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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 lik

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.
Nextgrid 6y ago
I've tried Teams. I dislike the UI however that is mostly personal preference and indeed it's not bad enough to make it unusable. If the UI was the only thing wrong with it I could still live with it. The problem is that it's just so damn slow and unstable. It is an order of magnitude worse than Slack which is also an Electron app, so Electron alone isn't to blame here. The notification system is a mess. They use their own notification system instead of integrating with the system one which is terrible because those notifications take up way more space than the default system ones and established UX behaviors (like dismissing them by swiping right on the trackpad) don't apply. There's also a bug where the notification is its own window which remains (in an invisible state) even when no notification is displayed (which means you can Cmd+Tab into it). The tiny video window while you're on a call will bring up the main Teams UI when you try to minimize it. So if you're in a call with the participants in the main window and switch away from it, the little window will pop up in the bottom right corner of the screen. If you minimize that one, the main Teams window will come back into foreground and you now need to minimize it too. The text editing experience is awful. It's wysiwyg-based with some minor Markdown-like formatting supported, but the problem is that copy/pasting most content from other apps will paste as "rich text" so not only is the formatting of that pasted text screwed up, but the screwed up formatting continues as you type beyond it. The button to copy a meeting invite link will copy HTML which means it'll work if pasted into a rich-text field (although the formatting will still be screwed up and differ from whatever was there before), but it will just spew out several long lines of HTML if you paste it into a plain text field like a code editor or another messenger. When you make a button called "copy meeting link", it should copy a plain-text link and that's it. The slowness of it all is just the icing on the cake and makes dealing with those (relatively minor if in isolation) issues painful. Teams is a pile of shit and its only objective is to win marketshare by appealing to bean-counters who will never seriously use it or people who've spent their entire life in a bullshit Microsoft environment and never tried real tools. I guess if your only experience of enterprise chat is Skype for Business (ex-Lync) then maybe it's better, but that's a pretty low bar and is definitely a trip back to the dark ages once you've used a real messenger like Slack or even the consumer-grade ones such as Discord, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. My experience using it for the past 3 months was so bad that it's now on my "stuff I don't work with" list and any potential client that insists on it gets an instant decline on my part.
reificator 6y ago
Just a heads up, it looks like you're using single newlines and `-` for bullet points. If you don't want HN to eat your formatting just add another newline after each bulletpoint. Sincerely, Clippy

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.

Nextgrid 6y ago

I've tried Teams. I dislike the UI however that is mostly personal preference and indeed it's not bad enough to make it unusable. If the UI was the only thing wrong with it I could still live with it. The problem is that it's just so damn slow and unstable. It is an order of magnitude worse than Slack which is also an Electron app, so Electron alone isn't to blame here. The notification system is a mess. They use their own notification system instead of integrating with the system one which is terrible because those notifications take up way more space than the default system ones and established UX behaviors (like dismissing them by swiping right on the trackpad) don't apply. There's also a bug where the notification is its own window which remains (in an invisible state) even when no notification is displayed (which means you can Cmd+Tab into it). The tiny video window while you're on a call will bring up the main Teams UI when you try to minimize it. So if you're in a call with the participants in the main window and switch away from it, the little window will pop up in the bottom right corner of the screen. If you minimize that one, the main Teams window will come back into foreground and you now need to minimize it too. The text editing experience is awful. It's wysiwyg-based with some minor Markdown-like formatting supported, but the problem is that copy/pasting most content from other apps will paste as "rich text" so not only is the formatting of that pasted text screwed up, but the screwed up formatting continues as you type beyond it. The button to copy a meeting invite link will copy HTML which means it'll work if pasted into a rich-text field (although the formatting will still be screwed up and differ from whatever was there before), but it will just spew out several long lines of HTML if you paste it into a plain text field like a code editor or another messenger. When you make a button called "copy meeting link", it should copy a plain-text link and that's it. The slowness of it all is just the icing on the cake and makes dealing with those (relatively minor if in isolation) issues painful. Teams is a pile of shit and its only objective is to win marketshare by appealing to bean-counters who will never seriously use it or people who've spent their entire life in a bullshit Microsoft environment and never tried real tools. I guess if your only experience of enterprise chat is Skype for Business (ex-Lync) then maybe it's better, but that's a pretty low bar and is definitely a trip back to the dark ages once you've used a real messenger like Slack or even the consumer-grade ones such as Discord, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. My experience using it for the past 3 months was so bad that it's now on my "stuff I don't work with" list and any potential client that insists on it gets an instant decline on my part.

reificator 6y ago

Just a heads up, it looks like you're using single newlines and `-` for bullet points. If you don't want HN to eat your formatting just add another newline after each bulletpoint. Sincerely, Clippy