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Being stuck at home and working 100% through Teams, I have to say, if Google wants to have a long-term strategy here, being more like teams and less like Apple
by bane 7y ago
Being stuck at home and working 100% through Teams, I have to say, if Google wants to have a long-term strategy here, being more like teams and less like Apple or Facebook would be better.
Chat + Forums + Fileshare + Video chat + Voice chat + OneDrive integration + Sharepoint integration + Kanban + goodness knows what else
Before the lock-down we all turned our nose up at it as "yet another lame chat app", now it's dominating everything, and it works on MacOS, Windows, iPhone, and Android -- so there's no excuse for anybody to not have it on their phone as well.
There's nothing else that's even close for us and just on my team we have about 60 people on it, and across the company over a thousand. It's almost 100% replaced all the other things that do the things in the list above with the exception of Jira and a few holdouts still using Webex (so there's a dial-in for people outside our org who don't have teams, but we've even been using for meetings across different organizations that have teams and it works perfectly fine).
Duo, Meet, Hangouts all seem really spare and kind of old fashioned now.
- pwarner 7y agoI am not sure Teams does anything well, but it does many things! Actually, I take it back, it is the best interface into SharePoint!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- p1necone 7y agoI was surprised after hearing all the negativity about it on here and other places that I actually like it. I don't see any major flaws - what problems do you have with it? We used slack before and teams definitely feels like a step up.
- curiousgal 7y agoPersonally I have issues with the Android app. For instance I sometimes can't join a meeting from my phone (I can see that the meeting started but there is no way to join in). The only solution is to join in from my laptop, only then does the Join button magically appear in the app.
- pwarner 7y agoThe channel or team messaging part is unusable. You can't leave channels, you can't ever get the right people in a team. Everyone just ends up using group chat, which is way more closed. For channel messaging it does not compete with Slack.
- bane 7y agoOn MacOS, I definitely have an option to "leave the team" or "leave channel" either by right clicking on one or hitting the hamburger dots.
- bane 7y agoAs many good things as I say about it, there's still some rough edges. - Starting a group telecon from a channel doesn't seem to exist. You have to start a chat with the same people and then you can start the meeting. - The screensharing selection interface is kinda wonky and doesn't show certain applications, it consistently won't give me an option to show Excel, but every other thing I have open is visible (MacOS). - It gets hung up sometimes if people paste lots of images into a long chat. - It needs better management of old chats, channels and so on, for example there's certain old chats from last year when we were first testing it that I really don't need around anymore and I'd like to get rid of. - The notification system is a bizarre mess, I can't quite seem to find the magic combination that turns off notification sounds, but plays a sound when somebody calls me for a voice or video chat.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jbc1 7y agoI haven't used it in a year so things might have changed, but it seemed to only have the last 20 or so messages with a person stored in memory and I'd have to wait for it to load if scrolling up to see more, and then only load them in batches of 20 or so at a time after that as well. It also didn't like me trying to paste screenshots directly in to it. instead I'd have to save them as a file and then upload that. For my use case at the time, which was getting engineering support as a software salesperson in an organisation with poor documentation, that was a huge downgrade from slack. Those extra seconds waiting or it to load or messing around with image files hurt when you're on the phone with someone.
- chrisweekly 7y ago"best interface into Sharepoint" ^ Candidate for all-time best illustration of the phrase "to damn with faint praise".
- velosol 7y agoTeams has an option for PSTN conferencing so if that's the only reason holding on to WebEx, it might be cheaper to add the PSTN option to Teams and ditch WebEx. Pricing: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-teams/online-meeting-solutions?rtc=1#customerstoryregion2 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-team...
- bane 7y agoThat's a good point. I'm regularly going back and forth between Teams conferences and Webex conferences and the Teams ones seem to take a quarter of the time to get started compared to the webex ones (with all the "are you on mute?", "I can't hear you" nonsense) and the quality tends to be higher. If I could junk webex entirely I'd love it.
- crazygringo 7y agoI mean, that's just G Suite -- Chat + Groups or Plus + Drive + Meet + Meet + Drive + Drive + goodness knows what else. I've never used Teams, but it seems like an awful lot for one app to handle. But the Google way of splitting it up across the logical apps seems to work well, since everything's integrated anyways. At the end of the day, does it really matter if you're using different icons in your home screen or different icons in a menu?
- Thorentis 7y agoAside from the single sign-on, I don't find the integration of Google products to be anywhere close to Microsoft's. When Google releases a new product, it's like the almost expect you to use it in isolation, but with your same account. And they love releasing new products. Google Calendar, Tasks, Keep, etc. Microsoft Teams brings together Office 365, Exchange, Share point, OneDrive, and then adds collab features on top for comms and organisation. You get your full existing Outlook Calendar appearing in teams, you get all your Outlook contacts, you can link to any doc in your OneD, shared edit, you get group chats and channels, you can create "Teams" (where the name of the app comes from) made up of different people in your Exchange org. For anybody using Microsoft AD/Exchange within their org, Teams is a natural choice. You don't need a new account, everybody else in the org is immediately searchable and contactable, there's no data import needed. It just works. And "it just works" has been the central driving feature of anything that has taken off during this lockdown.
- crazygringo 7y agoI mean, if your org already uses Microsoft then of course it makes sense to use Teams. But I guess I don't see how Google apps are "in isolation", it's the exact opposite. All my contacts appear in every app, whether Calendar or Meet or Docs. Links work everywhere. The Google concept of a team is basically that when you create a Group you can generally use it everywhere else (to share a doc, to create a calendar event, to add to a Team Drive, to start a chat, to notify of a comment, etc.). And heck, the "side panel" functionality literally allows you to load Keep inside of Gmail, or Calendar inside of Docs, if you don't want to open a whole new tab. Clearly the opposite of isolation. Maybe you've just never used Google apps this way, that you haven't seen their integration? I find it entirely natural to have a tab for Mail, Calendar, Keep, Tasks, and several Docs and Sheets in my browser. Perhaps for me, my tabbed browser window is the same as your Teams app? In either case, it seems like the functionality and integration is largely identical. Again, it's just a matter of whether the icons are at the browser tab or home screen level, or whether they're inside of a single app. It seems to be a very minor distinction at the end of the day.
- opmac 7y agoI'm not sure how this relates to Teams whatsoever and why you're drawing the comparison. Teams is for organizations who have Office 365. Duo is person to person chat... think Apple Facetime. I can't call up my Mom on Teams. I can with Duo.
- danielscrubs 7y agoIt's funny, because a friend of mine wanted to video chat yesterday. I wanted to use Hangouts, but he doesn't have an Google account (he's a director of his own company so he lives and dies with the company email), in the end he said: - No problem we'll just use Teams. Not having to create an account was kind of mind-blowing for me (in the "where's is the business incentive in not taking my email, and spamming it?!" kind of way).
- cosmie 7y ago> so he lives and dies with the company email While I don't see too many people take advantage of it, you can make a Google account without an associated Gmail account. You just have to choose "Use my current email address instead" on the signup page[1]. [1] https://accounts.google.com/signup/ https://accounts.google.com/signup/
- pcx 7y agoYou should try https://meet.jit.si https://meet.jit.si. Started using it this week, works great with no login necessary. And open source :)
- danielscrubs 7y agoCrashed the tab for me on Safari and they themselves say it's Chome only. Will be following it though!
- pcx 7y agoWorks great on Firefox for me
- graton 7y ago> .. so there's no excuse for anybody to not have it on their phone as well. Unless you are one of those people (like me) who don't want to put work related things on your phone. I like to have a separation between work and personal life. Thus why I don't put work email (or other things) on my phone.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kyriakos 7y agoAs someone who does all his work through teams I must say it's only strong point is integration with OneDrive and sharepoint. Other than that the application is a nightmare. On Windows its the slowest thing I'm running at any point, I understand its an electron app but there are no excuses for its performance. On android it keeps missing notifications. After a while the concept of teams in teams is being overlooked in favor of less formal chats which yet don't have all the features of teams. Now teams have channels which make zero sense if everyone from the team can also see them and there is no way to fix that. Sharing code requires 4 clicks and there is no keyboard equivalent way to get to it. And the list goes on. The sad truth is that if teams didn't come for free with office 365 it wouldn't be able to stand on its own.
- maxerickson 7y agoChat and channels and so forth are a big mess in Teams, but multiple channels in a Team do make sense, as topics.
- bane 7y agoWe usually start a channel for each program, and each project gets a channel as needed. It works really well as an organizational scheme.
- baq 7y agosharing code - do you mean ``` ? otherwise i kinda agree except it's years ahead of lync, so for microsoft shops it's still a net win. my personal pet peeve is lack of a global mute keyboard shortcut (win+f4 for lync).
- kyriakos 7y agoThanks didn't know the shortcut. Only issue doesn't let you choose the language for syntax highlighting.
- shrikant 7y ago> Now teams have channels which make zero sense if everyone from the team can also see them and there is no way to fix that. You can create private channels within teams. When you go to "Add Channels", there's a Privacy option that's set to Standard by default, but you can toggle it to Private and invite only specific team members to join.
- paxys 7y agoYou are conflating two very different business models. Google needs these products to generate ad revenue. They already have the GSuite stack that competes with Microsoft.
- bane 7y agoForget the business models. Duo and hangouts don't present me with ads for example. So that doesn't matter in any way in this comparison. What google needs to do is to stop fracturing communication modes across every single conceivable strata they can identify.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoMy Teams currently has 5 processes using 750MiB total. I don't need that running on my phone.
- speedgoose 7y agoIt has a very little usage of ram on phone. Basically 0 when you don't use it.
- crankylinuxuser 7y agoEven better yet, say I'm on my company's Teams instance. And I'm talking with a customer, who is on another Teams instance. I can cross over to their full videoconference with an invite, share screens, put notes in chat, whole 9 yards. For a moment, The company is just a logical division of the whole Teams infrastructure. That's powerful.
- bane 7y agoFor the last few weeks, I've been on a weekly 50 person conferences with people from 6 entirely different organizations/companies and it's been absolutely flawless. Presentations, slidesharing, filesharing, chat, driving somebody else's computer, the works. I've never experienced anything quite like it even if on paper it sounds like half a dozen other conference systems. It blows anything else I've used out of the water.
- deadbunny 7y agoEven my Linux loving, MS doubting self is mostly happy with teams. It's the only video chat I've found that properly handles multiple screens when sharing my screen from Linux. Most apps will only share the entire X "screen" which means it shares all 3 monitors as a single screen but teams allows me to select the actual monitor I want to share. If they got rid of the excessive whitespace at each side of the chat and used libnotify like civilized folks I'd be super happy.
- vladvasiliu 7y ago>If they got rid of the excessive whitespace at each side of the chat and used libnotify like civilized folks I'd be super happy. I wouldn't hold my breath. They use the same custom notification on Mac os and even on Windows. Oh, and on Linux, have you tried using it with a tiling wm ? The notification gets its own regular window. The first time it happened it was quite jarring to have it fill half my 32" monitor. Even since that happened, I've went back to using it through Firefox, which honors the system notification setup.
- deadbunny 7y agoI do indeed use it with a TWM, if you're using i3 like me you can fix it with the below in the i3 config, probably something similar in other TWMs. for_window [title="Microsoft Teams Notification"] floating enable Still not as useful as system notifications but it doesn't explode whatever I'm working on!
- oldmanhorton 7y agoWindows has an option to use native notifications, idk if that's where their headed towards or just an experiment
- kabes 7y agoThat's weird, since sharing each window or tab is standard in most browsers. It's just a 'navigator.mediaDevices.getDisplayMedia' call. So I would expect any webRTC solution to support it.
- 7y ago
- Shorel 7y agoI am a bit sad you forgot to mention Teams also works fine in Linux (Ubuntu) as I use it every day.
- gvjddbnvdrbv 7y agoGsuite has a well integrated group video conference app.
- Gudin 7y agoIf you're not into Microsoft ecosystem then you don't really need it. In IT company where Mac and Linux dominates we are already accustomed to other software and don't see any benefit in changing everything to use One Drive.
- globular-toast 7y agoTeams does a lot of things but not a single one is done well. Even the text chat, which has been working well for decades, is horrendously broken. The video calling is worse than Skype used to be before MS ruined it. I could go on.
- rathish_g 7y agoGoogle is doing something at http://chat.google.com/ http://chat.google.com/ Looks like a fresh start and has features similar to slack and MS team.
- dbbk 7y agoIt's a rebranding of Hangouts Chat: https://gsuite.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/products/chat/ https://gsuite.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/products/chat/
- TLightful 7y agoI only just noticed Duo as a spare app just hanging around on my phone the other day. If Google couldn't care less to bring it to my attention, I couldn't care less to try it. And now it's suddently important to them? Do the right thing at the right time. Invest and believe in your product becuase it's great. Don't try and jump on the bandwagon now that you've just suddenly reversed your decision to sunset the product because of what's going on. /rant