook, Zoom, etc already do this and it would be foolish of M$ not to fix this soon.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

vbordo 7y ago

> "[caching/searching] is awful on any platform. It’s not clear what the bounds are for any search and only a very brief history is cached locally. Everything else has to be fetched remotely so scrolling is painful and searching glacial." I've felt this frustration with Teams and Slack. Effective search in any real-time messaging platform seems difficult to deliver. Has anyone else had this problem and found a good solution to it?

inetknght 7y ago
> Effective search in any real-time messaging platform seems difficult to deliver. Has anyone else had this problem and found a good solution to it? Log chats to text files and learn `grep`. Keep chat logs organized in a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly directory hierarchy. I think many people would be amazed at just how fast their disk can read tens or hundreds of MBs of chat logs; how fast `grep` can find what you're looking for.
- vbordo 7y ago
  Interesting approach. I'll give it a try. Thanks for the suggestion.
jimnotgym 7y ago
Yes, Keep your chats short and to the point...I never even noticed there was a search feature

jimbobimbo 7y ago

My biggest grief with Teams is that it's impossible to shut off notifications. With pretty much everything turned off in its settings and being in Do-Not-Disturb mode it still blinks the icon and shows number of unread notifications in the taskbar. Just. No.

walshemj 7y ago
I use focus assist on and I don't get to bothered by teams at work (it is a small <35 person company though). And teams works better for a/v conference that whatever Microsoft has done to poor skype.

cryptozeus 7y ago

Interestingly we do not have issues like this within our company. Recently switched from emails to Ms team and have never used slack. We are pretty happy with ms team with for few reasons: screen share, seems video or audio call, great support on desktop and mobile app, connection with everything Microsoft like word, excel, onenote etc. we are greatly enjoying it.

realPubkey 7y ago
How big is your company? Have you tried the search 'feature'?
- cryptozeus 7y ago
  I’d say about 200 people IT team. Our company culture is not very tightly interested with each other so may be there is less chatter around the company channels. At this point its email tool in chat format. I personally love it.
  - teknopaul 7y ago
    Have you tried any other chat system?
- toxican 7y ago
  I just want to know who thought it was a good idea to return results with zero context around them and no way to jump to that point in a conversation. Right now the best you can do is search to find a date, then scroll up until you hit that date (which takes forever, since it lazy loads the convo one "screen" at a time)
  - rollthehard6 7y ago
    Oh yes, so much agree - almost completely pointless to search for something in a chat and only see the one line that contains the search terms, none of the context chat around it - dumb dumb dumb.

alkonaut 7y ago

We use it with some success on a medium team and it’s been pretty well received. That said: what we came from was Skype. No not the business kind, the regular one with blinking ads. Compared to that, Teams isn’t that bad. Nothing is. We evaluated Slack and a few others but the cost difference to slack when you already have a huge tab at Microsoft for their tools is pretty substantial if I remember correctly.

atq2119 7y ago
Frankly, the regular Skype is better than SfB: it has a fully featured Linux client.
pluma 7y ago
Same here. We're a small company (6-7 employees plus a handful of freelancers) and we previously heavily relied on regular Skype. We mostly chat one-on-one and use team chats mostly for general status updates. I'm working as a contractor so I also use Slack a lot but Slack was a terrible fit for our company and its GDPR compliance is extremely sketchy at best. Also the calling features are practically useless -- I haven't once managed to get anywhere near acceptable quality from that. And don't get me started on using Slack on dodgy wifi (which Slack seems to be either incapable or uninterested in fixing, if my conversations with Slack devs are anything to go by). If you're already on Office 365 and mostly Windows, Teams is a no-brainer. Slack is a replacement for IRC. Teams is a replacement for Skype for Business. There is a lot of overlap, especially in how Teams is covered in the press, but ultimately I feel there are more differences than commonalities, especially if you account for software like Mattermost and RocketChat.

baxtr 7y ago

As a long time hater and forced user of slack: how does Teams compare to slack? Should I be happy “that we at least have slack”?!

entropea 7y ago
Slack is better than Teams in my opinion, but Slack still suffers from things even IRC has advantages over. Teams UI is atrocious. IRC is free, has channel administration & granular permissions, a working & functional tab complete, many different clients with extremely low memory & cpu usage. The biggest problem with IRC though is not being able to read back without the use of a bouncer or something like paid IRCcloud.

bluedino 7y ago

Microsoft ruins Skype, then tries making their own communication tool. Ugh. What is it again that Microsoft is getting such accolades for? Visual Studio Code is fantastic. Github is great, but they bought that. Office 365? OneDrive? I'll give you those. Hosted Exchange is a thorn in my side. Internet Explorer and Edge are (were?) both a joke. I don't have any experience with Azure. Xbox is great. Their server products have been fine since Windows 2000. Windows 10 is a joke. The Surface line isn't anything special.

wolfgke 7y ago
> What is it again that Microsoft is getting such accolades for? Visual Studio Code is fantastic. Visual Studio is great.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  For what? Legacy desktop developing? We used Visual Studio daily. Everyone I speak to wants to switch to VS Code because we're tired of the laggy mess that is Visual Studio 2019. Even with no addons it stutters and micro-freezes all day long with medium-large solutions. Somehow VS Code, an electron app(!), feels snappier than VS a native app. We're just waiting for feature party (and nothing special, just managing project files/solution files without editing the XML manually, better publishing, and similar C# debugging).
  - blub 7y ago
    VS is no longer a pure native app, it has a ton of .NET in it. In theory that should be as fast as native, in practice... you've seen it yourself. Nothing on Windows comes close to C++ for UI speed (or any other kind of speed).
lowdose 7y ago
> Microsoft ruins Skype, then tries making their own communication tool. Even some rumors MS is in the market to buy Zoom.
- 7y ago

emptysongglass 7y ago

How is it that businesses get sold on these poor groupware solutions when they can: a. self-host open-source Zulip (or Matrix/Riot, which is not that good compared to plain old The Lounge IRC) totally free b. pay for hosted software that’s open-source so their information isn’t hostaged when they decide their solution is crap? I see these kinds of poor choices made all the time. People usually don’t want to do the research or a salesman walks into the office and they get sold a contract. It really bugs me because I think: these people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars for taking other smart people on a ride. Is making hundreds of thousands of dollars orthogonal to big picture thinking? Is there a position where someone hires me to walk into their office and save them thousands of dollars on unnecessary SaaS contracts? I’d do that job with glee.

dflock 7y ago
> self host ... totally free Self hosting stuff is work for someone, and either needs hardware or rented VMs - it's the opposite of "totally free". This is why this happens.
- empath75 7y ago
  Not to mention the engineering hours spent managing it.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    My experience with these things on AWS is that they are pretty much set up and forget.
- Cyphase 7y ago
  > b. pay for hosted software that’s open-source
crag 7y ago
Have you ever worked in Corporate America? Many times the decision to use something like Teams is made in an office across the country. And usually, its made with the vendor's sales team involved. This happens in government too, all the time. You get an edict to use the software and the fun begins. I love the idea of including the CEO... have to remember that.

jimnotgym 7y ago

I like Teams. I picked it up really quickly. My team picked it up really quickly. The rest of the company started asking me for it, which was my plan. I like the Sharepoint integration, the Outlook meetings integration, the Planner integration. I like that it works with my mac users. Yes it could be a tad quicker... If you are getting too many messages it is your organisation that is broken, not your IM app. Most of the other complaints in this article are to do with the set up, which the writer mentions in some cases but not others. As a manager I am very happy that I can control who is added outside of the organisation, for instance.

scottlegrand2 7y ago

Reminds me a lot of the horror show that is Amazon chime, Amazon's alternative to slack. That said it had some half implemented good ideas, but whenever you found a bug in it, its AWS-based team pretty much told you where to shove that bug report.

stevesimmons 7y ago

Messages with a single emoji are displayed 4x the size, with animation that can't be turned off. Teams is just not a serious business tool...

dbg31415 7y ago

Teams does suck, but man... it's marginally better than Skype for Business. Skype for Business was so bad, you could send a message on your phone and you'd never see it on your desktop, and vise versa. Or you'd get bombarded with notifications on your phone while you were typing on your desktop. Microsoft would point to your local IT team's setup causing caching issues or what have you... and notifications were never in real-time, calls were impossible and would constantly drop people, and heaven help you if you ever changed your password; you'd sign in again only to find all of your messages had been erased and wouldn't ever re-download from the server. It was such a productivity loss for everyone and I'm guessing the only people who ever had a complete and sequential chat history of my chats were probably NSA employees who couldn't care less. It's absurd that Microsoft didn't just buy Slack when they had the chance. Building this in-house has forced a lot of people to use some really shitty software. https://www.inc.com/business-insider/bill-gates-passed-on-slack-microsoft-now-developing-competing-team-tool.html https://www.inc.com/business-insider/bill-gates-passed-on-sl...

selimthegrim 7y ago
What happened to Yammer?
- Multicomp 7y ago
  Still around, just on the back burner

empath75 7y ago

This thread should give some much needed perspective on all the people who assume MS is going to destroy slack. I bet slack destroys outlook before teams destroys slack.

GFischer 7y ago
As many mentioned, it´s licensing. My team had Slack but Teams got rolled company-wide and we were forced to switch. IMO Teams is much worse but I guess it gets the job done not horribly enough.
dagw 7y ago
A few of us here at work were using free Slack and I asked about paying for Slack back in March. Got a hard No, since they where rolling out Teams over the summer and it was 'free' and easily integrated with all their other MS stuff. That is how they're going to win.
tremon 7y ago
Microsoft will destroy Slack the same way it destroyed Netscape: by pushing its own inferior product for free.

bob1029 7y ago

We currently use Teams and everyone on the team absolutely hates it. I am actively looking at alternatives such as mattermost or slack to get us onto something that doesn't run like complete garbage. Also, why did this have to be developed using electron? If Teams were a native application, or even written using something on the .NET-side, we would probably have about 20% the complaints we do today. Watching an application that is more-or-less responsible for managing basic text and image data on a continuously-paginated basis occupy nearly a gigabyte of memory is simply intolerable. Teams makes me want to write a clone just to prove how much better it could be. That is how bad Teams is. It makes me want to spend an entire month's worth of weekends writing a native clone that no one will ever use.

opencl 7y ago
There are already a bunch of native Teams/Slack/etc.-like applications. Matrix has a good number of native clients[1]. There's Ripcord[2] which supports both Slack and Discord. There's Matterhorn[3] for Mattermost. [1] https://matrix.org/clients/ https://matrix.org/clients/ [2] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ [3] https://github.com/matterhorn-chat/matterhorn https://github.com/matterhorn-chat/matterhorn
- Jaruzel 7y ago
  What I want, is something that ISN'T a poor copy of Slack. We've lost the rich landscape of differing chat/collaboration clients, and now just have a mono-culture of Slack-Clones.
  - benparsons 7y ago
    That isn't true at all - Matrix has a rich and growing ecosystem of chat clients. For Slack clones, you're well stocked, but the links given to you by the parent shows there is much more out there.
    - Jaruzel 7y ago
      > Matrix has a rich and growing ecosystem of chat clients. Including ones that work on iOS and Android WITH Notifications? Not having that feature has been a blocker for me so far.

acollins1331 7y ago

Is there a reason that companies don't just use discord?

bob1029 7y ago
Is there an enterprise hosting option? Any open source options? If no, and no, there is your quick answer. Also, the target user base and UX of the application make it unsuitable for a wide range of business cases. I think something like Discord for Business could be an amazing opportunity for growth. This isn't the first time I've seen someone bring up the idea.
dagw 7y ago
Does it self host? Does it integrate with AD for authorization and authentication? What tools does it have to ensure GDPR compliance? Is it easy to centrally manage and for IT to set limitations for which users can do what?
the_angry_angel 7y ago
Off the top of my head; * No Active Directory/SAML/other SSO. * Gaudy/gamer orientated look-and-feel, messages and notifications is hard to sell to business. * No/Poor implementations of "Enterprise Features" (read: eDiscovery, DLP, etc.) Of those the first and second are arguably the most important as it is often a requirement for businesses of any size. The third is a bit more larger/enterprise-y business.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

Main issue killing me with Teams is that the desktop client can't be joined to two servers (at least, last time I checked). As a contractor, I have a Teams at my company and a Teams at my client, and I had to pick one, which is terrible.

netpenthe 7y ago
i think i'm joined to two now - had to be invited to second one
castlecrasher2 7y ago
There's a drop-down element in the top-right that lets you switch, but it's nothing as easy as Slack.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  The drop-down lets me sign in and out of my one account, but I don't see a way to sign into another one. Similarly, there's a "Manage Teams" button I found, but you can't use it to add a team from another account/server there.

jackvalentine 7y ago

I had the misfortune of renaming a file that was shared in Teams and we were chatting about. This completely broke it so if you click on it you can see the chat but it won't open and has the error "This item might not exist or is no longer available". You can now only open it from Sharepoint and changing the name back didn't fix anything. Thanks teams.

deleted 7y ago

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throwaway7000 7y ago

Disclosure: Microsoft employee. Using a throwaway. Satya, please don't track me down and fire me. I've never agreed so heavily with a headline and disagreed so vehemently with the actual content. Some of this is right, but a big chunk is wrong and I think misses some of the most egregious horrors of Teams. I used Slack professionally before in a fairly large org (>200). Two things the author got wrong: First - things the author got wrong. Notifications are absolutely configurable by Channel - at least with the bits I'm on and how the internal Microsoft tenant is configured. Second, a huge portion of the things mentioned by the author are config switches that apparently his tenant admins decided to muck with (auto-adding to Teams, no outsiders, etc). The biggest complaint I have about this piece is it doesn't actually talk about some of the real, most egregious parts about Teams: Teams has atrocious search, performance (functionally and by footprint, and UI - which the author covered. On top of that, it seems clear that the Teams team didn't have a coherent vision for the user/grouping model, so channels are kinda treated like groups but so are channels? For instance, you can mention a channel from another channel. Wtf. This drives me insane on a daily basis. The development story is a mess. Not going into details here but if folks in the comments care to peruse the docs, I'd love to hear other folks' perspective. Other random complaints: - The emoji story is hilarious. There's a taskbar thing called "emoji" which are animated stickers (some of which are actually fantastic) but definitely aren't emoji. You used to be able to shortcode emoji (ie :smile:) and get a thing that looked like an emoji but still wasn't unicode emoji. AND you could use the actually emoji keyboard on your device to actually type unicode. So, 3 ways to get 3 separate sets of glyphs, all referred to as "emoji". Yes, I know this complaint is dumb but it shows a weird lack of attention to detail. - The formatting story is the union of every formatting concept ever. Quasi-markdown is supported inline, but its essentially an editor trick that triggers (what I assume is) richtext formatting. - This is ANOTHER thing trying to be the* dashboard in Microsoft's product suite. There are like... 7. PowerBI, Azure Devops, SharePoint... Teams... I'm sure I'm forgetting some. Which leads me to... - It was clear from early development that leadership wasn't fixated on "do one thing well" and were trying to be the sum of all productivity goals. The result is chat sucks, feels halfassed and there's a lot of stapled on shit that makes the experience gross. There are a lot of smart people on this team but the folks at the helm set things on a terrible course that misses the fundamentals, which is super depressing. As an aside, one thing I'm genuinely curious about from folks that use Slack in very large orgs (>500), how does Slack's usability scale?

Aeolun 7y ago

My company is switching to Teams right now, because Slack “does not have active directory integration”. I asked them if it wasn’t a better idea to just enable that then, but apparently the ability to actually use any corporate software is just not very high on their list...

evilotto 7y ago

At my org, you'd never know that slack has muting as an option. @here in a nontrivial channel gets you public humiliation, every possible "loud" reaction thrown at you (to the point of hitting the slack limit on reactions) and people publicly scolding you that you just notified 500 people in 12 different time zones.

austinl 7y ago
I can relate to this. We have a few thousand people in our general channel. The channel description is: Please do not use @ here in this channel. (You can mute this channel).
bastawhiz 7y ago
Workspace owners in Slack can set permissions on who can @here or @channel in a channel.
Macha 7y ago
Just mute it would be a valid option if slack allowed whitelisting @here/@channel, rather than blacklist Our slack instance has the opposite, a bot that explains how to mute in many "public" channels upon a here. As is I need to remember to do the same every time I join or get added to a channel or some inconsiderate person on the other side of the world will @channel at a dumb time.
ck425 7y ago
We used to have that, then there was a backlash and we're now far more tolerant. I'm not sure what the right balance is between not disturbing people and calling out folk (new joiners in particular) in from of the whole company.

Andrex 7y ago

Slack vs. Teams doesn't interest me as much as Teams vs. Hangouts Chat. Anyone here use both and can compare?

evacchi 7y ago
as a user of Hangouts Chat, reading this Teams description, they look terrible just the same. Misfeature-wise, they are very much alike.

mxuribe 7y ago

A Teams client for linux - meh. I mean, I guess I wouldn't mind it I guess (assuming I don't have to pay more for it per my office365 monthly fee), but i certainly don't seek it. On linux, I'm perfectly happy with libreoffice. However, what I do want is a native onedrive client for linux.

francisofascii 7y ago

Kind of related. I cannot login to Teams from home. Some sort of infinite redirect loop in both IE and Chrome on my home PC. It is pretty horrible.

CharlesW 7y ago
FWIW, I'm using Teams from home as I type this, and I've never seen this come up as an issue in our (large-ish) company's communications channels. I don't believe you're experiencing a Teams problem.

Solar19 7y ago

The Teams client is built on Electron? Why? Developers need to stop building slow applications. This is ridiculous. It's 2019 and software is slower than it was in the 90s. It must take an enormous number of CPU cycles to execute simple tasks in an Election-based app. It's just incredibly inefficient. I heard similar things about Slack – that it was built on Node, maybe Electron, and was dog slow, especially to open. It's frustrating that developers are bringing the slowness of the web to the desktop. Just build proper desktop applications using native desktop APIs.

toxican 7y ago
It's built on Electron and still no native Linux client. There's a web version, but you can't join meetings or screenshare. There are 3rd party wrappers for the web version that enable meetings, but you still can't screenshare. At the very least their web version needs to have parity with the desktop application. It's 2019, browsers can handle voice chat and screensharing!
- pacoverdi 7y ago
  Well, there is an unofficial 'snap' package for Linux that enables all features including screen sharing. I don't remember the name but it must be easy to find. Edit: probably https://snapcraft.io/teams-for-linux https://snapcraft.io/teams-for-linux
  - briffle 7y ago
    you can view in a screen share, but not send your screen.
- utopian3 7y ago
  Wow, I’m pretty sure Hipchat is built on Electron and has had all these features for years! Microsoft must really be struggling
  - rekoros 7y ago
    What’s Hipchat?

noddingham 7y ago

I'm sorry but you've got to at least spell check if you're going to put something on the internet for others to read. Regarding the content, "It can take half a day because of all the fiddly little options that are so easily forgotten". What? If you've really been a "long time" Outlook user, then this is 10 minutes. Half hour tops. But a half day? This makes me not take anything you say after that statement seriously. And your complaints about teams are related to admin policies. Believe it or not enterprises actually have admins and policies regarding their desktops and tools. Unfortunately this represents what I've come to expect from medium content.

vadym909 7y ago

Fortunately I live wo either of these im tools. I know I'd go crazy trying to live an 'always on' life. I doubt the numbers MS throws around though to show how they are succeeding. If they are bundling Teams with Windows or Office of giving it away for free with Office 365 or Outlook, they could claim every single Windows laptop and PC as an active user and soon be at 1B users. Technically correct but oh so wrong!

timoth3y 7y ago

I use both daily. I think the biggest problem with Teams can't be discovered by feature comparisons and performance metrics. Teams enables a company to "secure" the application in the same way other MS products can be. That makes the product easy to sell, but in practice, it prevents Teams from being an effective collaboration tool. If I want to create a new channel, I need to get approval from IT. If I want to invite a vendor to participate, I need to convince IT that the benefit of adding this particular vendor to Teams outweighs a raft of vague "security" concerns. In the end, it's not worth the trouble of asking and I end up setting up Slack channels instead. By creating a product that can satisfy the IT policies of their enterprise customers, Microsoft has unwittingly created a platform completely unsuited to flexible and open collaboration.

choppaface 7y ago
In my experience with Slack, vendors are always locked down. A good practice is to create a totally separate Slack instance where vendors and contractors can talk freely with employees. If non-emoloyees are on company Slack, they can pick up IP, be witnesses to harassment, be exposed to PII leaks, etc. Locking down channels is tough. As a company grows, there can be immense confusion when channels pop up all over (especially duplicates). Having some friction to creation can be helpful, but that could be simple public “shaming” instead of getting IT / HR in the mix. When HR thinks its job is to administrate, the company has lost its chance at having a real culture. It sounds like using MS Teams is like having HR administrate over everything you say at work.
- timoth3y 7y ago
  That's effectively what I do as well, but we don't have a corporate Slack account. Teams is great for internal communications on long-running projects. It's well suited to that and I wouldn't substitute Slack. When used well, it cuts down on a ton of internal emails and status updates. I don't really blame IT for locking down Teams. It makes a lot of sense for all the reasons you mention and many more. It's just that by locking it down they prevent Teams from really being a challenger to Slack. It's not that Teams can't be configured to be just as useful as Slack, but enterprise IT best practices pretty much guarantees that it never will be.

dinofacedude 7y ago

I am going to have to use Microsoft Teams next semester at my college for project management class. Not looking forward to it. Especially since there is no Linux version, and Linux is the only OS I enjoy using.

atq2119 7y ago
Then be glad that it's at least not Skype for Business: Teams has a decent web client, SfB doesn't.

uglygoblin 7y ago

I'm not necessarily a fan of Teams but there's an unofficial Linux client that I use almost daily. It has some issues but mostly works. https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux

carlospwk 7y ago

Our Teams has Planner to do lists. Great, I thought, now our to dos are integrated into our chat platform. Then I tried to edit a comment I made on a card. Couldn't figure out, contacted our vendor only to find out it's NOT POSSIBLE! Googled it, tons of requests from years ago asking MS to implement edit and delete options for comments. Unbelievable.

fulafel 7y ago

Teams is replacing "Skype for Business", right? Horror must be relative. At least now with the Web clients MS-invested orgs might stop asking people to install virtual machines running Windows to videoconf / chat with them.

cleandreams 7y ago

We use it heavily but these aren't the features I dislike. In function Teams is a workflow browser but compared to real browsers it is very low functioning. No good bookmark system and ugh, no tabs. Even the back arrow doesn't scope properly, and anyway I find myself jumping around because I need multiple contexts. I find the meetings and phone to be fine. It does suck memory like a hog. Because it is a workflow browser I have to have the app open and also several browser accessed versions. That means my laptop slows down a lot.

nudpiedo 7y ago

To me that sounds like a “agile” failure. They were to agile for a design, to collect user feedback or any variable input, to fix the known problems, and to try a realistic set up as the client does.

mastazi 7y ago

Am I the only one noting the irony of criticising a piece of software by writing a post on Medium?

unixhero 7y ago

I like it. The reason is that in my situation, large enterprise corporate setting, it's the best I can get. Believe me it's been a breath of fresh air.

seren 7y ago
Same here, I don't feel that it is necessarily great, but it is not terrible either, and it is better for persistent goup chat that any group chat IM. I believe some teams have used Matterhorn or Slack internally but it was not necessarily 100% approved and not company wide Maybe, I should but I don't think that the using one solution versus another is such a game changer. People rarely fight about email clients either. Since we are subscribed to Office 365, I believe Teams is part of the package and it is likely an easier sell. Pretty clearly, it shows the power of Microsoft and bundle. Also, I am also glad that the "new" Microsoft is really focused on providing better tools, and not stuck with Office/Sharepoint only.

possiblelion 7y ago

The worst thing about Teams for me is the god-awful file managing solution. Everything shared actually goes in to the SharePoint backend, but changes made in Teams don't always carry over to SharePoint and vice versa. In addition, moving folders and files is such a broken and unintuitive pain, there's no way to do it inside Teams, you have to go to SharePoint in your browser. I'm sure everyone who has had the displeasure of using it agrees with me.

richdougherty 7y ago

Apart from the notification noise drowning out important messages I'd like the ability to select messages and copy them. Sadly if you drag and select you only get the bit of the Electron DOM that's currently visible on the screen. Vote here: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/31918531-allow-copying-whole-chat-conversations https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...

donmb 7y ago

> I realise that WhatsApp doesn’t have a proper desktop client That's just not true. The Desktop app of Whatsapp is imo excellent.

junkri 7y ago

another annoying bug is the "John Doe is out of office and may not respond." message banner at chats which of course can't be turned off

marble-drink 7y ago

I've been using IRC since the 90s and Teams is a regression, plain and simple. I agree with all the points made in the article. But hey, at least it has "stickers" for children.

robdachshund 7y ago

Anyone else use discord for work communication? No one ever mentions it.

Multicomp 7y ago

My company rolled out teams but then did it in such a way or only the designated administrators can create channels... if you're not a designated administrator you can only do multi-party dm to dm chat. The effect was probably half intended which is to say only the various corp administrators actually used teams, the rest of us just ignore teams save for their randomly blasted 'app is being updated guys!...guys?' and continue to use our half-baked email threads or GroupMe groups or other shadow IT solutions because the Enterprise solution is so painful / pseudo insulting. Conversations.im / chatsecure / gajim all with an ejabberd server and omemo style encryption works a treat. GroupMe for group chats from legacy groups from before the xmpp days which we plan to migrate to xmpp and yeah we have no need of teams.

martijn_himself 7y ago

In my experience Teams is often used alongside other 'channels of communication and collaboration' which makes it a burden more than anything else. Ever since it was introduced it seems more like an unfinished tech experiment (but Slack felt the same to me). It seems to be designed with the aim of increasing productivity rather than making it easier to communicate with people.

cannonedhamster 7y ago

I'm an admin of both Slack and Teams. Almost all of this is due to how his org configured Teams. While there's some valid complaints, a lot of this comes down to IT not understanding the needs of their users or simply not caring about the needs of their users because of some stupid opaque management decisions. You can mute chats same as on Slack. You can be forced to autojoin same as in Slack. I have regular meetings with customers in Teams. While Slack is absolutely still better at what it does most of his horrible experience comes down to crappy settings by his IT. The mobile device integration is truly abysmal though. Hoping in apps requires you to install those apps as well to do simple things like project management. The whole point of hooking in an app is to not have to go directly to said app. We haven't had a problem with notifications either. Most of what's possible in locking down Teams is possible to do it Slack it's just not default.

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nl 7y ago

Teams is like Sharepoint. It compares with the competition really well on paper, but the details suck the life out of you.

brynjolf 7y ago

Reading this thread [0] on their Uservoice shows that no progress has been done since August 2018 on notifications management for the end user. I'm sure they allow control when you create a channel but convincing the teammanager who very day pings the entire channel to say their work hours that day is impossible so that feature is more or less useless. The fact that you can praise coworkers with unicorns, being implemented before proper notifications, has made me go from believing in the future of Teams to now praising Slack. It is maddening. [0] https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/20592283-mute-a-channel-mute-chat-is-complete https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...

jjwhitaker 7y ago

This sounds like ad administrative issue with how Teams are built and organized within Teams. It can be clean, simple, and effective when managed properly but user training is important.

kisna72 7y ago

My main frustration with Teams are: - Caching + searching : Their caching and searching is just terrible. It's surprising how hard it is to search older messages especially in a private group chat. scrolling up takes a long time. Images don't show up in the desktop app, so I have to open web app all the time. - Centralized control: I agree that Teams is designed for centralized control. some of it might be good, but its a communation software, and telling people how to communicate seems like it'd defeat the purpose. - Not being able to add External people: Agree with the OP, this is a pain. People in my org did this well with slack, but once we were asked to move to teams, we weren't collaborating with external folks the same way. - Chat and Teams are two different windows. WHen I am in private chat area, I never see new messages in Teams area. Notifications for chat work fine when I am in teams area. - Threading: I think threading is poorly implemented, since it collapses the thread when you reopen the app. I feel like it would be an excellent improvement over email if this came out before slack. But slack has shown what a good chat software can do, and teams falls short in many ways.

makecheck 7y ago

The problem for me is that people haven’t really clued into social norms for chat clients as it is, and poorly-implemented clients make this worse. Some people honestly seem oblivious to any current chat status, launching into complex questions and expecting immediate replies just because you seem alive right now. I’m sorry but once I’m “in conference call” or otherwise really busy, you should get the hint. I shouldn’t need a chat client that lets me be virtually invisible just to get work done. And generally, I hate chat for work. E-mail/bug-track is enough. I want to deal with things when I actually have time to deal with them, not when someone else assumes I have infinite availability.

NoxArt 7y ago

I could pardon a lot of stuff early on, but what worries me is that _development_ of Teams is horribly slow. Given how basic it still is there's almost no progress. Probably the worst thing for me is that Teams seem to be able to hold like 6 chat messages in memory, if I scroll to the past it starts loading and it takes about 5+ seconds to load 6 more. If I go back it starts to load the messages I just seen again. Performance-wise it's catastrophically bad