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Not really relevant but I need to vent. Client dropped Slack for Teams. I hate it, and information exchange has dropped precipitously since everyone switched.
by bloopernova 5y ago
Not really relevant but I need to vent.
Client dropped Slack for Teams. I hate it, and information exchange has dropped precipitously since everyone switched. So slow, half the time text markup doesn't work, and the UI is inconsistent depending on if you're typing in a chat, meeting, or channel.
Oh and none of the Slack logs were kept, losing years of information. (But that's not the fault of the Teams software)
I loathe Teams.
- xyst 5y agoI agree with this. Also how can they forget an option to “paste without formatting”? Copying stuff from other sources is extremely painful. At this point, I leave it as is. I don’t have time to micromanage each copy and paste. Also teams has this arbitrary message character limit that makes it terrible for sharing large chunks of text (partial logs for example). While the integrations with outlook (mail/scheduling) + teams works “well enough”, the experience of the app itself leaves something to be desired.
- bloopernova 5y agoI have to use the Mac plain paste shortcut all the time: shift+option+command+v (Ctrl+shift+v in windows, not sure about Linux) Definitely a helpful shortcut!
- xyst 5y agoDidn’t know OS’s had their own native plain paste shortcut. I’ll start using this, thanks!
- ceejayoz 5y agoI wish "paste without formatting" was the default, and you had to use the contortionist keyboard shortcut to include formatting.
- leejoramo 5y agoFor the cases were software or OS doesn’t support native plain text paste I create a similar shortcut in Keyboard Maestro (macOS) or AutoHotKey (Windows). As an extra measure I configure the macro to automatically type the text and not use the direct clipboard paste. This takes care of the situations were the app prohibited pasting.
- unknown_error 5y agoWow, that requires a lot of fingers. It's like an OS and fighting game all in one.
- wombatpm 5y agoSiliconGraphics machines had the Vulcan death grip that took two hands to force a reboot.
- bluefirebrand 5y agoMac Shortcuts are a nightmare, jeez.
- qlm 5y agoCan somebody explain why "paste with formatting" is so widely the default option? I have literally never wanted to paste with formatting and neither have multiple family members who have needed help with preventing it from happening.
- handrous 5y agoAll I can figure is that research/observation showed that: - Normal users often prefer to paste with formatting. - Normal users will never figure out how to do that if it's not the default. - Normal users will usually reluctantly accept paste-with-formatting even if it's not what they wanted—that is, it's only rarely entirely unacceptable for them. - Power users will figure out how to paste without formatting.
- unknown_error 5y agoYou think Microsoft, of Ribbon and Clippy and full-screen start menu ads, and 20 different control panels for the same settings, does UX testing...? The same Microsoft that can't decide whether normal users prefer Windows, Windows Phone, Zune, or Xbox interfaces, so they just go ahead and add a little of each to all of them? More likely they were just worried Slack was attacking their enterprise segment and killing Skype so they rushed a shitty product to market ASAP. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" has turned into "panic, copycat, repeat".
- 41b696ef1113 5y agoI imagine it stems from Powerpoint or Word. If I move bolded header text from the bottom of the page to the top of the page, it would be irritating to re-apply formatting. Once you have established this precedent, easy for it to infect the rest of the ecosystem.
- m-p-3 5y agoIMO if paste with formatting was assigned another shortcut like Ctrl+Shift+V and the default Ctrl+V was without formatting, that would be less frustrating.
- 52-6F-62 5y ago
- tenebrisalietum 5y agoPaste without formatting is Ctrl-Shift-V, isn't it? I don't know if I've ever tried it in Teams though.
- lttlrck 5y agoIt works consistently across all MS products I use including Teams and Office365.
- everdrive 5y ago>Also how can they forget an option to “paste without formatting” That's just Microsoft. I can probably count on one hand the amount of times I've wanted to actually retain source formatting. But, it's the default option on almost any microsoft product out there. And, apparently, on Teams it's not an option at all.
- unknown_error 5y agoI bet Teams secretly used Word xml style tags behind the scenes.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoNo, it's HTML. (Source: entirely too much familiarity with that heap of garbage.)
- Keyframe 5y agoCtrl+shift V... How about where's reply to a specific message on a desktop/web app? Isn't that like the basest of the basics? Audio and video quality is great however, millions of times ahead of Slack and a bit better than Zoom, but ever so slightly, from my experience.
- carom 5y agoMy trick for paste without formatting is to throw it in the url bar and copy it back out.
- dajohnson89 5y agoif you accidentally press enter, are you ok with the browser sending that information wherever it does?
- pwg 5y agoBetter to use notepad. The formatting goes away, and you can copy the text back out.
- sgtnasty 5y agoNothing is more painful than to watch others copy and paste complex linux commands from Teams into the terminal, and watch the shell get corrupted. Windows copy and paste has always been a mess for me. macOS seems to do it much better, but X11 middle click is the best.
- kyriakos 5y agoHack for the character limit is to share as code. Unfortunately that adds 3 clicks to the process.
- icey 5y agoPaste with formatting annoyed me so much I made a website that's just a giant textbox I can use to paste stuff into (https://qi.io https://qi.io)
- DangitBobby 5y agoNow that's going above and beyond.
- jyrkesh 5y agoFYI, Ctrl+Shift+V works as a paste without formatting shortcut in Teams. But for some reason I can't work out, they chose not to put it in the right-click UI.
- tyingq 5y agoI know there's Ctrl-Shift-V, but I use "PureText" on Windows so I can map my own hotkey. https://stevemiller.net/puretext/ https://stevemiller.net/puretext/
- DangitBobby 5y agoI always paste into the address bar of my browser to clear the formatting. Some other solutions here are probably better, though.
- analog31 5y agoFrom what I've seen, a lot of people just paste screen captures.
- tut-urut-utut 5y ago> Oh and none of the Slack logs were kept, losing years of information. Agree with your sentiment except that it's not Teams fault that your client didn't care about message history when they decided to migrate to Teams.
- bloopernova 5y agoTrue, good point. I updated my comment, thanks!
- pedrocr 5y agoWe were using Skype for Business before and Teams was a big improvement over that. It does video conferencing and file sharing well, with even collaborative editing of Office files working well. The chat features seem like an afterthought so if you're comparing it based on that I'm not surprised it's that bad.
- ethbr0 5y ago> We were using Skype for Business So you mean the Lync codebase. That's a pretty low bar to start with. As one "for example", that's the product team that couldn't figure out how to stop repeating AD logins with invalid saved passwords for 5+ years. Which invariably led to a system you were signed into somewhere locking your account every password rotation.
- pedrocr 5y agoAn extremely low bar, it was incredibly poor software. The Teams migration was great compared to that, even for messaging. For VC and file collaboration Teams seems good in absolute, for messaging it seems good only relative to that. Messaging feels like a third-priority feature in Teams. If you're coming from a good messaging experience and that's what you mostly use Teams for then it's no doubt a really poor experience.
- chx 5y agoWhile Slack displays all your organizations in a single tabbed UI, presenting you with the number of unread messages on the tab icons in Teams you need to hard switch and you never know what happens in the others. This makes Teams worse than nothing in communications because one half of the communication expects you to communicate and you are not even aware of this. You literally must jump organizations constantly , possibly needing to log in too, just to see who is pinging you. This has been known since 2016 at least https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/17750851-i-want-to-use-multiple-teams-accounts-at-the-same https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su... "Support for multiple work accounts is still being worked on and will come at a later date."
- monkeybutton 5y agoRight! My company switched from Slack to Teams and even though we recreated all our original channels, public discussion has all but died. Having to context switch between private messaging and public channels, even though it's just another tab, is apparently just too much friction. Also opening docs and excel sheets inside the main window by default and blocking chat while doing it is absolutely atrocious.
- wussboy 5y agoYour last paragraph is a huge source of frustration for me. Such a boner move.
- bluGill 5y agoSwtiching windows in teams is slow, 20 years ago Microsoft knew the research on this and minimum viable response time. They ignore it and the predictable result is people don't take advantage of teams. It possibly could be good, but I want Skype back, it didn't do as much, but what it did it did well.
- ethbr0 5y ago> chat, meeting, or channel (from parent) This is the root of all Teams fuckups. It's an asinine primitive mapping, that could only come from a project manager who spent their entire career optimizing SharePoint access controls to meet HR product requests. The entire point of modern chat solutions is persistence and searchability. So the only real differentiation should be public or private channels.
- slumdev 5y agoSame. Our company (we'll call it Monsarno) was bought by a certain German aspirin company, and our Bavarian overlords are slowly forcing us from Slack over to Teams. It's a nightmare, and very few groups have made the transition willingly.
- turbinerneiter 5y agoBayer isn't Bavarian, it's Northrine Westphalian.
- slumdev 5y agoI guess there'll be some more required CBTs about the company's history and naming, then.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- goda90 5y agoMy team started off piloting a self hosted Mattermost instance used by our developers and quality assurance testers. Tons of information exchange as well a team bonding. Then they rolled out Teams for the whole company. We lost a ton of features that made Mattermost a delight to use. The way channels worked felt less intuitive, and it was just harder to care about group messages. And the worst part? A 30 day deletion policy.
- ratww 5y agoSame for us. Our channels went from vibrant to dead in a week because notifications are somehow broken there in ways I can't explain. The solution for us was to create multi-user chats in the "Chat" section and let the "Teams" section die the horrible death it deserves. The notifications are more consistent in "Chat". But god forbid someone talks too much, because then you get those horrible non-native notifications that are completely broken in itself too. It's probably the worst app I've used in years, and that's saying a lot because app quality is incredibly bad these days.
- criddell 5y agoThe "Teams" part has never made sense. A few exist where I work and I don't think they have ever been used.
- apexalpha 5y agoI still can't get over the fact that even Microsoft uses an electron app for their own OS. If not even Microsoft itself writes native code for their own bloody OS then we're just doomed. It's just all so sluggish.
- dsego 5y agoYeah, what ever happened to their Silverlight platform?
- Someone 5y agoIt’s alive, but only on IE 11, and only for four more months. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/silverlight-end-of-support-0a3be3c7-bead-e203-2dfd-74f0a64f1788 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/silverlight-end-...: “Microsoft Silverlight will reach the end of support on October 12, 2021. Silverlight development framework is currently only supported on Internet Explorer 10 and Internet Explorer 11, with support for Internet Explorer 10 ending on January 31, 2020. There is no longer support for Chrome, Firefox, or any browser using the Mac operating system.”
- Closi 5y ago> If not even Microsoft itself writes native code for their own bloody OS then we're just doomed I agree a native client would be great, although I assume this choice is more because Microsoft wanted it to be multi-platform across iOS, Android, Web, Mac, Linux, Windows, Chromebook e.t.c. and that would either require building it multiple times, or building it in html/js as the lowest common denominator (web).
- uncomputation 5y agoMy last job used Teams after I had years of experience with Slack and I’m right there with you. I actually enjoy being on Slack and feel like it adds something to the workplace culture (although yes, as many have pointed out before on HN, not everything Slack/real-time team software adds is good). Custom emojis in particular, such a simple thing and yet they really build a channel’s culture. Slack feels fun. Contrast that with Teams, which just feels soulless and corporate and… “angular” is the word that comes to mind. Obviously they are both run for profit, by corporations, for work, but the feel is indescribably different to me. Super grateful my current job uses Slack.
- ezst 5y ago> Oh and none of the Slack logs were kept, losing years of information. Welcome to another walled garden messaging service! At least lessons were learned..not.
- jbluepolarbear 5y agoI worked at a game company that was moving from google enterprise (gmail, docs, etc) to office be use our owner organization used office. Everyone fought hard to keep slack because teams is so bad. We got to keep slack but had to adopt office and it was a disaster. Outlook web and app act completely different, the mail web and app act completely different. the way to edit and share files was very confusing and always had permission issues. We were told we’d keep our email history, then the last 2 years of our history, and then finally they were unable to migrate the history and we lost years of emails. It messed the company up so much, I’m sure it’s one of the contributing factors for why the company was closed 6 months later. Like we were at the end of a 2 year development process going into soft launch, but this migration crippled production and the parent company never took responsibility.
- spoonjim 5y agoOn the contrary, I find that the total suckage of Teams means that there is no random chatter in Teams like we had in Slack because people hate using it. No memes or other random stuff. I like it.
- MuffinFlavored 5y agoOr just have dedicated rooms for memes/rules about no memes in serious channels and mute the rest...
- rvanlaar 5y agoMy 2cts with teams. Multiple clients use teams and sent me invites with team links. There seems to be no way to open or see the meetings directly within team. I always have to open my mail, click the link, go to the website, click on open in teams and only then will it open the meeting.
- jackson1442 5y agoWe use Teams at my University. Generally if something University-sponsored outside of the college of engineering wants to make a chat about something, they use Teams. CoE uses Discord, fortunately. Easily my least favorite chat app, save for those that break basic functionality as their core product (Snapchat). Teams doesn't seem to understand that organization admins might want to see user names in a different format than users. Everyone's name is Last, F., which makes sense from an administrative standpoint but needing to click into someone's profile to figure out who they are gets old _very_ fast. The only selling point that Teams seems to have is "we're already paying for it."
- wdb 5y agoI think Google Chat is the worst, though.
- iso1631 5y agoCompany spends $20,000 a month on an employee Company decides the most important thing is to save $20 a month on not paying for slack