6 ms·

> Teams is particularly effective as a way to prevent a Microsoft customer from even trying Slack. You sure about that, Ben? Teams has been a disappointment f

> Teams is particularly effective as a way to prevent a Microsoft customer from even trying Slack. You sure about that, Ben? Teams has been a disappointment for my group. We need it. At least, we need what it is on paper. But it's been so bad that my (Microsoft-loving) boss asked me to write a groupware web app specifically for our workflow, so that we wouldn't have to try to make that shoe fit any more. The fundamental, universal problem that Microsoft is trying to fix with Teams is a problem of their own making: Office. Everyone LOVES to make Office documents. Can't write a memo without Word! Can't add a series of numbers without Excel! Can't have a meeting without a slide deck! So every non-single-office-sized organization has mountains and mountains of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files that lie scattered around various, obfuscatedly-shared directories, with absolutely zero ability to find the thing you KNOW is "out there" somewhere. They tried and failed to fix it with SharePoint. They tried and failed to fix it with OneNote. And now they're failing to fix it with Teams. Ray Ozzie fixed it with Groove, 15 years ago, then Microsoft acqui-hired him, and threw the product away. Good work, there, Ballmer.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago
I don't necessarily agree with you, but your point of view is rather interesting, and I've never seen or read it before. I guess it's hard to gauge the exact behavior of hundreds of millions of customers, from all over the world. Both you and I might be heavily biased by our point of view. I live in San Francisco; what do I know about German Microsoft users? Anyway, interesting thought.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  > I live in San Francisco; what do I know about German Microsoft users? You at least know they have tens of thousands of Office documents that no one but their creators can find when they need to reference them. ;-)
stefan_ 6y ago
Your response was to flee, right?
jasonv 6y ago
In the Enterprise organizations I've participated in recently, most of them have Teams & Slack. Business users and leadership go with Teams -- especially because it pulls in the Sharepoint connections they've been using for the last decade. Devs, devops and other tech teams gravitate towards Slack. And product/project management teams end up using both.
- enraged_camel 6y ago
  In my experience, most of the time, the only reason organizations even have Teams is because it comes included in Office 365 subscriptions.
  - jasonv 6y ago
    And my current org has spent a lot of time and energy integrating Teams into a highly regulated environment -- with additional archiving integrations. It wasn't just a "because it was there" kind of thing.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  SharePoint has fared so poorly in my Fortune 250 that the company rolled out Teams as its spiritual savior. Now, Teams has fared so poorly that the company is going to re-introduce the software next week -- with some Zoom meetings (uh, don't we already own Skype FOR BUSINESSSSSS?) -- and give away swag to get people re-interested. > This is where Teams thrives: if you fully commit to the Microsoft ecosystem, one app combines your contacts, conversations, phone calls, access to files, 3rd-party applications, in a way that “just works”... This is another part of the problem. Again, living in the litigious, policy-addled state of corporate IT that Microsoft has created, our company has turned off message history on Skype for dubious legal reasons, so this compelling integration is MIA for us. I suspect we are not alone in this decision.
  - saas_sam 6y ago
    Having flashbacks to my brief stint in F250 land. How do these companies successfully deliver products and services? It is amazing.
JoshTriplett 6y ago
I've seen firsthand that Teams is effective at drawing attention from Slack and similar. People want a persistent chat service. There was a strong push for Slack, or something like it. Some companies push back, but if there's enough momentum and demand, eventually infrastructure needs to provide some solution. And if a company is already a Microsoft shop, they'll provide Teams (with its full integration with everything else they're already using) rather than considering something like Slack.
- gav 6y ago
  A former employer bristled at the cost of Slack[1]. Why should we pay for Slack when we already own Teams? Everyone will just use Teams. About a week later I was on 4 unofficial Slack workspaces. They also mandated Teams for meetings, which was both terrible and particularly hostile to external invitees, so everyone just used free versions of Zoom instead. [1] Less than 0.07% of my base salary
  - thinkharderdev 6y ago
    Yeah, the one killer thing that slack has is that there is a free tier which is perfectly usable. Organizations can try and force everyone to use Teams but in practice they can't stop people from just spinning up a free-tier slack account for their team. At the end of the day it's just not worth fighting it anymore if everyone is determined to use slack.
    - tharne 6y ago
      > Organizations can try and force everyone to use Teams but in practice they can't stop people from just spinning up a free-tier slack account for their team. Unless you work for a large corporation or really any business that takes security seriously. Many of these businesses will quickly fire employees for conducting company business on non-approved applications or sites. Major security issues there.
      - prepend 6y ago
spaetzleesser 6y ago
I find it really hard to understand how MS thinks it’s ok to have such bad search functionality as Teams has. I am not able to find anything reliably in there. For the first few months it was ok to use not now finding something more than a year old is almost impossible. In my mind Teams has taken over the function of SharePoint to swallow docs to never be found again. Considering that Teams is a thin layer over SharePoint this makes sense...
walrus01 6y ago
> mountains of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files that lie scattered around various, obfuscatedly-shared directories, with absolutely zero ability to find the thing you KNOW is "out there" somewhere. They tried and failed to fix it I see this more as a corporate organizational problem and work flow issue with different departments' responsibilities, than microsoft not providing an adequate tool to create a "cloud" based fileserver (sharepoint, onenote, onedrive, etc). GIGO. I've seen people do useful things with sharepoint with a proper organizational structure thought of ahead of time, before it starts getting populated with content. And also have seen some truly terrible things done with sharepoint.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jimduk 6y ago
Support for the Ozzie comment - Groove was an interesting thing - strong, user friendly, permissions model built on groups as the user perceived them (as opposed to the corporate LDAP model). Once had a (cancelled) gig to deploy it for sheep farmers in Albania as the trust model mapped. IMHO Ozzie definitely understood the user perspective.
rodolphoarruda 6y ago
> Everyone LOVES to make Office documents. Can't write a memo without Word! This reminded my of when we gathered project managers from virtually all continents to define the company's global PM methodology. We had chosen Teamwork our PMS and the backbone for the methodology. The product has a nice text notes feature the group could be using to document anything to the favor of "seachability". But hey, someone said "we can only make a good impression with customers if we use Office documents". So instead of using simple text notes we ended up flooding the system with 3 trillion Office documents. Unreal.
scarface74 6y ago
So why do you doubt the data based on your anecdote?
alsobrsp 6y ago
> files that lie scattered around various, obfuscatedly-shared directories, with absolutely zero ability to find the thing you KNOW is "out there" somewhere. This is why I promote wiki's whenever I can. Locking data up in files makes it nearly useless.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

I don't necessarily agree with you, but your point of view is rather interesting, and I've never seen or read it before. I guess it's hard to gauge the exact behavior of hundreds of millions of customers, from all over the world. Both you and I might be heavily biased by our point of view. I live in San Francisco; what do I know about German Microsoft users? Anyway, interesting thought.

TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
> I live in San Francisco; what do I know about German Microsoft users? You at least know they have tens of thousands of Office documents that no one but their creators can find when they need to reference them. ;-)

stefan_ 6y ago

Your response was to flee, right?

jasonv 6y ago

In the Enterprise organizations I've participated in recently, most of them have Teams & Slack. Business users and leadership go with Teams -- especially because it pulls in the Sharepoint connections they've been using for the last decade. Devs, devops and other tech teams gravitate towards Slack. And product/project management teams end up using both.

enraged_camel 6y ago
In my experience, most of the time, the only reason organizations even have Teams is because it comes included in Office 365 subscriptions.
- jasonv 6y ago
  And my current org has spent a lot of time and energy integrating Teams into a highly regulated environment -- with additional archiving integrations. It wasn't just a "because it was there" kind of thing.
TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
SharePoint has fared so poorly in my Fortune 250 that the company rolled out Teams as its spiritual savior. Now, Teams has fared so poorly that the company is going to re-introduce the software next week -- with some Zoom meetings (uh, don't we already own Skype FOR BUSINESSSSSS?) -- and give away swag to get people re-interested. > This is where Teams thrives: if you fully commit to the Microsoft ecosystem, one app combines your contacts, conversations, phone calls, access to files, 3rd-party applications, in a way that “just works”... This is another part of the problem. Again, living in the litigious, policy-addled state of corporate IT that Microsoft has created, our company has turned off message history on Skype for dubious legal reasons, so this compelling integration is MIA for us. I suspect we are not alone in this decision.
- saas_sam 6y ago
  Having flashbacks to my brief stint in F250 land. How do these companies successfully deliver products and services? It is amazing.

JoshTriplett 6y ago

I've seen firsthand that Teams is effective at drawing attention from Slack and similar. People want a persistent chat service. There was a strong push for Slack, or something like it. Some companies push back, but if there's enough momentum and demand, eventually infrastructure needs to provide some solution. And if a company is already a Microsoft shop, they'll provide Teams (with its full integration with everything else they're already using) rather than considering something like Slack.

gav 6y ago
A former employer bristled at the cost of Slack[1]. Why should we pay for Slack when we already own Teams? Everyone will just use Teams. About a week later I was on 4 unofficial Slack workspaces. They also mandated Teams for meetings, which was both terrible and particularly hostile to external invitees, so everyone just used free versions of Zoom instead. [1] Less than 0.07% of my base salary
- thinkharderdev 6y ago
  Yeah, the one killer thing that slack has is that there is a free tier which is perfectly usable. Organizations can try and force everyone to use Teams but in practice they can't stop people from just spinning up a free-tier slack account for their team. At the end of the day it's just not worth fighting it anymore if everyone is determined to use slack.
  - tharne 6y ago
    > Organizations can try and force everyone to use Teams but in practice they can't stop people from just spinning up a free-tier slack account for their team. Unless you work for a large corporation or really any business that takes security seriously. Many of these businesses will quickly fire employees for conducting company business on non-approved applications or sites. Major security issues there.
    - prepend 6y ago

spaetzleesser 6y ago

I find it really hard to understand how MS thinks it’s ok to have such bad search functionality as Teams has. I am not able to find anything reliably in there. For the first few months it was ok to use not now finding something more than a year old is almost impossible. In my mind Teams has taken over the function of SharePoint to swallow docs to never be found again. Considering that Teams is a thin layer over SharePoint this makes sense...

walrus01 6y ago

> mountains of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files that lie scattered around various, obfuscatedly-shared directories, with absolutely zero ability to find the thing you KNOW is "out there" somewhere. They tried and failed to fix it I see this more as a corporate organizational problem and work flow issue with different departments' responsibilities, than microsoft not providing an adequate tool to create a "cloud" based fileserver (sharepoint, onenote, onedrive, etc). GIGO. I've seen people do useful things with sharepoint with a proper organizational structure thought of ahead of time, before it starts getting populated with content. And also have seen some truly terrible things done with sharepoint.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jimduk 6y ago

Support for the Ozzie comment - Groove was an interesting thing - strong, user friendly, permissions model built on groups as the user perceived them (as opposed to the corporate LDAP model). Once had a (cancelled) gig to deploy it for sheep farmers in Albania as the trust model mapped. IMHO Ozzie definitely understood the user perspective.

rodolphoarruda 6y ago

> Everyone LOVES to make Office documents. Can't write a memo without Word! This reminded my of when we gathered project managers from virtually all continents to define the company's global PM methodology. We had chosen Teamwork our PMS and the backbone for the methodology. The product has a nice text notes feature the group could be using to document anything to the favor of "seachability". But hey, someone said "we can only make a good impression with customers if we use Office documents". So instead of using simple text notes we ended up flooding the system with 3 trillion Office documents. Unreal.

scarface74 6y ago

So why do you doubt the data based on your anecdote?

alsobrsp 6y ago

> files that lie scattered around various, obfuscatedly-shared directories, with absolutely zero ability to find the thing you KNOW is "out there" somewhere. This is why I promote wiki's whenever I can. Locking data up in files makes it nearly useless.