11 ms·

It's so weird -- I use Teams all the time and I've never had a serious problem with it. It's not the greatest software ever made but it's certainly functional.

It's so weird -- I use Teams all the time and I've never had a serious problem with it. It's not the greatest software ever made but it's certainly functional. It's definitely getting a lot of work done to it.

xattt 4y ago
Your definition of broken is likely different than the GP.
- wvenable 4y ago
  Broken means "doesn't work". I've used Teams for 2 years now for conferencing, chat, desktop sharing, etc. It works just fine. I think a lot of Microsoft hate is clouding judgement here. People want Teams to suck.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    I simply can not get it to work. Note that we are on Linux/Chromebooks depending on the person in the team and this alone seems to be a major barrier for something that should be a non-issue. Every two bit video chat site in the world seems to have this figured out.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      >>I simply can not get it to work. Seems like that is something you should have stated in the first comment. >>Linux/Chromebooks depending on the person in the team and this alone seems to be a major barrier Something like les than 1% of the world uses Linux on the desktop. Dont get me wrong I love Linux, I used it as my primary desktop from 2005 until around 2012 when I went back to Windows (windows 10) But calling problems on linux a "major issue" seems to over state the usage of Linux Desktop further depending on when you tried it, and what client you were using that is likely the root cause The Linux Desktop client always sucked, so much is no longer a thing, 100% a web app now. The web App teams should work just fine.
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        1% of the world -> you are missing out on whole orgs that use Chromebooks. I'm sure that if you use the whole Windows enchilada that it may work, but given that Microsoft has shipped a Linux desktop client[1] I would expect that thing to simply work. It doesn't. Besides wanting to run all the time even when you're not in a teams meeting. Video conferencing is all about seamless integration, it should get out of the way as much as possible and as soon as the tool becomes the focal point of the meeting in my book you've failed to deliver. [1] https://petri.com/microsoft-replace-teams-linux-client-progressive-web-app/ https://petri.com/microsoft-replace-teams-linux-client-progr... And they retired it, apparently because they agreed with my assessment or it isn't worth their trouble.
        blibble 4y ago
        > but given that Microsoft has shipped a Linux desktop client[1] I would expect that thing to simply work. this is the entire Microsoft business model: 1. identify a competitor's product 2. clone it, but only spend enough engineering effort to make it sound plausible enough to tick the required boxes for evaluation by someone won't have to use it 3. bundle it with your other products (so no need to compete on quality)
    - zdragnar 4y ago
      Weird, I've used teams on a chromebook before, no problem with the basic functionality we used (i.e. video call).
    - blibble 4y ago
      > I simply can not get it to work. Note that we are on Linux/Chromebooks I'm sure Microsoft will get right on improving that "DOS aint done 'til Lotus won't run"
    - jvdvegt 4y ago
      I'm using it on my cheap Acer laptop with Ubuntu and Wayland daily, and the website works as intended (the Linux app is horrible).
  - xattt 4y ago
    My broken is fixing something all the time in order to get it to work correctly. Why does Teams occasionally load up with the usual icons showing the broken image icon? Why did my organization create a special “Fix Teams” utility?
    - hackmiester 4y ago
      My org does not use Teams at all. But I get invited to external Teams meetings sometimes. As a result, Teams is on my computer, adds itself to the startup items, then opens up to a login window every time I turn on my computer. The X button does not work to close the window. I have to open Task Manager and kill it every time. I can disable it in startup items, but it puts itself back there, next time I join a Teams meeting. Also, if I am using my computer in the closed position, it still chooses the integrated webcam and microphone every time, even sometimes switching to them randomly during a meeting. Of course, I am running on an unusual setup that I'm sure Microsoft didn't think to test: I am running Microsoft Teams on Microsoft Windows 10 on a Microsoft Surface Pro computer.
      - Kwpolska 4y ago
        You can use Teams from your browser, no need to install it.
        hackmiester 4y ago
        I will try that next time. I don't think that occurred to me because the Zoom app experience is very good. What I have been doing instead is joining from the Teams app on my phone unless I must share content.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    >I think a lot of Microsoft hate is clouding judgement here. People want Teams to suck. Agreed. It's as bandwagon as I've seen anything else. FFS, I half expect to see M$ written about. It works fine, have your meeting and get back to work. What is it that people are trying to do in Teams?
  - dghlsakjg 4y ago
    I actually like a lot of microsoft products, even though I own several thousand dollars worth of Apple hardware. I happily use windows 10 for most personal computing (I haven't upgraded, so no comment on 11), VScode, github, word, excel, whatever... Teams, though, is one MS product that genuinely never worked for me. Last company I was at used it, and they had to upgrade my work machine since teams needed more CPU (old machine was an i5 macbook with 8gb). Google/zoom was fine, but running teams would regularly overheat my computer.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  Pretty sure the GP definition of broke is not really what broke means. I know it is all the rage these days to just redefine terms to make them often mean the exact opposite of what the rest of the planet understands them to mean But we have to have shared definitions for words or communications just breaks down It can not be "your definition of broke is different from mine" if that is the case then language is just noise and we need to stop communicating
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Do you realize I'm the idiot that came up with live video in the browser to begin with? When I say it is broken I'm pretty serious about it: we spent a full day because there was one customer that positively insisted that we had to use their Teams setup rather than what we normally use and in the end we just gave up, it isn't worth the stress to me if there is a viable alternative (or even several). But of course if you think that I'm redefining the meaning of the word 'broken' just for the heck of it then you're free to continue to do so.
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      >> we spent a full day because there was one customer that positively insisted that we had to use their Teams setup rather So you tried it once, as a guest and then banned the entire things with out understand the permissions systems or any other possible causes? Understand that as a Admin I have the power to block Guests from Joining, Block some features from Guest, and so alot of things that is not commonly possible under other platforms. Often these security settings are aggressive by default, for example we had an issue with one client needing to connect to one of our teams room, teams and the room worked fine but because the security settings the Guest could not connect, everyone else could but the guest could not This is not something that can be fixed by the guest, nor it is problem with teams as a technology, it is the security controls built into the platform >Do you realize I'm the idiot that came up with live video in the browser to begin with? and I am a guy that wrote PHP code in the 90's and love it... so....
      - 4y ago
kdtsh 4y ago
Likewise, I don’t particularly like it but it’s fine. My biggest gripe is nonexistent official Linux support - I hate having to use a package maintained by one person on GitHub to get a desktop application for Linux, when this application is so critical for my day to day. But besides that it works fine.
- wvenable 4y ago
  I use Teams in Chrome a lot. Given that it's an electron app, I'm not sure it matters that much that it's "native" vs. "web app".
  - vinceguidry 4y ago
    you do get the benefit of the app author's knowledge of how to tweak the chromium env to run it reasonably well. And of course the community support.
- MaKey 4y ago
  The Linux app doesn't even support screen sharing when you're using Wayland. I was forced to try out the browser based variant (meeting link opened the web variant instantly instead of giving me the choice to use the app instead) and can now finally share my screen (even single windows!). Also I can now use backgrounds, which the app didn't support.
  - bsder 4y ago
    > Wayland Don't blame Teams for the fact that Linux can't sort out its Desktop GUI situation.
    - gcbirzan 4y ago
      Yes, the second graphical API that Linux supports in 30 years, definitely Linux's problem.
      - 4y ago
dragonwriter 4y ago
Teams is minimally usable, but its pretty much worst-in-class for…everything it does. It’s two compelling selling points seem to be (1) that “nobody every got fired for buying IBM” now applies to Microsoft more than IBM, and (2) moreover, users don’t actually buy Teams qua Teams, they get a Microsoft 365 subscriptions for some of the things where Microsoft has not-worst-in-class solutions, and Teams comes along for the ride, and its hard (for decisionmakers who do meetings–which, perhaps for this reason, are the least inadequate feature of teams–and have underlings to do most of the hands-on work) to justify paying to get something good when you have something you’re already paying for that fills the same 30,000’ bullet-point description. And #1 is probably an even more compelling selling point if your company is a subsidiary of Microsoft.
- wvenable 4y ago
  What does it mean to be worst-in-class for text chat or video conferencing. Video conferences look and sound great. Text chat is text chat. What am I missing here that's so awful?
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
    For chats, it is embarrassingly slow at rendering. Seemingly only maintains the last ~two dozen messages in memory, if you scroll back in history, you have to painfully wait for it to retrieve the text and then render it. Weird rendering bugs frequently. Meanwhile, I remember reading full ebooks on my Pentium which were rendered as a single HTML file with zero lag.
    - amaccuish 4y ago
      I have the same problem with Slack, unsure why Microsoft needed to copy the pitiful performance. That the Slack mobile apps mirror the non-existent reliability of the desktop clients is actually pretty amazing.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > For chats, it is embarrassingly slow at rendering To be fair, despite all the other ways that Slack runs rings around Teams, rendering speed isn’t one of them. But, yeah, you’d think this would be an easy opportunity for a big win for Teams.
alerighi 4y ago
It works mostly fine. It doesn't have the prettiest interface, for example message editing is not great, and search is not great (though it got better than 1 year ago that was unusable). Anther stupid thing is that handling multiple organizations (for example if you are added as external collaborator to another company Teams) is basically broken, you don't receive messages from one if you don't switch to it most of the time. Sure there are systems that work probably better but Teams is fine, also the alternatives either don't have all the features of Teams or they are difficult to use/setup. A pro of Teams is that if you already have Office365 is mostly well integrated with the other tools (mail, calendar, Office, AzureAD authentication) and you have to manage accounts only in one tool (I can from the horrible AzureAD administration console create a user and it has a mail, Teams, Office, and can login into the company computers). To me the reason to have Teams is just that you don't have to introduce another tool, have another account, etc. Of course if you decided to use GSuite instead of Microsoft one makes perfectly sense to use Google Meet, but GSuite doesn't yet have all the feature of Office365 and it's more expensive, and like it or not you have to deal with .docx documents when interfacing with other companies.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  It works mostly fine. It’s also the application I use basically every minute of the day. ‘Mostly fine’ just doesn’t cut it. When we’re talking about an IDE I can just bring my own, but for chat it doesn’t work like that.
  - wvenable 4y ago
    That's a fair point. I think if I had to be on a chat/video app every minute of the day, I'd hang myself. For the average use that I have, it's fine. If I had to use it ceaselessly, I might have a different opinion.
  - alerighi 4y ago
    Well, fortunately I don't use Teams every minute of my day. When I need it it works mostly fine. Of course if you use Windows, on other platforms Teams works completely unreliably or doesn't work at all. But that is another issue. I gave up using Linux at work on bare metal and started using a VM (not only for Teams). On macOS it works but not as good as Windows (I have some coworkers that has a mac, they loose notifications a lot)
FinalBriefing 4y ago
On a Mac, I got stuck in some sort of loop that prevented me from joining any calls, and even uninstalling the Teams app didn’t fix it. I had to use my iPhone for every Teams call, and sometimes the Teams web app.
- symfoniq 4y ago
  Same issues here on M1 MacBook Pro. Most of my company is Windows-based so I don’t think they endure as much pain.
kenjackson 4y ago
We also use it every day. That said, I feel like I know a lot of devs who think there are a lot of things that are unusable (or the equivalent). Everything from Visual Studio to the display on their iPhone to modern cinema and science fiction in general to In-and-Out burgers. As a general rule, I discount their take on pretty much anything. Is Teams great? No. Its better than what I used before it though, and its probably gotten better faster than just about any other piece of software I've used. I struggle to generate any outrage at all about it one way or another.
- blibble 4y ago
  > Is Teams great? No. Its better than what I used before it though dare I ask what you used before?
  - ThaDood 4y ago
    We went from HipChat to Teams and Teams is much better.
    - HillRat 4y ago
      Yeah, we also went HipChat + Skype -> Teams, and once one gets used to it, it's fine (and certainly better than XMPP hell). Teams' search was always problematic, but for our organizational use case (moderately long-lived chat rooms for the duration or sales or projects, with lots of conference calls), it was actually more usable than Slack or Zoom. Conversely, Slack seems much more effective for coordinating in-house tech teams handling ephemeral discussions. Horses for courses and all that.
- smcleod 4y ago
  What on earth have you used before?! I struggle to think of anything worse than Teams, maybe Amazon chime but pretty much everything I've used over the years is a good step up from Teams.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
giantrobot 4y ago
If I get a message on Teams and bring the window forward, the text box isn't active so if I start typing a reply nothing happens. Now I need to use the cursor to select the box. So fuck me if I tab to Teams to reply to a message. When joining a video/audio meeting, even though the "Join" button is colored like it's active, hitting enter will pull up some part of the audio or video config instead of joining the meeting. Messages will remain "unread" until a tab is selected and then clicked in. I have to interact with the fucking tab with the cursor before it will recognize I read a stupid message. These UI issues are amateur hour shit. I run into them dozens of times a day because my fingers are on the keyboard and I like to use keyboard shortcuts. Using Teams requires not just a mental context switch but a physical adjustment to simply send a reply or just mark a message as read. This is all besides Teams spinning up my fans with 300% CPU usage for reasons.
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  > When joining a video/audio meeting, even though the "Join" button is colored like it's active, hitting enter will pull up some part of the audio or video config instead of joining the meeting. This gets me every time. Even more so recently when, for some reason, it started to take its sweet time actually joining meetings. Someone will invite me to join, I'd click join in the popup and go about my business. Since it's slow, I'm not too bothered if I don't hear anything right away. Then the person will message me along the lines of "so... are you joining or what?
- hulitu 4y ago
  Welcome to the new UX/UI/Web x.0 whatever. Why, in the name of ... , when only 1 (one) input field is displayed on the screen, why it is not active ? 20 years ago this was the standard. What happened ?
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    "I added the .active class to the div! What more do you want?!"
ChuckMcM 4y ago
This comment and the grandparent both ring true for my and my experience. When using Teams as basically an IRC replacement it worked fine and didn't have any serious issues, when folks started using it to try to host meetings across sites and share interactivity it really struggled unsuccessfully. I agree with Jacques that all the pieces (except for high speed networking) were in place in the last century I expected this to develop more than it has. Given the stuff that ML can do TODAY, it should totally be possible to give the "presenter" a view of the audience where you use a combination of the pre-computed model for people's faces, and a client doing pose estimation from the web cam. If I'm looking at the presentation on my screen, that information should allow the presenter's view to see me looking at them. If I'm looking away it could show me looking down or something. If I leave and go to the bathroom or something it could show my seat being empty. Similarly, raising a hand should present on the speakers screen as my raising my hand in the audience, calling on me with the mouse should unmute my microphone until the presenter moves the mouse/pointer off my face in the audience. Early, EARLY, on in the Java group the idea had been worked on to provide a "visual environment" for doing things, and of course "Snowcrash" came out at the same time and everyone was doing their own "metaverse." I was looking at the problem and realized that to be successful we'd have to emulate some of the physics that keep us sane in group settings today. (like everyone can't hear everyone else talking in a room usually). David Rosenthal did a study for NIST, as I recall, on the network implications of something like the metaverse and concluded that it would take a terabit of network connectivity to "host" a live concert in the metaverse with the same "feel" as being there in person. (so everyone gets a view from their POV, voices travel 10 - 30' in a cone from the direction of the mouth, sound from the stage follows the acoustics of the modeled room etc. And then that analysis is followed by trimming things out to reduce bandwidth until you reach the "present day" bandwidth numbers and describing that reduced experience. He got back to Zoom like meetings with something like 1mbps/10gbps for the participant/network ratio. So summarizing; Often people approach the problem without realizing the complexity of what they are trying to do, in part because meetups/communication in "real life" has so much of the complexity taken care of by physics and the fact that you learned what worked as a toddler before you could think so it just "is" in your brain. Stepping outside of that mindset requires deliberate effort. There are likely opportunities here that are not being exploited because of this mindset.
blibble 4y ago
I tried hiding a channel once that was it, there's apparently no way to ever get it back unless I can remember its exact name (which I can't) I learnt my lesson
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Uh what? Every "Team" I have on the left side of my teams window has a "X hidden channels" message that I can click and that shows every single channel in the teams, including archived ones.
  - blibble 4y ago
    this is what I have to go through: https://allthings.how/how-to-hide-and-unhide-chat-in-microsoft-teams/ https://allthings.how/how-to-hide-and-unhide-chat-in-microso...
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      Oh hiding CHATS, not channels. Yeah that's probably stupid.
realworldperson 4y ago
[dead]
anthomtb 4y ago
Teams has been fine enough for me. Video connects instantly, audio drop outs are rare and the "mute incoming video" setting is a god send (when your cat is kissing you its butthole is pointing at me). I only use Teams on an iPhone or company-issued Windows laptop, and almost exclusively for calls within my organization. Maybe some of the issues crop up on Linux and/or reaching outside of your LAN/VPN?
stuaxo 4y ago
The Linux version of Teams was very broken for ages, but instead of fixing it, they dropped it. So much for the cross platform Microsoft.
roncesvalles 4y ago
If you're a company of 10 or 20 people, you won't notice the problems. It starts to break at medium-sized business scale (anything over, say, 100 employees). You start to notice limitations in the UI/UX but also just constant bugs in calling functionality, split meetings, super laggy large meetings, slow navigation, and broken search. It just feels like it wasn't built for serious scale from the ground up, like some after-thought Todo List app that was thrown in with Office 365 to tick a checkbox.
- mmcnl 4y ago
  I use it daily in an organization with >10k employees. Never really have any issues?

xattt 4y ago

Your definition of broken is likely different than the GP.

wvenable 4y ago
Broken means "doesn't work". I've used Teams for 2 years now for conferencing, chat, desktop sharing, etc. It works just fine. I think a lot of Microsoft hate is clouding judgement here. People want Teams to suck.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  I simply can not get it to work. Note that we are on Linux/Chromebooks depending on the person in the team and this alone seems to be a major barrier for something that should be a non-issue. Every two bit video chat site in the world seems to have this figured out.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    >>I simply can not get it to work. Seems like that is something you should have stated in the first comment. >>Linux/Chromebooks depending on the person in the team and this alone seems to be a major barrier Something like les than 1% of the world uses Linux on the desktop. Dont get me wrong I love Linux, I used it as my primary desktop from 2005 until around 2012 when I went back to Windows (windows 10) But calling problems on linux a "major issue" seems to over state the usage of Linux Desktop further depending on when you tried it, and what client you were using that is likely the root cause The Linux Desktop client always sucked, so much is no longer a thing, 100% a web app now. The web App teams should work just fine.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      1% of the world -> you are missing out on whole orgs that use Chromebooks. I'm sure that if you use the whole Windows enchilada that it may work, but given that Microsoft has shipped a Linux desktop client[1] I would expect that thing to simply work. It doesn't. Besides wanting to run all the time even when you're not in a teams meeting. Video conferencing is all about seamless integration, it should get out of the way as much as possible and as soon as the tool becomes the focal point of the meeting in my book you've failed to deliver. [1] https://petri.com/microsoft-replace-teams-linux-client-progressive-web-app/ https://petri.com/microsoft-replace-teams-linux-client-progr... And they retired it, apparently because they agreed with my assessment or it isn't worth their trouble.
      - blibble 4y ago
        > but given that Microsoft has shipped a Linux desktop client[1] I would expect that thing to simply work. this is the entire Microsoft business model: 1. identify a competitor's product 2. clone it, but only spend enough engineering effort to make it sound plausible enough to tick the required boxes for evaluation by someone won't have to use it 3. bundle it with your other products (so no need to compete on quality)
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    Weird, I've used teams on a chromebook before, no problem with the basic functionality we used (i.e. video call).
  - blibble 4y ago
    > I simply can not get it to work. Note that we are on Linux/Chromebooks I'm sure Microsoft will get right on improving that "DOS aint done 'til Lotus won't run"
  - jvdvegt 4y ago
    I'm using it on my cheap Acer laptop with Ubuntu and Wayland daily, and the website works as intended (the Linux app is horrible).
- xattt 4y ago
  My broken is fixing something all the time in order to get it to work correctly. Why does Teams occasionally load up with the usual icons showing the broken image icon? Why did my organization create a special “Fix Teams” utility?
  - hackmiester 4y ago
    My org does not use Teams at all. But I get invited to external Teams meetings sometimes. As a result, Teams is on my computer, adds itself to the startup items, then opens up to a login window every time I turn on my computer. The X button does not work to close the window. I have to open Task Manager and kill it every time. I can disable it in startup items, but it puts itself back there, next time I join a Teams meeting. Also, if I am using my computer in the closed position, it still chooses the integrated webcam and microphone every time, even sometimes switching to them randomly during a meeting. Of course, I am running on an unusual setup that I'm sure Microsoft didn't think to test: I am running Microsoft Teams on Microsoft Windows 10 on a Microsoft Surface Pro computer.
    - Kwpolska 4y ago
      You can use Teams from your browser, no need to install it.
      - hackmiester 4y ago
        I will try that next time. I don't think that occurred to me because the Zoom app experience is very good. What I have been doing instead is joining from the Teams app on my phone unless I must share content.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  >I think a lot of Microsoft hate is clouding judgement here. People want Teams to suck. Agreed. It's as bandwagon as I've seen anything else. FFS, I half expect to see M$ written about. It works fine, have your meeting and get back to work. What is it that people are trying to do in Teams?
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  I actually like a lot of microsoft products, even though I own several thousand dollars worth of Apple hardware. I happily use windows 10 for most personal computing (I haven't upgraded, so no comment on 11), VScode, github, word, excel, whatever... Teams, though, is one MS product that genuinely never worked for me. Last company I was at used it, and they had to upgrade my work machine since teams needed more CPU (old machine was an i5 macbook with 8gb). Google/zoom was fine, but running teams would regularly overheat my computer.
phpisthebest 4y ago
Pretty sure the GP definition of broke is not really what broke means. I know it is all the rage these days to just redefine terms to make them often mean the exact opposite of what the rest of the planet understands them to mean But we have to have shared definitions for words or communications just breaks down It can not be "your definition of broke is different from mine" if that is the case then language is just noise and we need to stop communicating
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Do you realize I'm the idiot that came up with live video in the browser to begin with? When I say it is broken I'm pretty serious about it: we spent a full day because there was one customer that positively insisted that we had to use their Teams setup rather than what we normally use and in the end we just gave up, it isn't worth the stress to me if there is a viable alternative (or even several). But of course if you think that I'm redefining the meaning of the word 'broken' just for the heck of it then you're free to continue to do so.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    >> we spent a full day because there was one customer that positively insisted that we had to use their Teams setup rather So you tried it once, as a guest and then banned the entire things with out understand the permissions systems or any other possible causes? Understand that as a Admin I have the power to block Guests from Joining, Block some features from Guest, and so alot of things that is not commonly possible under other platforms. Often these security settings are aggressive by default, for example we had an issue with one client needing to connect to one of our teams room, teams and the room worked fine but because the security settings the Guest could not connect, everyone else could but the guest could not This is not something that can be fixed by the guest, nor it is problem with teams as a technology, it is the security controls built into the platform >Do you realize I'm the idiot that came up with live video in the browser to begin with? and I am a guy that wrote PHP code in the 90's and love it... so....
    - 4y ago

kdtsh 4y ago

Likewise, I don’t particularly like it but it’s fine. My biggest gripe is nonexistent official Linux support - I hate having to use a package maintained by one person on GitHub to get a desktop application for Linux, when this application is so critical for my day to day. But besides that it works fine.

wvenable 4y ago
I use Teams in Chrome a lot. Given that it's an electron app, I'm not sure it matters that much that it's "native" vs. "web app".
- vinceguidry 4y ago
  you do get the benefit of the app author's knowledge of how to tweak the chromium env to run it reasonably well. And of course the community support.
MaKey 4y ago
The Linux app doesn't even support screen sharing when you're using Wayland. I was forced to try out the browser based variant (meeting link opened the web variant instantly instead of giving me the choice to use the app instead) and can now finally share my screen (even single windows!). Also I can now use backgrounds, which the app didn't support.
- bsder 4y ago
  > Wayland Don't blame Teams for the fact that Linux can't sort out its Desktop GUI situation.
  - gcbirzan 4y ago
    Yes, the second graphical API that Linux supports in 30 years, definitely Linux's problem.
    - 4y ago

dragonwriter 4y ago

Teams is minimally usable, but its pretty much worst-in-class for…everything it does. It’s two compelling selling points seem to be (1) that “nobody every got fired for buying IBM” now applies to Microsoft more than IBM, and (2) moreover, users don’t actually buy Teams qua Teams, they get a Microsoft 365 subscriptions for some of the things where Microsoft has not-worst-in-class solutions, and Teams comes along for the ride, and its hard (for decisionmakers who do meetings–which, perhaps for this reason, are the least inadequate feature of teams–and have underlings to do most of the hands-on work) to justify paying to get something good when you have something you’re already paying for that fills the same 30,000’ bullet-point description. And #1 is probably an even more compelling selling point if your company is a subsidiary of Microsoft.

wvenable 4y ago
What does it mean to be worst-in-class for text chat or video conferencing. Video conferences look and sound great. Text chat is text chat. What am I missing here that's so awful?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
  For chats, it is embarrassingly slow at rendering. Seemingly only maintains the last ~two dozen messages in memory, if you scroll back in history, you have to painfully wait for it to retrieve the text and then render it. Weird rendering bugs frequently. Meanwhile, I remember reading full ebooks on my Pentium which were rendered as a single HTML file with zero lag.
  - amaccuish 4y ago
    I have the same problem with Slack, unsure why Microsoft needed to copy the pitiful performance. That the Slack mobile apps mirror the non-existent reliability of the desktop clients is actually pretty amazing.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > For chats, it is embarrassingly slow at rendering To be fair, despite all the other ways that Slack runs rings around Teams, rendering speed isn’t one of them. But, yeah, you’d think this would be an easy opportunity for a big win for Teams.

alerighi 4y ago

It works mostly fine. It doesn't have the prettiest interface, for example message editing is not great, and search is not great (though it got better than 1 year ago that was unusable). Anther stupid thing is that handling multiple organizations (for example if you are added as external collaborator to another company Teams) is basically broken, you don't receive messages from one if you don't switch to it most of the time. Sure there are systems that work probably better but Teams is fine, also the alternatives either don't have all the features of Teams or they are difficult to use/setup. A pro of Teams is that if you already have Office365 is mostly well integrated with the other tools (mail, calendar, Office, AzureAD authentication) and you have to manage accounts only in one tool (I can from the horrible AzureAD administration console create a user and it has a mail, Teams, Office, and can login into the company computers). To me the reason to have Teams is just that you don't have to introduce another tool, have another account, etc. Of course if you decided to use GSuite instead of Microsoft one makes perfectly sense to use Google Meet, but GSuite doesn't yet have all the feature of Office365 and it's more expensive, and like it or not you have to deal with .docx documents when interfacing with other companies.

Aeolun 4y ago
It works mostly fine. It’s also the application I use basically every minute of the day. ‘Mostly fine’ just doesn’t cut it. When we’re talking about an IDE I can just bring my own, but for chat it doesn’t work like that.
- wvenable 4y ago
  That's a fair point. I think if I had to be on a chat/video app every minute of the day, I'd hang myself. For the average use that I have, it's fine. If I had to use it ceaselessly, I might have a different opinion.
- alerighi 4y ago
  Well, fortunately I don't use Teams every minute of my day. When I need it it works mostly fine. Of course if you use Windows, on other platforms Teams works completely unreliably or doesn't work at all. But that is another issue. I gave up using Linux at work on bare metal and started using a VM (not only for Teams). On macOS it works but not as good as Windows (I have some coworkers that has a mac, they loose notifications a lot)

FinalBriefing 4y ago

On a Mac, I got stuck in some sort of loop that prevented me from joining any calls, and even uninstalling the Teams app didn’t fix it. I had to use my iPhone for every Teams call, and sometimes the Teams web app.

symfoniq 4y ago
Same issues here on M1 MacBook Pro. Most of my company is Windows-based so I don’t think they endure as much pain.

kenjackson 4y ago

We also use it every day. That said, I feel like I know a lot of devs who think there are a lot of things that are unusable (or the equivalent). Everything from Visual Studio to the display on their iPhone to modern cinema and science fiction in general to In-and-Out burgers. As a general rule, I discount their take on pretty much anything. Is Teams great? No. Its better than what I used before it though, and its probably gotten better faster than just about any other piece of software I've used. I struggle to generate any outrage at all about it one way or another.

blibble 4y ago
> Is Teams great? No. Its better than what I used before it though dare I ask what you used before?
- ThaDood 4y ago
  We went from HipChat to Teams and Teams is much better.
  - HillRat 4y ago
    Yeah, we also went HipChat + Skype -> Teams, and once one gets used to it, it's fine (and certainly better than XMPP hell). Teams' search was always problematic, but for our organizational use case (moderately long-lived chat rooms for the duration or sales or projects, with lots of conference calls), it was actually more usable than Slack or Zoom. Conversely, Slack seems much more effective for coordinating in-house tech teams handling ephemeral discussions. Horses for courses and all that.
smcleod 4y ago
What on earth have you used before?! I struggle to think of anything worse than Teams, maybe Amazon chime but pretty much everything I've used over the years is a good step up from Teams.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago

giantrobot 4y ago

If I get a message on Teams and bring the window forward, the text box isn't active so if I start typing a reply nothing happens. Now I need to use the cursor to select the box. So fuck me if I tab to Teams to reply to a message. When joining a video/audio meeting, even though the "Join" button is colored like it's active, hitting enter will pull up some part of the audio or video config instead of joining the meeting. Messages will remain "unread" until a tab is selected and then clicked in. I have to interact with the fucking tab with the cursor before it will recognize I read a stupid message. These UI issues are amateur hour shit. I run into them dozens of times a day because my fingers are on the keyboard and I like to use keyboard shortcuts. Using Teams requires not just a mental context switch but a physical adjustment to simply send a reply or just mark a message as read. This is all besides Teams spinning up my fans with 300% CPU usage for reasons.

vladvasiliu 4y ago
> When joining a video/audio meeting, even though the "Join" button is colored like it's active, hitting enter will pull up some part of the audio or video config instead of joining the meeting. This gets me every time. Even more so recently when, for some reason, it started to take its sweet time actually joining meetings. Someone will invite me to join, I'd click join in the popup and go about my business. Since it's slow, I'm not too bothered if I don't hear anything right away. Then the person will message me along the lines of "so... are you joining or what?
hulitu 4y ago
Welcome to the new UX/UI/Web x.0 whatever. Why, in the name of ... , when only 1 (one) input field is displayed on the screen, why it is not active ? 20 years ago this was the standard. What happened ?
- giantrobot 4y ago
  "I added the .active class to the div! What more do you want?!"

ChuckMcM 4y ago

This comment and the grandparent both ring true for my and my experience. When using Teams as basically an IRC replacement it worked fine and didn't have any serious issues, when folks started using it to try to host meetings across sites and share interactivity it really struggled unsuccessfully. I agree with Jacques that all the pieces (except for high speed networking) were in place in the last century I expected this to develop more than it has. Given the stuff that ML can do TODAY, it should totally be possible to give the "presenter" a view of the audience where you use a combination of the pre-computed model for people's faces, and a client doing pose estimation from the web cam. If I'm looking at the presentation on my screen, that information should allow the presenter's view to see me looking at them. If I'm looking away it could show me looking down or something. If I leave and go to the bathroom or something it could show my seat being empty. Similarly, raising a hand should present on the speakers screen as my raising my hand in the audience, calling on me with the mouse should unmute my microphone until the presenter moves the mouse/pointer off my face in the audience. Early, EARLY, on in the Java group the idea had been worked on to provide a "visual environment" for doing things, and of course "Snowcrash" came out at the same time and everyone was doing their own "metaverse." I was looking at the problem and realized that to be successful we'd have to emulate some of the physics that keep us sane in group settings today. (like everyone can't hear everyone else talking in a room usually). David Rosenthal did a study for NIST, as I recall, on the network implications of something like the metaverse and concluded that it would take a terabit of network connectivity to "host" a live concert in the metaverse with the same "feel" as being there in person. (so everyone gets a view from their POV, voices travel 10 - 30' in a cone from the direction of the mouth, sound from the stage follows the acoustics of the modeled room etc. And then that analysis is followed by trimming things out to reduce bandwidth until you reach the "present day" bandwidth numbers and describing that reduced experience. He got back to Zoom like meetings with something like 1mbps/10gbps for the participant/network ratio. So summarizing; Often people approach the problem without realizing the complexity of what they are trying to do, in part because meetups/communication in "real life" has so much of the complexity taken care of by physics and the fact that you learned what worked as a toddler before you could think so it just "is" in your brain. Stepping outside of that mindset requires deliberate effort. There are likely opportunities here that are not being exploited because of this mindset.

blibble 4y ago

I tried hiding a channel once that was it, there's apparently no way to ever get it back unless I can remember its exact name (which I can't) I learnt my lesson

mrguyorama 4y ago
Uh what? Every "Team" I have on the left side of my teams window has a "X hidden channels" message that I can click and that shows every single channel in the teams, including archived ones.
- blibble 4y ago
  this is what I have to go through: https://allthings.how/how-to-hide-and-unhide-chat-in-microsoft-teams/ https://allthings.how/how-to-hide-and-unhide-chat-in-microso...
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    Oh hiding CHATS, not channels. Yeah that's probably stupid.

realworldperson 4y ago

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anthomtb 4y ago

Teams has been fine enough for me. Video connects instantly, audio drop outs are rare and the "mute incoming video" setting is a god send (when your cat is kissing you its butthole is pointing at me). I only use Teams on an iPhone or company-issued Windows laptop, and almost exclusively for calls within my organization. Maybe some of the issues crop up on Linux and/or reaching outside of your LAN/VPN?

stuaxo 4y ago

The Linux version of Teams was very broken for ages, but instead of fixing it, they dropped it. So much for the cross platform Microsoft.

roncesvalles 4y ago

If you're a company of 10 or 20 people, you won't notice the problems. It starts to break at medium-sized business scale (anything over, say, 100 employees). You start to notice limitations in the UI/UX but also just constant bugs in calling functionality, split meetings, super laggy large meetings, slow navigation, and broken search. It just feels like it wasn't built for serious scale from the ground up, like some after-thought Todo List app that was thrown in with Office 365 to tick a checkbox.

mmcnl 4y ago
I use it daily in an organization with >10k employees. Never really have any issues?