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it is getting harder and harder to convince my higher ups to not switch us on to Microsoft Teams (which they practically consider free vs the thousands we spend

by ibero 6y ago

it is getting harder and harder to convince my higher ups to not switch us on to Microsoft Teams (which they practically consider free vs the thousands we spend monthly just for the dev team). its one saving grace for us is the amount of legacy comments and history of discussions we have built up over years across conversations that is useful for reference.

Normal_gaussian 6y ago
I find this kind of usage frightening. I honestly think that a message history of longer than a week encourages poor organisation to such a degree that daily operation is significantly and silently hampered.
- abluecloud 6y ago
  agree. but ideals dont always match up with reality.
- abeppu 6y ago
  Do you have suggestions for process or tooling that allows you to quickly / cheaply take the information or insights that arise from conversation and integrate them into a longer term store? And how to make that longer term location really useful? To the degree that teams fall into the habit of just searching slack history for info, I think those are the two key factors: - we remember bits of conversation, and who said something, or in which channel, can be a good way to rediscover the full details; note-taking and aggregating stuff into a knowledge base or docs repository can strip out that info making it harder to rediscover. (The obvious caveat here is that there can be sharp difference between re-finding a conversation you participated in e.g. in your team, vs finding information about a system you depend on from a conversation you didn't participate in.) - the process of getting stuff shared in slack into a longer-term knowledge base can be slow and tedious, and may require someone to spend time deciding which pieces are potentially valuable, generalizing from the specific case discussed to a form that makes sense out of context, condensing what was said over many messages, arbitrating between views which are valuable but conflicting, etc. I would like to see an NLP tool for summarizing threads and extracting the information which is most likely to be reusable.
- veritas3241 6y ago
  We implemented a 90 day retention policy for all slack messages about a year ago. Everyone was pretty resistant to it at first, but it's been pretty great, honestly. It forces us to put things we'll want to remember in the handbook and encourages a more async culture. Personally I'd be happy with a 30 day retention policy!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- NationalPark 6y ago
  I find searching chat history much more useful than what people used to do, which is throw anything that might be important into a wiki that never gets updated. At least in Slack you get some context around a piece of information rather than a hasty summary.
quaffapint 6y ago
I don't know why we don't switch to Teams. I enjoy slack and the history of comments is useful, but like you said Teams is already included in things we're paying for so why not use it. We might have to re-do some bots, but if it saves the company money and works basically the same it makes sense to switch.
- zeveb 6y ago
  > I don't know why we don't switch to Teams. If you'd used Teams, you'd know why. It is hilariously bad, gratuitously slow, ludicrously weird. I have periodically had to use Microsoft's team chat tools over the years, dating back to Yammer or perhaps even further, and for whatever reason it seems they just do not get chat. Better question: why not just switch to Mattermost?
  - CharlesW 6y ago
    > If you'd used Teams, you'd know why. It is hilariously bad, gratuitously slow, ludicrously weird. I use both all day, every day. I don't find Teams to be any worse, slower, or weirder than Slack. Teams also does a lot that Slack can't do. As one small examples, it seems amazing that I can't add tabs to a Slack channel like I can in Teams.
- atraac 6y ago
  > We might have to re-do some bots, You might not even be able to, Teams API is quite badly convoluted and limited. You simply won't be able to f.e. recreate Slackbot experience in group conversations(chats).
- dividedbyzero 6y ago
  I have to use both heavily at work right now, one part of the company is on Slack, another on Teams, I'm involved with both. Despite its (many) issues, Slack is just so, so much nicer than Teams, the difference has an actual, substantial impact on communication. Teams feels like a disconnected and disorientating mess of ideas copied from other communication solutions in a huge hurry without understanding them fully and without even getting them to a point where they "click" and work as intended, and without thinking about how they fit into the big picture. Sole exception: Video calls are much better, when they work. The rest is a mess and makes communication a much more tedious effort than it has to be.
altdatathrow 6y ago
Don't you guys find the MS Teams "chat" interface an absolute mess? When I tried it a few months ago it felt like another ridiculous UI that wanted to emulate mobile phone messages for some reason with giant chat bubbles, tons of wasted white space, emojiis, avatars, etc. Slack's "compact" mode definitely isn't perfect but it's better. We as a tech world need to just revert back to the simple format most IRC clients use.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of Slack in the first place but Teams's UI just seems like an utter mess. I don't understand how I'm supposed to use it. I'm sure I could figure it out if I spent 15 minutes, but it's a damn chat app. Why is this so hard?
  - thinkharderdev 6y ago
    MSFT just pushed a UI update to Outlook on Mac that is actually really nice. I'm hoping that maybe they've finally got their UX together and Teams will improve. Pretty sure my company will be axing Slack in favor of Teams in the next year or two. Maybe by then it will have a reasonably good UX.
  - toyg 6y ago
    The thing is, their threaded interface kinda sucked, so they built another one ('chat') and tried to push the idea that 'Teams' (threaded) is for 'permanent' info, and 'Chat' is for the ethereal one. Except nobody really bothers with switching back and forth, most teams just choose one or the other and do everything in there. Bit of a mess. I cannot fault them on the meeting functionality and sharepoint integrations though, they are excellent.
  - selykg 6y ago
    As someone that uses Teams. It's not pleasant to use on a Mac. My coworkers use Windows PCs and they all have a ton of fun problems with things as well. I'm not so sure switching to Teams is a better move than Slack.
ffpip 6y ago
Please dont. Microsoft teams is a mess of chat boxes. You'll regret it. Just don't.
dkdk8283 6y ago
Keeping comments is a bad practice: If your slack ever gets compromised you’ll wish you deleted everything. We purge every 6 mo. Keep updates in tickets.
- bawolff 6y ago
  And if your ticket system gets compromised? I get it from the perspective of slack is a disorganized mess in terms of long term history, but moving sensitive data from one system to another with similar security doesnt seem like a win (or loss) for security to me.
  - dkdk8283 6y ago
    When I update a ticket I write it expecting someone else to read it. It’s well written and thought out. When I chat I say whatever is reasonable, it’s low effort. Note I didn’t call out sensitive information specifically. Just that you wished you deleted messages. You shouldn’t store secrets in a ticket system either.
    - kurbin 6y ago
      Still don't quite follow your comment. Is "keeping updates in tickets" separate from the comment on deleting messages?
      - dkdk8283 6y ago
        I worked at a place that used Slack pings in lieu of tickets. The history was kept for ~7 years. This is a huge liability IMO. A off comment by the CEO could be misunderstood by an attacker or the public if it was to be leaked. I’m saying it’s ok for quick cursory discussions but those who retain Slack messages for tribal knowledge tend to have larger organizational issues. This knowledge should be in tickets where it’s expected to write well written responses with the intention of documenting knowledge.
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  We purge daily. We use it as an ephemeral messaging service, not as a wiki.
eggsaregreat 6y ago
Try Teams, it's not as bad as most comments here seem to indicate. I understand if you're used to the slack UI (as most users of Hackers News are), it seems like a step backwards, but that's only because you're looking for a 1:1 replacement for slack. Having taking the route of going from Slack to Teams, where Teams is better at, IMHO, is the following: - Within channels, all conversations are, by default, organized into threads. This gives you to the feeling that there are lots of chat boxes, but once we spend a few days with it, our team started noticing that our conversations have become more structured. However starting a new "thread" off the main channel discussion in slack takes significant conscious effort and its very easy for multiple conversations to get interleaved and become a mess. - Integrated video/audio calls, along with call built-in note taking, makes for a very seamless jump from text to voice/video. With Slack, we needed to maintain separate Zoom account, as it's built-in voice/video chat was pretty bad. - If your IT has already sold its soul to Microsoft Enterprise infra, Teams just fits in really really well, with its Active Directory/Azure AD/O365 integrations. It's no wonder that Teams is doing well in the Enterprise space. We still use GSuite for our emails, but given how less our team emails these days, if I were given an option to start from scratch, I'd probably choose to host our email on O365 outlook (even though I feel Gmail's UI is superior). Of course, nothing is without its problems - you're dealing with Microsoft products, so except to hassle around a little bit with licensing, bad markdown abilities and a few other quirks. I've seen complaints of the client being really slow at times, but my team hasn't seen this issue in the recent past, since we switched in, except once or twice, where a restart of the client solves it. One part of our team (~12 people) used Hangouts Chat for a few months, which has been around for more than a few years, and every six months. It sucks. They just released a new update to how their buttons looked every 6 months. I don't know why Google even bothers putting up this product. The criticism for Teams is disproportionate in Hacker News, I don't understand why. I encourage you to try it out for a few days with a select group of people and make up your own mind.
- atraac 6y ago
  It's not that much about the UI even(which is terrible as a lot of other people here explained), but rather the disgustingly bad performance and costant issues. I use teams every day at work, it eats insane amounts of ram, it leaks memory during video conferences, it's practically unusable during a call, switching tabs from chat to teams takes anywhere from one to five seconds, push notifications simply do not work properly, so does motification badge - it also often takes seconds for teams to acknowledge that you've seen certain activity. Text input has such an insane latency that it's uncomfortable to write, often eating characters from the next message after pressing return if you start typing too quickly. And this is just a tip of the iceberg. Almost all of few hundreads of people in our org hate the app as well and we're almost purely a Microsoft shop. I liked Slack until it became incredibly bloated. But even now, it's still in another league when compared to the abysmal experience that Teams offer.
agentdrtran 6y ago
Teams is awful compared to Slack, Slack's UX and feature set blow it out of the water.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  And Zulip's UX is far better than Slack's. If you haven't tried it, I recommend it.
mrweasel 6y ago
I don't understand the fascination with Microsoft Teams, it doesn't work. Sound simply doesn't work in the app, full stop. You need to use the web version, in Chrome, because nothing else works... Well Edge maybe, who knows. There is apparently no way to get sound working in the Mac client, meaning that it might as well not exist.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > There is apparently no way to get sound working in the Mac client, meaning that it might as well not exist. FWIW, it works fine for a team in our company who regularly posts audio content for review. Many of us use macOS.
  - mrweasel 6y ago
    But can you use it for a video conference?
    - CharlesW 6y ago
      Yes. We use both Teams and Webex (I haven't used Slack for videoconferencing so I can't compare), and they seem comparable. There's a 49 on-screen participant limit, with a 250 participant limit overall.
- underwater 6y ago
  That's a pretty silly statement. Microsoft has not built a product where sounds flat out "doesn't work" on any Mac.
  - mrweasel 6y ago
    No one at my company has managed to have a functional video conference using the Mac client, and I talked to people at two major software development companies in Denmark, they have the same problem. The web client works. It’s not as good or easy as Google Meet, or what ever it’s called, but it works. The Mac client does NOT work and have not worked for at least six month.
whoisburbansky 6y ago
The "amount of legacy comments and history" is the single most useful thing about Slack, imo. Teams in comparison was an absolute nightmare to try to find references to old conversations in, it felt like throwing away information into a bog, never to be retrieved ever again. Slack's archival search was the biggest reason I was able to onboard to a new team as quickly as I did, especially given WFH, since it removed the need to ask an actual person about so many of my questions.
underwater 6y ago
That smacks of a checkbox-driven mentality to software. Similar features don't have the same result. Implementation matters a lot Flip it around and ask, what is the benefit of more effective communication worth to your company? You're already paying at least $10k a month for each person on your team. Making each person just 1% more efficient should be worth $100 a month. It's not unbelievable that a communcation app would make that happen. Reaching out to a coworker saves a couple of hours of digging around. A high quality FYI channel means someone can read a proposal and spot a critical issue. Slack is far from perfect, but choosing Teams instead to save a little cash seems like madness.

by ibero 6y ago

Normal_gaussian 6y ago

I find this kind of usage frightening. I honestly think that a message history of longer than a week encourages poor organisation to such a degree that daily operation is significantly and silently hampered.

abluecloud 6y ago
agree. but ideals dont always match up with reality.
abeppu 6y ago
Do you have suggestions for process or tooling that allows you to quickly / cheaply take the information or insights that arise from conversation and integrate them into a longer term store? And how to make that longer term location really useful? To the degree that teams fall into the habit of just searching slack history for info, I think those are the two key factors: - we remember bits of conversation, and who said something, or in which channel, can be a good way to rediscover the full details; note-taking and aggregating stuff into a knowledge base or docs repository can strip out that info making it harder to rediscover. (The obvious caveat here is that there can be sharp difference between re-finding a conversation you participated in e.g. in your team, vs finding information about a system you depend on from a conversation you didn't participate in.) - the process of getting stuff shared in slack into a longer-term knowledge base can be slow and tedious, and may require someone to spend time deciding which pieces are potentially valuable, generalizing from the specific case discussed to a form that makes sense out of context, condensing what was said over many messages, arbitrating between views which are valuable but conflicting, etc. I would like to see an NLP tool for summarizing threads and extracting the information which is most likely to be reusable.
veritas3241 6y ago
We implemented a 90 day retention policy for all slack messages about a year ago. Everyone was pretty resistant to it at first, but it's been pretty great, honestly. It forces us to put things we'll want to remember in the handbook and encourages a more async culture. Personally I'd be happy with a 30 day retention policy!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
NationalPark 6y ago
I find searching chat history much more useful than what people used to do, which is throw anything that might be important into a wiki that never gets updated. At least in Slack you get some context around a piece of information rather than a hasty summary.

quaffapint 6y ago

I don't know why we don't switch to Teams. I enjoy slack and the history of comments is useful, but like you said Teams is already included in things we're paying for so why not use it. We might have to re-do some bots, but if it saves the company money and works basically the same it makes sense to switch.

zeveb 6y ago
> I don't know why we don't switch to Teams. If you'd used Teams, you'd know why. It is hilariously bad, gratuitously slow, ludicrously weird. I have periodically had to use Microsoft's team chat tools over the years, dating back to Yammer or perhaps even further, and for whatever reason it seems they just do not get chat. Better question: why not just switch to Mattermost?
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > If you'd used Teams, you'd know why. It is hilariously bad, gratuitously slow, ludicrously weird. I use both all day, every day. I don't find Teams to be any worse, slower, or weirder than Slack. Teams also does a lot that Slack can't do. As one small examples, it seems amazing that I can't add tabs to a Slack channel like I can in Teams.
atraac 6y ago
> We might have to re-do some bots, You might not even be able to, Teams API is quite badly convoluted and limited. You simply won't be able to f.e. recreate Slackbot experience in group conversations(chats).
dividedbyzero 6y ago
I have to use both heavily at work right now, one part of the company is on Slack, another on Teams, I'm involved with both. Despite its (many) issues, Slack is just so, so much nicer than Teams, the difference has an actual, substantial impact on communication. Teams feels like a disconnected and disorientating mess of ideas copied from other communication solutions in a huge hurry without understanding them fully and without even getting them to a point where they "click" and work as intended, and without thinking about how they fit into the big picture. Sole exception: Video calls are much better, when they work. The rest is a mess and makes communication a much more tedious effort than it has to be.

altdatathrow 6y ago

Don't you guys find the MS Teams "chat" interface an absolute mess? When I tried it a few months ago it felt like another ridiculous UI that wanted to emulate mobile phone messages for some reason with giant chat bubbles, tons of wasted white space, emojiis, avatars, etc. Slack's "compact" mode definitely isn't perfect but it's better. We as a tech world need to just revert back to the simple format most IRC clients use.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of Slack in the first place but Teams's UI just seems like an utter mess. I don't understand how I'm supposed to use it. I'm sure I could figure it out if I spent 15 minutes, but it's a damn chat app. Why is this so hard?
- thinkharderdev 6y ago
  MSFT just pushed a UI update to Outlook on Mac that is actually really nice. I'm hoping that maybe they've finally got their UX together and Teams will improve. Pretty sure my company will be axing Slack in favor of Teams in the next year or two. Maybe by then it will have a reasonably good UX.
- toyg 6y ago
  The thing is, their threaded interface kinda sucked, so they built another one ('chat') and tried to push the idea that 'Teams' (threaded) is for 'permanent' info, and 'Chat' is for the ethereal one. Except nobody really bothers with switching back and forth, most teams just choose one or the other and do everything in there. Bit of a mess. I cannot fault them on the meeting functionality and sharepoint integrations though, they are excellent.
- selykg 6y ago
  As someone that uses Teams. It's not pleasant to use on a Mac. My coworkers use Windows PCs and they all have a ton of fun problems with things as well. I'm not so sure switching to Teams is a better move than Slack.

ffpip 6y ago

Please dont. Microsoft teams is a mess of chat boxes. You'll regret it. Just don't.

dkdk8283 6y ago

Keeping comments is a bad practice: If your slack ever gets compromised you’ll wish you deleted everything. We purge every 6 mo. Keep updates in tickets.

bawolff 6y ago
And if your ticket system gets compromised? I get it from the perspective of slack is a disorganized mess in terms of long term history, but moving sensitive data from one system to another with similar security doesnt seem like a win (or loss) for security to me.
- dkdk8283 6y ago
  When I update a ticket I write it expecting someone else to read it. It’s well written and thought out. When I chat I say whatever is reasonable, it’s low effort. Note I didn’t call out sensitive information specifically. Just that you wished you deleted messages. You shouldn’t store secrets in a ticket system either.
  - kurbin 6y ago
    Still don't quite follow your comment. Is "keeping updates in tickets" separate from the comment on deleting messages?
    - dkdk8283 6y ago
      I worked at a place that used Slack pings in lieu of tickets. The history was kept for ~7 years. This is a huge liability IMO. A off comment by the CEO could be misunderstood by an attacker or the public if it was to be leaked. I’m saying it’s ok for quick cursory discussions but those who retain Slack messages for tribal knowledge tend to have larger organizational issues. This knowledge should be in tickets where it’s expected to write well written responses with the intention of documenting knowledge.
ciarannolan 6y ago
We purge daily. We use it as an ephemeral messaging service, not as a wiki.

eggsaregreat 6y ago

Try Teams, it's not as bad as most comments here seem to indicate. I understand if you're used to the slack UI (as most users of Hackers News are), it seems like a step backwards, but that's only because you're looking for a 1:1 replacement for slack. Having taking the route of going from Slack to Teams, where Teams is better at, IMHO, is the following: - Within channels, all conversations are, by default, organized into threads. This gives you to the feeling that there are lots of chat boxes, but once we spend a few days with it, our team started noticing that our conversations have become more structured. However starting a new "thread" off the main channel discussion in slack takes significant conscious effort and its very easy for multiple conversations to get interleaved and become a mess. - Integrated video/audio calls, along with call built-in note taking, makes for a very seamless jump from text to voice/video. With Slack, we needed to maintain separate Zoom account, as it's built-in voice/video chat was pretty bad. - If your IT has already sold its soul to Microsoft Enterprise infra, Teams just fits in really really well, with its Active Directory/Azure AD/O365 integrations. It's no wonder that Teams is doing well in the Enterprise space. We still use GSuite for our emails, but given how less our team emails these days, if I were given an option to start from scratch, I'd probably choose to host our email on O365 outlook (even though I feel Gmail's UI is superior). Of course, nothing is without its problems - you're dealing with Microsoft products, so except to hassle around a little bit with licensing, bad markdown abilities and a few other quirks. I've seen complaints of the client being really slow at times, but my team hasn't seen this issue in the recent past, since we switched in, except once or twice, where a restart of the client solves it. One part of our team (~12 people) used Hangouts Chat for a few months, which has been around for more than a few years, and every six months. It sucks. They just released a new update to how their buttons looked every 6 months. I don't know why Google even bothers putting up this product. The criticism for Teams is disproportionate in Hacker News, I don't understand why. I encourage you to try it out for a few days with a select group of people and make up your own mind.

atraac 6y ago
It's not that much about the UI even(which is terrible as a lot of other people here explained), but rather the disgustingly bad performance and costant issues. I use teams every day at work, it eats insane amounts of ram, it leaks memory during video conferences, it's practically unusable during a call, switching tabs from chat to teams takes anywhere from one to five seconds, push notifications simply do not work properly, so does motification badge - it also often takes seconds for teams to acknowledge that you've seen certain activity. Text input has such an insane latency that it's uncomfortable to write, often eating characters from the next message after pressing return if you start typing too quickly. And this is just a tip of the iceberg. Almost all of few hundreads of people in our org hate the app as well and we're almost purely a Microsoft shop. I liked Slack until it became incredibly bloated. But even now, it's still in another league when compared to the abysmal experience that Teams offer.

agentdrtran 6y ago

Teams is awful compared to Slack, Slack's UX and feature set blow it out of the water.

StavrosK 6y ago
And Zulip's UX is far better than Slack's. If you haven't tried it, I recommend it.

mrweasel 6y ago

I don't understand the fascination with Microsoft Teams, it doesn't work. Sound simply doesn't work in the app, full stop. You need to use the web version, in Chrome, because nothing else works... Well Edge maybe, who knows. There is apparently no way to get sound working in the Mac client, meaning that it might as well not exist.

CharlesW 6y ago
> There is apparently no way to get sound working in the Mac client, meaning that it might as well not exist. FWIW, it works fine for a team in our company who regularly posts audio content for review. Many of us use macOS.
- mrweasel 6y ago
  But can you use it for a video conference?
  - CharlesW 6y ago
    Yes. We use both Teams and Webex (I haven't used Slack for videoconferencing so I can't compare), and they seem comparable. There's a 49 on-screen participant limit, with a 250 participant limit overall.
underwater 6y ago
That's a pretty silly statement. Microsoft has not built a product where sounds flat out "doesn't work" on any Mac.
- mrweasel 6y ago
  No one at my company has managed to have a functional video conference using the Mac client, and I talked to people at two major software development companies in Denmark, they have the same problem. The web client works. It’s not as good or easy as Google Meet, or what ever it’s called, but it works. The Mac client does NOT work and have not worked for at least six month.

whoisburbansky 6y ago

The "amount of legacy comments and history" is the single most useful thing about Slack, imo. Teams in comparison was an absolute nightmare to try to find references to old conversations in, it felt like throwing away information into a bog, never to be retrieved ever again. Slack's archival search was the biggest reason I was able to onboard to a new team as quickly as I did, especially given WFH, since it removed the need to ask an actual person about so many of my questions.

underwater 6y ago

That smacks of a checkbox-driven mentality to software. Similar features don't have the same result. Implementation matters a lot Flip it around and ask, what is the benefit of more effective communication worth to your company? You're already paying at least $10k a month for each person on your team. Making each person just 1% more efficient should be worth $100 a month. It's not unbelievable that a communcation app would make that happen. Reaching out to a coworker saves a couple of hours of digging around. A high quality FYI channel means someone can read a proposal and spot a critical issue. Slack is far from perfect, but choosing Teams instead to save a little cash seems like madness.