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My company tried MS Teams for about two days before canning it and switching back to Slack + Zoom. I've never encountered such a poorly designed product [1] oth

by meritt 6y ago

My company tried MS Teams for about two days before canning it and switching back to Slack + Zoom. I've never encountered such a poorly designed product [1] other than the one it was supposed to replace, Skype for Business. Why the does chat need to take up so much space on the screen and why is everything presented in basically an old school SMS layout (I'm looking at you too, Signal). I tried a handful of their integrations nothing worked correctly. Trying to simply enable github commits/PRs/etc was a confusing nightmare of authenticating multiple parties and ultimately all it did was have a chatbot privately spam me, but couldn't have it reside in a channel. Screen sharing is a disaster for everything business oriented too (ms teams, zoom, slack, whatever google's thing is called this week). They're slow, laggy, frequently crash, and resolution is unreadable most of the time. If you need to have screen sharing where your voice chat happens at the same time as your video actions, Discord is the only thing that works flawlessly. It's superior on simple voice chat too, persistent voice chat rooms, etc. It's lovely software. [1] https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/02/teams-beta-windows-100708530-large.jpg https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/02/teams-bet...

wenc 6y ago
Screen-sharing on Teams has been pretty solid -- after all, screen sharing is an enterprise's bread and butter. As someone who averages 10-15 meetings a week, most of them with screen shares, I think I have a pretty good sample size to come to that conclusion. I can't comment on aesthetics since that's fairly subjective. I can't comment on integrations either since I've only tried a few, but I find it integrates fairly effortlessly with Azure Devops (ie Microsoft's attempt at replicating Github in what was previously Team Foundation Server) [1]. Here's the thing about Microsoft stuff -- generally things work well if you remain in the Microsoft ecosystem. Otherwise, you'll likely have to do extra work. That said, Teams has improved drastically since 2017. Microsoft's philosophy these days seems to be move fast, ship crap and get better quickly. Not in every product line, but I've definitely seen this happen with Teams development and I've actually come to like what the Teams product has become today. I have to confess, Microsoft under Satya Nadella is a very different company from what it once was. [1] We're not allowed to use Github in my organization (bigcorp, IP etc.) but I've found Azure Devops to be quite a decent substitute. It plays well with a git pull-request workflow, has almost full feature parity with Github as far as I can tell, plus has a built-in kanban board. I like Github -- it's more tightly focused and simpler -- but I've been able to carve out a part of Azure Devops that is similar to Github and maintain my previous git workflow without much trouble. Azure Devops is not the dumpster fire I'd expected it to be -- it's actually fairly good in parts. (the only pain-in-the-neck with Azure Devops is licensing cost -- it's not free. In the enterprise, it has named-user licensing which can get costly. I wouldn't have used it if we didn't already have it and couldn't use private Github.)
- meritt 6y ago
  > We're not allowed to use Github in my organization (bigcorp, IP etc.) Is your organization aware that Microsoft owns Github and your Azure stuff is most likely hosted inside Microsoft data centers exactly like Github? Seems like a weird line in the sand to draw. > Microsoft under Satya Nadella is a very different company from what it once was. Yeah, Microsoft is doing great things in other areas. VS Code, Windows 10, WSL, DirectX on WSL, the massive focus on open source and giving back to the community. I just found MS Teams in particular is unusable garbage, but I'm very happy with Microsoft otherwise. I don't know if you're old enough but MS Comic Chat was significantly superior to Microsoft Teams.
  - wenc 6y ago
    Our source control has to be on-prem (our Azure Devops is on-prem). I've never used it but I'm old enough to remember Comic Chat. Fair enough, we have different positions and that's ok.

by meritt 6y ago

wenc 6y ago

Screen-sharing on Teams has been pretty solid -- after all, screen sharing is an enterprise's bread and butter. As someone who averages 10-15 meetings a week, most of them with screen shares, I think I have a pretty good sample size to come to that conclusion. I can't comment on aesthetics since that's fairly subjective. I can't comment on integrations either since I've only tried a few, but I find it integrates fairly effortlessly with Azure Devops (ie Microsoft's attempt at replicating Github in what was previously Team Foundation Server) [1]. Here's the thing about Microsoft stuff -- generally things work well if you remain in the Microsoft ecosystem. Otherwise, you'll likely have to do extra work. That said, Teams has improved drastically since 2017. Microsoft's philosophy these days seems to be move fast, ship crap and get better quickly. Not in every product line, but I've definitely seen this happen with Teams development and I've actually come to like what the Teams product has become today. I have to confess, Microsoft under Satya Nadella is a very different company from what it once was. [1] We're not allowed to use Github in my organization (bigcorp, IP etc.) but I've found Azure Devops to be quite a decent substitute. It plays well with a git pull-request workflow, has almost full feature parity with Github as far as I can tell, plus has a built-in kanban board. I like Github -- it's more tightly focused and simpler -- but I've been able to carve out a part of Azure Devops that is similar to Github and maintain my previous git workflow without much trouble. Azure Devops is not the dumpster fire I'd expected it to be -- it's actually fairly good in parts. (the only pain-in-the-neck with Azure Devops is licensing cost -- it's not free. In the enterprise, it has named-user licensing which can get costly. I wouldn't have used it if we didn't already have it and couldn't use private Github.)

meritt 6y ago
> We're not allowed to use Github in my organization (bigcorp, IP etc.) Is your organization aware that Microsoft owns Github and your Azure stuff is most likely hosted inside Microsoft data centers exactly like Github? Seems like a weird line in the sand to draw. > Microsoft under Satya Nadella is a very different company from what it once was. Yeah, Microsoft is doing great things in other areas. VS Code, Windows 10, WSL, DirectX on WSL, the massive focus on open source and giving back to the community. I just found MS Teams in particular is unusable garbage, but I'm very happy with Microsoft otherwise. I don't know if you're old enough but MS Comic Chat was significantly superior to Microsoft Teams.
- wenc 6y ago
  Our source control has to be on-prem (our Azure Devops is on-prem). I've never used it but I'm old enough to remember Comic Chat. Fair enough, we have different positions and that's ok.