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Microsoft Teams. I am forced to use it (work) and it is missing really basic features that messenger software had in the 1990s like Push-To-Talk, real multi-wi

Microsoft Teams. I am forced to use it (work) and it is missing really basic features that messenger software had in the 1990s like Push-To-Talk, real multi-window (even with the recent "pop-out" functionality), and its UI is all the worst modern trends. You cannot extend it or fix these issues (e.g. plugins, custom CSS styles, etc). Plus it is buggy, I keep not getting calls/messages/etc, and every time my computer sleeps/wakes it sits in offline until you open the main window from the system tray. Those are year+ old bugs. While it is often updated[0], the Team's priorities leave a lot to be desired. Adding new gimmicks and tie-ins while ignoring the dilapidated state of the core software itself for two+ years now. [0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-new-in-microsoft-teams-d7092a6d-c896-424c-b362-a472d5f105de https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-new-in-mic...

GordonS 6y ago
+1 for Teams. Video calling actually works great, but gods the UX is appalling! It's just so confusing and inconsistent. As you said too, the whole thing is buggy. Sometimes screen sharing doesn't work unless you reopen the app, for example. The wiki feature is crap (at least the web version, I haven't tried the desktop version of the wiki) - formatting is a mess, markdown support is practically non-existent, it's buggy as hell, and so unbelievably slow. If they had a feature freeze and concentrated on overhauling the UI and fixing the bugs, it could actually be a great product... but as it is, it's loathsome.
- zarify 6y ago
  The screen sharing one has bitten me a couple of times. I record live classes for students, and we've had occasions when someone who was away goes back to the video and it's a black screen with me nattering away as if they can see it :/ That said, apart from the shitty embedding support and their channel management, I REALLY like Stream and using it for a video lesson platform. The captioning is quite good even for my fast talking, Aussie accent and jargon.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    Ah yes, I noticed the live CC recently! I tried it out in a conf call between myself (very Scottish accent), a Swede, a Norwegian, an Indian and an American - it really was amazingly accurate for everyone! That said, beyond novelty I'm not sure how useful a CC feature is.
    - zarify 6y ago
      Some of my students tell me I talk too fast, so it can be helpful for them to review content, and I've had quite a few students with varying degrees of hearing impairment. Pretty useful in my field.
    - GEBBL 6y ago
      Massively helpful to me, a deaf person.
- crest 6y ago
  And at least on macOS screen sharing doesn't work with a German keyboard layout. Neither the German nor the US keyboard layout modifiers work correctly. At least it is enough to bootstrap a better remote desktop connection.
- nsilvestri 6y ago
  The desktop wiki feature is awful, but it's awful in the same way that any of the pseudo-markdown for setting in teams is awful. The WYSIWYG editor constantly doesn't recognize backtick monospace formatting, or is overzealous in hijacking the cursor when you are trying to type adjacent to monospace formatting. The enter key seemingly arbitrarily makes either newlines or continues to the next section. I've spent a few hours writing wiki entries this last week and it does not spark joy to the point where I wonder if anybody who works on Teams wiki functionality actually has used it.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    That problem with the enter key making it jump around sections is there in the web version too! A few weeks back I spent a lot of time compiling a wiki, and that combined with the lag of the web version absolutely drove me nuts!
arprocter 6y ago
I noticed earlier even if Teams is switched 'off' in Startup Apps it'll still run when Windows starts unless you tell it not to under settings in the client
- 0xfaded 6y ago
  To kill the Linux version you need to run "killall teams" in a loop because it keeps trying to respawn itself
PopeDotNinja 6y ago
I miss ICQ.
- jachee 6y ago
  I miss the heyday of IRC. I'm aware there are niche communities still thriving on it, but I miss when it was the primary real(-ish)-time chat option.
olav 6y ago
+1 for MS Teams. I am forced to use it at work, too. Terrible audio focus on a single speaker, it really forces you to speak like on these old CB radios where you had to say "over" every time you were done talking. The single window UI follows the mobile-first trend but is awfully inefficient on my three monitor setup, even more so with screen sharing. Plus, our admins lock the whole MS Office 365 down so that there are no APIs or third-party plugins allowed. Data in it is just trapped. Such a waste of human potential.
- stu2b50 6y ago
  >Plus, our admins lock the whole MS Office 365 down so that there are no APIs or third-party plugins allowed. Data in it is just trapped. To be fair, that's a feature from team's perspective. If your admins are worried about sensitive data leaking out at all, and refuse to have a whitelist of approved 3rd party integrations, then that's on them. Imo it's a good thing to allow admins to do.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jimnotgym 6y ago
  The feedback from our users has been that the audio quality is amazing. Sounds like a hardware problem to me. Perhaps you are one of those annoying people who won't wear a headset in a conference call, so we all get to hear your background noise?
  - akiselev 6y ago
    You're getting feedback from users right now and it's not amazing. It seems that this one of the longest (negative) threads about a single piece of software in this topic, second only to git which is turning out to be HN's version of the Crusades 7.0
w_t_payne 6y ago
+1 for Teams. It's horrible.
nisse72 6y ago
Teams is utter shite. Especially if you're forced to use the web version (because linux). This goes for all of Office365.
- imhoguy 6y ago
  There is desktop version for Linux. It is still web app, probably wrapped as Electron app, but it integrates a bit better than plain web tab.
  - kyriakos 6y ago
    Windows version is also a Web app in electron
  - nisse72 6y ago
    Yes but ms gov cloud is unfortunately not supported.
  - ForHackernews 6y ago
    Same with Slack
  - vladvasiliu 6y ago
    It is wrapped in Electron, but as other siblings have said, so are the Windows and Mac versions. I use the Linux one and it actually works surprisingly well. Video calls, screen sharing, etc. However, for some reason, if when you start Teams the mic is unplugged, it will never detect it if plugged in afterwards. I often use it on a desktop pc without a built-in mic, and I only plug my headphones in case of a call. 100% of the time I have to restart Teams. Oh, and as others have said elsewhere, it's painfully slow. There's a constant sort of lag about it. For example the highlights changing in the chats list when moving the mouse on top of them...
zwayhowder 6y ago
Rearrangement of messages in channel based on threads, forcing replies that weren't in thread out of order. A UX that encourages replying out of thread because it's too darn confusing. Unable to quote messages on desktop, but you can on mobile. Unable to be signed into more than one Team. Have they never heard of consultants? At one point last year I had 4 separate Teams I needed to be signed into. Microsoft's solution have different Chrome profiles (Yep, Chrome, not Edge) for each one. My laptop only has 16GB of ram, so that didn't last long... Super unclear UX around document viewing. I open a file in Teams and if I have write access I am instantly saving all changes. So many times I've shared a document for feedback and then had to recover the original version from Sharepoint because people changed a lot of things without Track changes on. Based on Sharepoint. 'nuff said.
- kevsim 6y ago
  > Rearrangement of messages in channel based on threads Wait, what? Do threads move when they get replies or something?
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    Yup. Straight to the bottom of the page. Did you know, they're pushing it into schools? Every time a student asks a question, all other students lose track of which pieces of work they've still got left to do.
    - Closi 6y ago
      I don’t think putting all the work for students to do is seen as the use case for teams channels - it’s for chat and discussion. If you are trying to get students to do work, maybe use something like planner, sharepoint or any of the other myriad of tools actually designed for collaborative working rather than chat.
      - wizzwizz4 6y ago
        The intended Teams place for these things to be is either Assignments or the "_Content Library" section of a Class Notebook. Both of them are harder for teachers to use than a channel called "homework" (or just the main channel; creating a channel is hard, too).
sershe 6y ago
+1. I don't actually have too many complaints about the features, other than perhaps that the download management is intrusive and inconvenient, but it's SLOW. So SLOW. It's mind boggling how much CPU it uses and how much it stutters when merely typing.
rorykoehler 6y ago
We switched over recently too and it suffers from trying to be all things to all people.
AdrianB1 6y ago
+ 1. While in a chat if I open a voice call with that person, it creates a new instance with the chat frame closed. If I want to navigate into a channel and open a file, if I go back to the discussion the file is closed, I need to navigate again. It should have multi-window, multi-tab capabilities.
blcArmadillo 6y ago
I actually like the UX of Teams' chat more than the other common chat services. Main reasons: 1. There is whitespace between messages 2. My replies are a different color and right justified Most of the other common corporate chat apps just look like a wall of text to me.
robin_reala 6y ago
The worst thing about Teams is that for no reason they’ve decided to roll their own notifications framework on macOS that doesn’t respect Do Not Disturb settings. That’s the absolute minimum a notifications system should do: stop appearing when told to.
- jasonv 6y ago
  Spark, the email client, has this same problem on iOS. When I go for a run I DND my iPhone but Spark keeps sending notifications. I ended up deleting it and settling for gmail on the phone, but in actuality, I resist doing any email on my phone because the gmail app is so terrible. Maybe it’s a “win”.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Odd, that generally isn't possible in iOS. Perhaps you're running into some strange iOS bug or behavior quirk?
- Terretta 6y ago
  And is considered a full fledged “window”, a decision bringing a whole host of annoyances if you have multi screens and/or do window management.
- kyriakos 6y ago
  Same on Windows. Doesn't use Windows 10 notification system. This means sometimes I get a proper Windows notification and at the same time a message and instead of the two notifications to be stacked they are overplayed on top of each other.
- kingnight 6y ago
  There isn't anything that gets me so flustered throughout the day than this. I would turn these banners off, but as far as I can tell, there is no way to get badges to show up on the icon (only other cue to remind me people want to talk to me) without these banners. I really wish there was a 3rd party client that was all native that I could use. Teams is definitely the worst part of my software stack.
lloydatkinson 6y ago
Don’t forget posting a link rarely embeds properly. Posting a YouTube video doesn’t show a player like practically every modern chat platform. Oh and the most insulting part is how they treat its users like children. You can use giphy to embed a gif but if you search for any “bad” words it says no results. Search for fuck, and it hides them. Everyone using it is an adult, why apply this conservative boomer “nO sWeARIng alLOweD”? To top it off if you instead copy paste a giphy url it doesn’t embed that properly either!
- dylz 6y ago
  For the last bit, giphy basically lies to serve ads and tracking. A giphy .gif URL is not actually a .gif, or an image file even.
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  > Everyone using it is an adult, It's the primary platform for entire schools, now. Whoopee. So you're going to get lots of new child protection features (that fail at their intended purpose) added.
  - jimnotgym 6y ago
    There is pretty fine grained control for admins over that kind of stuff though.
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      Some of which fails GDPR compliance, and violates Microsoft's own privacy statement: https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-gb/privacystatement https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-gb/privacystatement (see the Education sections, where they say they don't collect lots of info that's collected by Teams).
fmpwizard 6y ago
Like many others, we were also forced to use it at work, hard to pick the worse part of Teams but a big one is how slow it is from the time I click the "reply" link until I can actually type a message. So many times I click, start typing and then I notice it missed about 4 to 5 letters, and I don't even consider myself fast at typing. Oh, and how you upload a file/image, need to wait until it is fully uploaded but after that you still need to click the "Send" button to actually post the file. It's definitely an enterprise kind of app, one that makes sure you take forever to do anything.
- userbinator 6y ago
  There's also a very noticeable lag on mute/unmute, that causes others in a conversation to miss the first word or two that I say immediately after unmuting. The workaround is to wait a second or two before speaking, but I've used VoIP and video back in the MSN Messenger days, on a far less powerful machine, and it didn't have that problem.
- jachee 6y ago
  How about when you [alt/cmd]-tab to it, it shows you a blinking cursor in an input field, but no matter what key you hit, you can't type in that field without clicking on it? Infuriating.
- johnwalkr 6y ago
  I always forget this. And then if you send the same file to someone else it overwrites the file but the first file and the first person can no longer access it? And then you realize it’s not just a file but a share point link? Yeah that will surely work next year when you need to Go back and double check something.
EvanAnderson 6y ago
Don't forget Outlook randomly crashing due to the Teams "add-in" failing, and Teams thoughtfully reinstalling and re-enabling add-in whenever it gets updated.
gcatalfamo 6y ago
And why the hell is it not native
hinkley 6y ago
As a recent Teams user, I don't know if Teams is bad on its own merits, or if the conception is just enough different from Slack that I can never quite figure out whether a feature exists and where it's hidden. Generally I don't have much time to mutter about Teams because some Atlassian monstrosity is busting my balls.
- philipwhiuk 6y ago
  It's both. Everything from WhatsApp to SMS to Slack has a unified list of chats. Teams does not. Teams is wrong.
imhoguy 6y ago
Company switched to it from Slack recently for cost cuts. Generally a huge downgrade of user experience: channel threads are mess to read after a while of being away; no way to lookup/mention other users in private chats; chats and channels is like two separate apps- constant switching between them; activity feed is not always up to date; messages once red on desktop are still left in notifications on mobile; chats list is dynamic - very easy to choose wrong chat by mistake; code snippet editing is unintuitive.
- sli 6y ago
  Code snippet editing is awful in Azure for all the same reasons. Inserting code and then going back to normal text is like trying to exit vim for the first time.
LandR 6y ago
I hatE Teams. Search is broken in it and if you scroll back a few days on a conversation it just stops loading messages... It's just awful.
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  Scroll down and up again to get it to trigger loading more. You'll lose your place, though, because it will immediately jump, then unload what it just loaded…
ack210 6y ago
I've never felt that anything has captured the essence of what it's like to use Microsoft's software better than the URLs Teams generates for meetings scheduled via Outlook. Why use something like Zoom's 9 digit meeting numbers when you can have a 250+ character url complete with long seemingly random strings and a url-encoded JSON object? The plugin will try to hide this behind a "Join Teams Meeting" hyperlink, but on more than one occasion I've had the link converted to plaintext, leaving the recipient with no idea what they're supposed to do. So every time before sending a teams meeting from Outlook I have to extract the mess of a URL and manually paste into the location field.
- prepend 6y ago
  It’s weird how OneDrive does the same thing. Why not use the Dropbox and gdrive method of some uid? Obviously a super long url with paths and query string variables is better, right? Microsoft is pretty cool with training though. During the training they said this wasn’t an issue because the url gets converted to the file name on display. And we’d only ever want to paste urls into outlook or teams, nowhere else.
jl6 6y ago
Can someone explain why Teams is so totally unable to interoperate with anything else, to the point where you can’t save messages, you can’t export chats, and you can’t even print them! The lock-in is intense.
- jimnotgym 6y ago
  That is a bit of a strange statement. There is an API, there is an app store full of the Trello's and Jira's of this world. Chats copy and paste or share to Outlook just fine for me. You can even use Flow to save all of your chats... literally anywhere that has a connector. The lock-in is imaginary.
  - jl6 6y ago
    How do you copy and paste chats without having to go back and expand all “show more” links (potentially hundreds of clicks)? Even then, I can not get it to reliably select more than a page or two. Apps are not allowed in my corporate deployment. I’d settle for “save to PDF”.
  - atraac 6y ago
    I've created a simple bot that posts memes in our chats/channels and '1337' every day at 13:37. The teams API is incredibly bad and illogical in most places. You just can't make a Slack-like bot for Teams, because of how limited everything is. Not mentioning breaking changes in their SDKs(like literally recently message .Text started putting some weird random bytes in front of actual message that broke all regexes for us), 3 different types of conversations that you handle differently and an overly complicated way of adding bots to your teams/conversations. Add to that and incredibly slow Electron app with bad UX, typing lag and around 2gb constant ram usage and here you go, worst chat application I've ever used.
- nikanj 6y ago
  Nobody would use it if porting out was easy
abhgh 6y ago
Tell me about it. We moved from Slack to Teams to cut costs. Common story. Leaves a LOT to be desired. 1. The UI took the fun out of well, whatever, Slack was/is. For some of the common interest channels at work, I see less people going to them. 2. I'm in a group where we frequently need to share images (mostly plots) among the members. Sometimes they just disappear. Yes. You upload an image during a conversation, come back to it a few min later, its not there, and the person at the either end of the chat hasn't seen it either. Guess what OS I'm on: Windows 10 Pro. Because of this I've resorted to using the web version of teams occasionally, which doesn't seem to suffer from this issue. 3. This one is actually baffling: when I try to upload an image in 2 different conversations (one after another), the second one complains the file already exists. This is during upload. 4. Inconsistent UI: did you know you could reply to individual messages from the Android app for Teams? Doesn't work on web or the windows desktop client. So when I am catching up on a conversation, I occasionally switch to the mobile app to reply to specific messages. So that's my workflow: the Teams website opened on my laptop browser for most of the messaging, Teams running on mobile, in case I need to reply to specific messages, and Teams running as an application on my laptop for video/screen sharing calls. 5. You cannot specify a Download folder. Yes that's a thing in 2020. [1] But, yeah, "costs". I miss Slack. [1] https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/18693262-have-the-download-function-of-files-allow-you-to-s https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- toyg 6y ago
  > when I try to upload an image in 2 different conversations (one after another), the second one complains the file already exists That's because, bafflingly, it uses a local directory-cache for files. Think of it as the "Downloads" folder for a browser. Any time you upload, Teams will try to save it to your local cache first; if it finds the old file, it will whine like that. Any time you want to upload a file, you should really not do in Chats but in Channels, which have a separate area for each Channel (backed by Sharepoint). Except in some companies (like where I'm now) people for some reason use Chats almost exclusively instead of Channels, so the whole thing becomes awkward: go to the channel, upload, get the link, paste the link in chat. I guess it could be worse, it could be AOL.
retromario 6y ago
My biggest annoyance with Teams is its shitty search functionality. You search for a topic you discussed with a colleagues a few weeks ago. It'll show you the direct hits, but there's zero way to jump to that point of the conversation and see the context, the message before or after. It's so infuriating.
- jbeam 6y ago
  I once had to scroll for 30 minutes to find a critical piece of information because of this. I could find the time stamp of a related message but needed the context. So I just had to scroll. And scroll. And scroll some more. Mind boggling that continues to make it past UAT.
PascLeRasc 6y ago
Teams is absolutely awful. I also have all the crashes, undelivered notifications, shitty UI, but whatever, that's par with Microsoft. I have an issue where if there's any sound in my room in a meeting, it reduces the volume of someone else talking to me even if my mic is muted. My workaround is to only keep one earbud in and constantly listen for cars driving past outside so I can crank up the volume in advance. So Teams is literally painful to my ears.
- jachee 6y ago
  Using a headset with a physical mute switch on the mic could solve that problem.
jimnotgym 6y ago
I am going to go against the grain and say I rather like Teams. Video calls work really well. Voice calls are clear. Screen sharing occasionally doesn't work as some have noticed, but restarting the call seems to fix it. It is so much better than Webex though. I think it is still suffering from the teething troubles of trying to bring so many things under one umbrella, Sharepoint (which already had groups), Skype for business, Onedrive and chat. This has created some quirks which will need ironing out. The killer feature really is that it is a dream to deploy for admins who already had AD. I pushed it by group policy and sent an email telling people to log in with their existing Office credentials. I can't remember what I did with macs, I think I may have just told users to grab it from the appstore. Think of all the admins faced with having to move their whole company to home working with no notice for Covid-19, you can see why Teams is an app that has found it's moment. Teams has been the saviour of many companies during the crisis. I'm sorry but minor UI niggles (which I personally don't find problematic) just pale into insignificance.
- ImaCake 6y ago
  I've been using Teams for some work and I also agree that it's pretty good. I really like the integration with OneDrive/Sharepoint so you can build up a project of files. Using remote files on local instances of MS office products is seemless and super easy to do. Of course, the version control isn't as good as something like git, but my coworkers are not familiar with git and don't have any interest in learning it. So at least with Teams I can have my work live on a Team's folder/repository thing so anyone else at my job can access it when they need to, complete with version history!
- toyg 6y ago
  Some of the skepticism around here might be a bit outdated. I tried Teams about 4 years ago and found it bad; I was recently forced to use it again and now the experience is fairly pleasant overall. I don't understand why they split "Chats" from Channels though - or rather I have suspicions about causes, I just think the better way forward (from an UX perspective) would have been to keep everything in Channels.
  - 6y ago
nknealk 6y ago
For those complaining about Teams slowness, I've found following this guide to clear out cached content dramatically speeds up the application especially on mac: https://td.unh.edu/TDClient/KB/ArticleDet?ID=2197 https://td.unh.edu/TDClient/KB/ArticleDet?ID=2197
swasheck 6y ago
Good for chat channels. Tries to be a central repo for all of your business docs. Chews RAM like it’s its prime directive. Can’t actually find the centralized doc unless you magically remember the channel or team where it was originally shared. UX is actively hostile and so inefficient.
userbinator 6y ago
You cannot extend it or fix these issues (e.g. plugins, custom CSS styles, etc). It's probably possible to mod it, given that it's Electron, and definitely easier than doing same to a native application, but the relative lack of configurability is certainly irritating. The amount of RAM and CPU it uses is also ridiculous even in comparison to Slack, which was already pretty bloated. (I wonder if any thirdparty clients have been created --- at least two exist for Slack, but I haven't looked for Teams.) I've also been forced to use it, and have considered doing some RE and writing a Win32 native one to show MS what it should've done --- if anything I expect they should have plenty of Win32 programmers who know how to do it --- but like many others, have too many things to fix and not enough time for them...
imgabe 6y ago
I've been forced to use Microsoft Teams recently. After using it once the app decided it's no longer connected to the Internet. Every other program seems to have no problem figuring out that I'm connected to the Internet, but somehow Microsoft Teams is like "Nope" This is on Windows computer too, like, how do you guys not know how to detect an Internet connection on your own operating system?
georgeburdell 6y ago
We use Skype internally but some people have started to use Microsoft Teams. At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, these Microsoft Teams meetings never seem to have a dial-in number (my laptop microphone is horrible). If I try to use my computer's microphone to speak, it asks for camera permission at the same time. I don't want everyone to see me in briefs, just listen to my voice. So it's apparently either share my video and audio, or just be silent. I've been choosing to be silent. I've spent the majority of my only two Teams meetings trying to figure out these issues. I never had a problem with other apps like GotoMeeting, Zoom, or Discord, or even Skype (also owned by Microsoft)
- toyg 6y ago
  > So it's apparently either share my video and audio, or just be silent. Maybe in the past, or on some clients only. On the Windows client you can currently operate camera and mic independently and choose how to respond to each calls (with video or audio only).
- hnick 6y ago
  We have users on remote desktop machines but the microphone/sound doesn't pass through. IT's "solution" was to install the app on your phone and use that for talking and your computer for viewing. Yay.
philipwhiuk 6y ago
The lack of a common 'chats' list shows that nobody who used it has ever used another communications tool.
Assossa 6y ago
I've been using Teams at college for over a year now and at work for a couple months. It baffles me that there are simple, obvious bugs that have remained all that time. For instance, on the Windows desktop app, the word "I've" gets marked as incorrectly spelled. When you click on it to see the spelling suggestions, it suggests "I've". Clicking on the suggestion does nothing and it continues to flag it. This has been an issue in the app for over a year and I refuse to believe that the developers are unaware of it. It's a very common word to be typing. Another problem is sending files or images. You have to wait for it to finish uploading before it will let you send the message. Not only is it pretty slow (I would estimate 1MB/s, whereas Discord uploads at my full 12MB/s), but sometimes it won't let you send for a couple seconds even after it finishes uploading. A couple months ago Teams added read receipts, which is really nice, but they don't always work. My work has them globally enabled and everyone is on the latest client, yet each person only sees them for certain other people. I don't see them for anyone, but my coworker sees them for about 50% of our staff. Notifications are also buggy. Teams will just randomly decide to not give you notifications for messages or calls. I've missed multiple messages in Teams for days because it never alerted me. I had to actually open the specific chat with that person before I saw the message. I've gotten into the habit of checking Teams every 15 minutes because of this. Teams for Android also seems to send notifications a good 30 seconds before the desktop app does, so I usually keep my phone on my desk solely for Teams notifications. I would also like to point out that Microsoft built a general-purpose notification system into Windows, yet Teams uses a completely custom notification system. This completely baffles me as they aren't even following their own company's best practices.
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  > For instance, on the Windows desktop app, the word "I've" gets marked as incorrectly spelled. When you click on it to see the spelling suggestions, it suggests "I've". Clicking on the suggestion does nothing and it continues to flag it. This has been an issue in the app for over a year and I refuse to believe that the developers are unaware of it. It's a very common word to be typing. The spelling situation gets better than this. You're actually forced to use the Teams one. For example, on MacOS, text fields get "free" spelling and grammar by the OS, which honour whatever settings you've configured. Of course, Teams doesn't use MacOS text fields, so they're on their own. I live in France and so use French in Teams, but I absolutely hate having programs in several languages so all my programs are in US English. If I set Teams to use English for the interface, guess what language it uses for spelling? I'm still looking for a way to tell it in which language to check spelling, but we'll have probably switched to the next shiny thing until this happens...
hnick 6y ago
Sometimes I get signed out, because of VPN/WiFi issues. It'll have a little text prompt at the top with a Sign In link. But if I join a meeting, and I'm signed out, I just get a generic error message. It's like they didn't even code to check that I'm signed in when trying to join a meeting and advise me. Sometimes I have to restart the app after signing in to make the meeting link work again. Just feels janky. I also had to mute it because on my budget work-provided laptop the Windows 10 notifications for every one line message take up a few inches of my screen which is pretty annoying when I'm working.
LockAndLol 6y ago
Their video is downright buggy. Some users just can't share their screen with me while others can. I've tried "resetting" the video by disabling incoming video and then reallowing it, but that just freezes the video. Audio is frequently bad too when people speak alternatingly. The new speaker has 2-3 seconds of muffled audio until they're clear again. Especially annoying when speakers rapidly change and all you get is semi muffled audio all the way. Also the inability to respond to a specific message on desktop has baffled me. It seems like a basic functionality in chat software these days but teams only decided to give it to mobile? Just... Why? And many emoticons have been renamed or simply removed. Why reinvent the wheel ?
Mromson 6y ago
While I'd very much wish to put anything Atlassian up front and center, Microsoft Teams is simply way more in my face. I have to use it for communication, and it's a huge pain use. It's huge, bloated, and more importantly; extremely slow and unresponsive. I'd have a hard time suggesting a worse chat application when including all that have ever existed.
winrid 6y ago
When we were forced to try it you couldn't even customize keyboard commands. Most applications with multiple views/tabs will have something like cmd+1,2,3 to switch between the tabs. On OSX it was some RSI inducing combination you couldn't change.
markus_zhang 6y ago
MS has adopted the release-early-and-let-user-test-it policy since years ago. I remember that Power BI was barely usable (missing a lot of basic features) until late 2018/early 2019. They also adopted the seeming good policy to ask users to vote for future bug fix/feature requirement, which of course leads to more feature release than bug fixing. But then this is the norm of software development nowadays so I really don't think anyone can change it.

GordonS 6y ago

+1 for Teams. Video calling actually works great, but gods the UX is appalling! It's just so confusing and inconsistent. As you said too, the whole thing is buggy. Sometimes screen sharing doesn't work unless you reopen the app, for example. The wiki feature is crap (at least the web version, I haven't tried the desktop version of the wiki) - formatting is a mess, markdown support is practically non-existent, it's buggy as hell, and so unbelievably slow. If they had a feature freeze and concentrated on overhauling the UI and fixing the bugs, it could actually be a great product... but as it is, it's loathsome.

zarify 6y ago
The screen sharing one has bitten me a couple of times. I record live classes for students, and we've had occasions when someone who was away goes back to the video and it's a black screen with me nattering away as if they can see it :/ That said, apart from the shitty embedding support and their channel management, I REALLY like Stream and using it for a video lesson platform. The captioning is quite good even for my fast talking, Aussie accent and jargon.
- GordonS 6y ago
  Ah yes, I noticed the live CC recently! I tried it out in a conf call between myself (very Scottish accent), a Swede, a Norwegian, an Indian and an American - it really was amazingly accurate for everyone! That said, beyond novelty I'm not sure how useful a CC feature is.
  - zarify 6y ago
    Some of my students tell me I talk too fast, so it can be helpful for them to review content, and I've had quite a few students with varying degrees of hearing impairment. Pretty useful in my field.
  - GEBBL 6y ago
    Massively helpful to me, a deaf person.
crest 6y ago
And at least on macOS screen sharing doesn't work with a German keyboard layout. Neither the German nor the US keyboard layout modifiers work correctly. At least it is enough to bootstrap a better remote desktop connection.
nsilvestri 6y ago
The desktop wiki feature is awful, but it's awful in the same way that any of the pseudo-markdown for setting in teams is awful. The WYSIWYG editor constantly doesn't recognize backtick monospace formatting, or is overzealous in hijacking the cursor when you are trying to type adjacent to monospace formatting. The enter key seemingly arbitrarily makes either newlines or continues to the next section. I've spent a few hours writing wiki entries this last week and it does not spark joy to the point where I wonder if anybody who works on Teams wiki functionality actually has used it.
- GordonS 6y ago
  That problem with the enter key making it jump around sections is there in the web version too! A few weeks back I spent a lot of time compiling a wiki, and that combined with the lag of the web version absolutely drove me nuts!

arprocter 6y ago

I noticed earlier even if Teams is switched 'off' in Startup Apps it'll still run when Windows starts unless you tell it not to under settings in the client

0xfaded 6y ago
To kill the Linux version you need to run "killall teams" in a loop because it keeps trying to respawn itself

PopeDotNinja 6y ago

I miss ICQ.

jachee 6y ago
I miss the heyday of IRC. I'm aware there are niche communities still thriving on it, but I miss when it was the primary real(-ish)-time chat option.

olav 6y ago

+1 for MS Teams. I am forced to use it at work, too. Terrible audio focus on a single speaker, it really forces you to speak like on these old CB radios where you had to say "over" every time you were done talking. The single window UI follows the mobile-first trend but is awfully inefficient on my three monitor setup, even more so with screen sharing. Plus, our admins lock the whole MS Office 365 down so that there are no APIs or third-party plugins allowed. Data in it is just trapped. Such a waste of human potential.

stu2b50 6y ago
>Plus, our admins lock the whole MS Office 365 down so that there are no APIs or third-party plugins allowed. Data in it is just trapped. To be fair, that's a feature from team's perspective. If your admins are worried about sensitive data leaking out at all, and refuse to have a whitelist of approved 3rd party integrations, then that's on them. Imo it's a good thing to allow admins to do.
deleted 6y ago
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jimnotgym 6y ago
The feedback from our users has been that the audio quality is amazing. Sounds like a hardware problem to me. Perhaps you are one of those annoying people who won't wear a headset in a conference call, so we all get to hear your background noise?
- akiselev 6y ago
  You're getting feedback from users right now and it's not amazing. It seems that this one of the longest (negative) threads about a single piece of software in this topic, second only to git which is turning out to be HN's version of the Crusades 7.0

w_t_payne 6y ago

+1 for Teams. It's horrible.

nisse72 6y ago

Teams is utter shite. Especially if you're forced to use the web version (because linux). This goes for all of Office365.

imhoguy 6y ago
There is desktop version for Linux. It is still web app, probably wrapped as Electron app, but it integrates a bit better than plain web tab.
- kyriakos 6y ago
  Windows version is also a Web app in electron
- nisse72 6y ago
  Yes but ms gov cloud is unfortunately not supported.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  Same with Slack
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  It is wrapped in Electron, but as other siblings have said, so are the Windows and Mac versions. I use the Linux one and it actually works surprisingly well. Video calls, screen sharing, etc. However, for some reason, if when you start Teams the mic is unplugged, it will never detect it if plugged in afterwards. I often use it on a desktop pc without a built-in mic, and I only plug my headphones in case of a call. 100% of the time I have to restart Teams. Oh, and as others have said elsewhere, it's painfully slow. There's a constant sort of lag about it. For example the highlights changing in the chats list when moving the mouse on top of them...

zwayhowder 6y ago

Rearrangement of messages in channel based on threads, forcing replies that weren't in thread out of order. A UX that encourages replying out of thread because it's too darn confusing. Unable to quote messages on desktop, but you can on mobile. Unable to be signed into more than one Team. Have they never heard of consultants? At one point last year I had 4 separate Teams I needed to be signed into. Microsoft's solution have different Chrome profiles (Yep, Chrome, not Edge) for each one. My laptop only has 16GB of ram, so that didn't last long... Super unclear UX around document viewing. I open a file in Teams and if I have write access I am instantly saving all changes. So many times I've shared a document for feedback and then had to recover the original version from Sharepoint because people changed a lot of things without Track changes on. Based on Sharepoint. 'nuff said.

kevsim 6y ago
> Rearrangement of messages in channel based on threads Wait, what? Do threads move when they get replies or something?
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  Yup. Straight to the bottom of the page. Did you know, they're pushing it into schools? Every time a student asks a question, all other students lose track of which pieces of work they've still got left to do.
  - Closi 6y ago
    I don’t think putting all the work for students to do is seen as the use case for teams channels - it’s for chat and discussion. If you are trying to get students to do work, maybe use something like planner, sharepoint or any of the other myriad of tools actually designed for collaborative working rather than chat.
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      The intended Teams place for these things to be is either Assignments or the "_Content Library" section of a Class Notebook. Both of them are harder for teachers to use than a channel called "homework" (or just the main channel; creating a channel is hard, too).

sershe 6y ago

+1. I don't actually have too many complaints about the features, other than perhaps that the download management is intrusive and inconvenient, but it's SLOW. So SLOW. It's mind boggling how much CPU it uses and how much it stutters when merely typing.

rorykoehler 6y ago

We switched over recently too and it suffers from trying to be all things to all people.

AdrianB1 6y ago

+ 1. While in a chat if I open a voice call with that person, it creates a new instance with the chat frame closed. If I want to navigate into a channel and open a file, if I go back to the discussion the file is closed, I need to navigate again. It should have multi-window, multi-tab capabilities.

blcArmadillo 6y ago

I actually like the UX of Teams' chat more than the other common chat services. Main reasons: 1. There is whitespace between messages 2. My replies are a different color and right justified Most of the other common corporate chat apps just look like a wall of text to me.

robin_reala 6y ago

The worst thing about Teams is that for no reason they’ve decided to roll their own notifications framework on macOS that doesn’t respect Do Not Disturb settings. That’s the absolute minimum a notifications system should do: stop appearing when told to.

jasonv 6y ago
Spark, the email client, has this same problem on iOS. When I go for a run I DND my iPhone but Spark keeps sending notifications. I ended up deleting it and settling for gmail on the phone, but in actuality, I resist doing any email on my phone because the gmail app is so terrible. Maybe it’s a “win”.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Odd, that generally isn't possible in iOS. Perhaps you're running into some strange iOS bug or behavior quirk?
Terretta 6y ago
And is considered a full fledged “window”, a decision bringing a whole host of annoyances if you have multi screens and/or do window management.
kyriakos 6y ago
Same on Windows. Doesn't use Windows 10 notification system. This means sometimes I get a proper Windows notification and at the same time a message and instead of the two notifications to be stacked they are overplayed on top of each other.
kingnight 6y ago
There isn't anything that gets me so flustered throughout the day than this. I would turn these banners off, but as far as I can tell, there is no way to get badges to show up on the icon (only other cue to remind me people want to talk to me) without these banners. I really wish there was a 3rd party client that was all native that I could use. Teams is definitely the worst part of my software stack.

lloydatkinson 6y ago

Don’t forget posting a link rarely embeds properly. Posting a YouTube video doesn’t show a player like practically every modern chat platform. Oh and the most insulting part is how they treat its users like children. You can use giphy to embed a gif but if you search for any “bad” words it says no results. Search for fuck, and it hides them. Everyone using it is an adult, why apply this conservative boomer “nO sWeARIng alLOweD”? To top it off if you instead copy paste a giphy url it doesn’t embed that properly either!

dylz 6y ago
For the last bit, giphy basically lies to serve ads and tracking. A giphy .gif URL is not actually a .gif, or an image file even.
wizzwizz4 6y ago
> Everyone using it is an adult, It's the primary platform for entire schools, now. Whoopee. So you're going to get lots of new child protection features (that fail at their intended purpose) added.
- jimnotgym 6y ago
  There is pretty fine grained control for admins over that kind of stuff though.
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    Some of which fails GDPR compliance, and violates Microsoft's own privacy statement: https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-gb/privacystatement https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-gb/privacystatement (see the Education sections, where they say they don't collect lots of info that's collected by Teams).

fmpwizard 6y ago

Like many others, we were also forced to use it at work, hard to pick the worse part of Teams but a big one is how slow it is from the time I click the "reply" link until I can actually type a message. So many times I click, start typing and then I notice it missed about 4 to 5 letters, and I don't even consider myself fast at typing. Oh, and how you upload a file/image, need to wait until it is fully uploaded but after that you still need to click the "Send" button to actually post the file. It's definitely an enterprise kind of app, one that makes sure you take forever to do anything.

userbinator 6y ago
There's also a very noticeable lag on mute/unmute, that causes others in a conversation to miss the first word or two that I say immediately after unmuting. The workaround is to wait a second or two before speaking, but I've used VoIP and video back in the MSN Messenger days, on a far less powerful machine, and it didn't have that problem.
jachee 6y ago
How about when you [alt/cmd]-tab to it, it shows you a blinking cursor in an input field, but no matter what key you hit, you can't type in that field without clicking on it? Infuriating.
johnwalkr 6y ago
I always forget this. And then if you send the same file to someone else it overwrites the file but the first file and the first person can no longer access it? And then you realize it’s not just a file but a share point link? Yeah that will surely work next year when you need to Go back and double check something.

EvanAnderson 6y ago

Don't forget Outlook randomly crashing due to the Teams "add-in" failing, and Teams thoughtfully reinstalling and re-enabling add-in whenever it gets updated.

gcatalfamo 6y ago

And why the hell is it not native

hinkley 6y ago

As a recent Teams user, I don't know if Teams is bad on its own merits, or if the conception is just enough different from Slack that I can never quite figure out whether a feature exists and where it's hidden. Generally I don't have much time to mutter about Teams because some Atlassian monstrosity is busting my balls.

philipwhiuk 6y ago
It's both. Everything from WhatsApp to SMS to Slack has a unified list of chats. Teams does not. Teams is wrong.

imhoguy 6y ago

Company switched to it from Slack recently for cost cuts. Generally a huge downgrade of user experience: channel threads are mess to read after a while of being away; no way to lookup/mention other users in private chats; chats and channels is like two separate apps- constant switching between them; activity feed is not always up to date; messages once red on desktop are still left in notifications on mobile; chats list is dynamic - very easy to choose wrong chat by mistake; code snippet editing is unintuitive.

sli 6y ago
Code snippet editing is awful in Azure for all the same reasons. Inserting code and then going back to normal text is like trying to exit vim for the first time.

LandR 6y ago

I hatE Teams. Search is broken in it and if you scroll back a few days on a conversation it just stops loading messages... It's just awful.

wizzwizz4 6y ago
Scroll down and up again to get it to trigger loading more. You'll lose your place, though, because it will immediately jump, then unload what it just loaded…

ack210 6y ago

I've never felt that anything has captured the essence of what it's like to use Microsoft's software better than the URLs Teams generates for meetings scheduled via Outlook. Why use something like Zoom's 9 digit meeting numbers when you can have a 250+ character url complete with long seemingly random strings and a url-encoded JSON object? The plugin will try to hide this behind a "Join Teams Meeting" hyperlink, but on more than one occasion I've had the link converted to plaintext, leaving the recipient with no idea what they're supposed to do. So every time before sending a teams meeting from Outlook I have to extract the mess of a URL and manually paste into the location field.

prepend 6y ago
It’s weird how OneDrive does the same thing. Why not use the Dropbox and gdrive method of some uid? Obviously a super long url with paths and query string variables is better, right? Microsoft is pretty cool with training though. During the training they said this wasn’t an issue because the url gets converted to the file name on display. And we’d only ever want to paste urls into outlook or teams, nowhere else.

jl6 6y ago

Can someone explain why Teams is so totally unable to interoperate with anything else, to the point where you can’t save messages, you can’t export chats, and you can’t even print them! The lock-in is intense.

jimnotgym 6y ago
That is a bit of a strange statement. There is an API, there is an app store full of the Trello's and Jira's of this world. Chats copy and paste or share to Outlook just fine for me. You can even use Flow to save all of your chats... literally anywhere that has a connector. The lock-in is imaginary.
- jl6 6y ago
  How do you copy and paste chats without having to go back and expand all “show more” links (potentially hundreds of clicks)? Even then, I can not get it to reliably select more than a page or two. Apps are not allowed in my corporate deployment. I’d settle for “save to PDF”.
- atraac 6y ago
  I've created a simple bot that posts memes in our chats/channels and '1337' every day at 13:37. The teams API is incredibly bad and illogical in most places. You just can't make a Slack-like bot for Teams, because of how limited everything is. Not mentioning breaking changes in their SDKs(like literally recently message .Text started putting some weird random bytes in front of actual message that broke all regexes for us), 3 different types of conversations that you handle differently and an overly complicated way of adding bots to your teams/conversations. Add to that and incredibly slow Electron app with bad UX, typing lag and around 2gb constant ram usage and here you go, worst chat application I've ever used.
nikanj 6y ago
Nobody would use it if porting out was easy

abhgh 6y ago

Tell me about it. We moved from Slack to Teams to cut costs. Common story. Leaves a LOT to be desired. 1. The UI took the fun out of well, whatever, Slack was/is. For some of the common interest channels at work, I see less people going to them. 2. I'm in a group where we frequently need to share images (mostly plots) among the members. Sometimes they just disappear. Yes. You upload an image during a conversation, come back to it a few min later, its not there, and the person at the either end of the chat hasn't seen it either. Guess what OS I'm on: Windows 10 Pro. Because of this I've resorted to using the web version of teams occasionally, which doesn't seem to suffer from this issue. 3. This one is actually baffling: when I try to upload an image in 2 different conversations (one after another), the second one complains the file already exists. This is during upload. 4. Inconsistent UI: did you know you could reply to individual messages from the Android app for Teams? Doesn't work on web or the windows desktop client. So when I am catching up on a conversation, I occasionally switch to the mobile app to reply to specific messages. So that's my workflow: the Teams website opened on my laptop browser for most of the messaging, Teams running on mobile, in case I need to reply to specific messages, and Teams running as an application on my laptop for video/screen sharing calls. 5. You cannot specify a Download folder. Yes that's a thing in 2020. [1] But, yeah, "costs". I miss Slack. [1] https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/18693262-have-the-download-function-of-files-allow-you-to-s https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
toyg 6y ago
> when I try to upload an image in 2 different conversations (one after another), the second one complains the file already exists That's because, bafflingly, it uses a local directory-cache for files. Think of it as the "Downloads" folder for a browser. Any time you upload, Teams will try to save it to your local cache first; if it finds the old file, it will whine like that. Any time you want to upload a file, you should really not do in Chats but in Channels, which have a separate area for each Channel (backed by Sharepoint). Except in some companies (like where I'm now) people for some reason use Chats almost exclusively instead of Channels, so the whole thing becomes awkward: go to the channel, upload, get the link, paste the link in chat. I guess it could be worse, it could be AOL.

retromario 6y ago

My biggest annoyance with Teams is its shitty search functionality. You search for a topic you discussed with a colleagues a few weeks ago. It'll show you the direct hits, but there's zero way to jump to that point of the conversation and see the context, the message before or after. It's so infuriating.

jbeam 6y ago
I once had to scroll for 30 minutes to find a critical piece of information because of this. I could find the time stamp of a related message but needed the context. So I just had to scroll. And scroll. And scroll some more. Mind boggling that continues to make it past UAT.

PascLeRasc 6y ago

Teams is absolutely awful. I also have all the crashes, undelivered notifications, shitty UI, but whatever, that's par with Microsoft. I have an issue where if there's any sound in my room in a meeting, it reduces the volume of someone else talking to me even if my mic is muted. My workaround is to only keep one earbud in and constantly listen for cars driving past outside so I can crank up the volume in advance. So Teams is literally painful to my ears.

jachee 6y ago
Using a headset with a physical mute switch on the mic could solve that problem.

jimnotgym 6y ago

I am going to go against the grain and say I rather like Teams. Video calls work really well. Voice calls are clear. Screen sharing occasionally doesn't work as some have noticed, but restarting the call seems to fix it. It is so much better than Webex though. I think it is still suffering from the teething troubles of trying to bring so many things under one umbrella, Sharepoint (which already had groups), Skype for business, Onedrive and chat. This has created some quirks which will need ironing out. The killer feature really is that it is a dream to deploy for admins who already had AD. I pushed it by group policy and sent an email telling people to log in with their existing Office credentials. I can't remember what I did with macs, I think I may have just told users to grab it from the appstore. Think of all the admins faced with having to move their whole company to home working with no notice for Covid-19, you can see why Teams is an app that has found it's moment. Teams has been the saviour of many companies during the crisis. I'm sorry but minor UI niggles (which I personally don't find problematic) just pale into insignificance.

ImaCake 6y ago
I've been using Teams for some work and I also agree that it's pretty good. I really like the integration with OneDrive/Sharepoint so you can build up a project of files. Using remote files on local instances of MS office products is seemless and super easy to do. Of course, the version control isn't as good as something like git, but my coworkers are not familiar with git and don't have any interest in learning it. So at least with Teams I can have my work live on a Team's folder/repository thing so anyone else at my job can access it when they need to, complete with version history!
toyg 6y ago
Some of the skepticism around here might be a bit outdated. I tried Teams about 4 years ago and found it bad; I was recently forced to use it again and now the experience is fairly pleasant overall. I don't understand why they split "Chats" from Channels though - or rather I have suspicions about causes, I just think the better way forward (from an UX perspective) would have been to keep everything in Channels.
- 6y ago

nknealk 6y ago

For those complaining about Teams slowness, I've found following this guide to clear out cached content dramatically speeds up the application especially on mac: https://td.unh.edu/TDClient/KB/ArticleDet?ID=2197 https://td.unh.edu/TDClient/KB/ArticleDet?ID=2197

swasheck 6y ago

Good for chat channels. Tries to be a central repo for all of your business docs. Chews RAM like it’s its prime directive. Can’t actually find the centralized doc unless you magically remember the channel or team where it was originally shared. UX is actively hostile and so inefficient.

userbinator 6y ago

You cannot extend it or fix these issues (e.g. plugins, custom CSS styles, etc). It's probably possible to mod it, given that it's Electron, and definitely easier than doing same to a native application, but the relative lack of configurability is certainly irritating. The amount of RAM and CPU it uses is also ridiculous even in comparison to Slack, which was already pretty bloated. (I wonder if any thirdparty clients have been created --- at least two exist for Slack, but I haven't looked for Teams.) I've also been forced to use it, and have considered doing some RE and writing a Win32 native one to show MS what it should've done --- if anything I expect they should have plenty of Win32 programmers who know how to do it --- but like many others, have too many things to fix and not enough time for them...

imgabe 6y ago

I've been forced to use Microsoft Teams recently. After using it once the app decided it's no longer connected to the Internet. Every other program seems to have no problem figuring out that I'm connected to the Internet, but somehow Microsoft Teams is like "Nope" This is on Windows computer too, like, how do you guys not know how to detect an Internet connection on your own operating system?

georgeburdell 6y ago

We use Skype internally but some people have started to use Microsoft Teams. At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, these Microsoft Teams meetings never seem to have a dial-in number (my laptop microphone is horrible). If I try to use my computer's microphone to speak, it asks for camera permission at the same time. I don't want everyone to see me in briefs, just listen to my voice. So it's apparently either share my video and audio, or just be silent. I've been choosing to be silent. I've spent the majority of my only two Teams meetings trying to figure out these issues. I never had a problem with other apps like GotoMeeting, Zoom, or Discord, or even Skype (also owned by Microsoft)

toyg 6y ago
> So it's apparently either share my video and audio, or just be silent. Maybe in the past, or on some clients only. On the Windows client you can currently operate camera and mic independently and choose how to respond to each calls (with video or audio only).
hnick 6y ago
We have users on remote desktop machines but the microphone/sound doesn't pass through. IT's "solution" was to install the app on your phone and use that for talking and your computer for viewing. Yay.

philipwhiuk 6y ago

The lack of a common 'chats' list shows that nobody who used it has ever used another communications tool.

Assossa 6y ago

I've been using Teams at college for over a year now and at work for a couple months. It baffles me that there are simple, obvious bugs that have remained all that time. For instance, on the Windows desktop app, the word "I've" gets marked as incorrectly spelled. When you click on it to see the spelling suggestions, it suggests "I've". Clicking on the suggestion does nothing and it continues to flag it. This has been an issue in the app for over a year and I refuse to believe that the developers are unaware of it. It's a very common word to be typing. Another problem is sending files or images. You have to wait for it to finish uploading before it will let you send the message. Not only is it pretty slow (I would estimate 1MB/s, whereas Discord uploads at my full 12MB/s), but sometimes it won't let you send for a couple seconds even after it finishes uploading. A couple months ago Teams added read receipts, which is really nice, but they don't always work. My work has them globally enabled and everyone is on the latest client, yet each person only sees them for certain other people. I don't see them for anyone, but my coworker sees them for about 50% of our staff. Notifications are also buggy. Teams will just randomly decide to not give you notifications for messages or calls. I've missed multiple messages in Teams for days because it never alerted me. I had to actually open the specific chat with that person before I saw the message. I've gotten into the habit of checking Teams every 15 minutes because of this. Teams for Android also seems to send notifications a good 30 seconds before the desktop app does, so I usually keep my phone on my desk solely for Teams notifications. I would also like to point out that Microsoft built a general-purpose notification system into Windows, yet Teams uses a completely custom notification system. This completely baffles me as they aren't even following their own company's best practices.

vladvasiliu 6y ago
> For instance, on the Windows desktop app, the word "I've" gets marked as incorrectly spelled. When you click on it to see the spelling suggestions, it suggests "I've". Clicking on the suggestion does nothing and it continues to flag it. This has been an issue in the app for over a year and I refuse to believe that the developers are unaware of it. It's a very common word to be typing. The spelling situation gets better than this. You're actually forced to use the Teams one. For example, on MacOS, text fields get "free" spelling and grammar by the OS, which honour whatever settings you've configured. Of course, Teams doesn't use MacOS text fields, so they're on their own. I live in France and so use French in Teams, but I absolutely hate having programs in several languages so all my programs are in US English. If I set Teams to use English for the interface, guess what language it uses for spelling? I'm still looking for a way to tell it in which language to check spelling, but we'll have probably switched to the next shiny thing until this happens...

hnick 6y ago

Sometimes I get signed out, because of VPN/WiFi issues. It'll have a little text prompt at the top with a Sign In link. But if I join a meeting, and I'm signed out, I just get a generic error message. It's like they didn't even code to check that I'm signed in when trying to join a meeting and advise me. Sometimes I have to restart the app after signing in to make the meeting link work again. Just feels janky. I also had to mute it because on my budget work-provided laptop the Windows 10 notifications for every one line message take up a few inches of my screen which is pretty annoying when I'm working.

LockAndLol 6y ago

Their video is downright buggy. Some users just can't share their screen with me while others can. I've tried "resetting" the video by disabling incoming video and then reallowing it, but that just freezes the video. Audio is frequently bad too when people speak alternatingly. The new speaker has 2-3 seconds of muffled audio until they're clear again. Especially annoying when speakers rapidly change and all you get is semi muffled audio all the way. Also the inability to respond to a specific message on desktop has baffled me. It seems like a basic functionality in chat software these days but teams only decided to give it to mobile? Just... Why? And many emoticons have been renamed or simply removed. Why reinvent the wheel ?

Mromson 6y ago

While I'd very much wish to put anything Atlassian up front and center, Microsoft Teams is simply way more in my face. I have to use it for communication, and it's a huge pain use. It's huge, bloated, and more importantly; extremely slow and unresponsive. I'd have a hard time suggesting a worse chat application when including all that have ever existed.

winrid 6y ago

When we were forced to try it you couldn't even customize keyboard commands. Most applications with multiple views/tabs will have something like cmd+1,2,3 to switch between the tabs. On OSX it was some RSI inducing combination you couldn't change.

markus_zhang 6y ago

MS has adopted the release-early-and-let-user-test-it policy since years ago. I remember that Power BI was barely usable (missing a lot of basic features) until late 2018/early 2019. They also adopted the seeming good policy to ask users to vote for future bug fix/feature requirement, which of course leads to more feature release than bug fixing. But then this is the norm of software development nowadays so I really don't think anyone can change it.