5 ms·

Just wait for the migration from Slack to MS Teams, makes me wanna stop working all together. Also, MS recently launched their Notion clone, so all Notion users

by fjodir 3y ago

Just wait for the migration from Slack to MS Teams, makes me wanna stop working all together. Also, MS recently launched their Notion clone, so all Notion users in MS shops better prepare to migrate to a much worse alternative.

kqr 3y ago
I briefly led an underground incentive to use something other than Teams among the engineers at a previous employer. It gathered quite a bit of steam even though none of the alternatives proposed were great. Tells you what people think of Teams! (It petered out when my priorities shifted, though, so I guess that tells you how much bandwidth people actually have for caring about their instant messaging. (There had already been a successful underground movement to use something other than Teams for video conferencing.))
- lbriner 3y ago
  Personally, I don't mind if a tool is rubbish as long as I can use the bits I need to use and the rest doesn't get in my way. I don't like Teams but mostly keep to chat and video calls and that works fine. Sure, there is other stuff that might be junk like files, tasks and apps but I just don't use that. That is the old adage about keeping the main thing the main thing. It depresses me how many major apps doesn't even do the basics well, either performance is terrible or the UX is over-complicated.
  - zokier 3y ago
    > It depresses me how many major apps doesn't even do the basics well, either performance is terrible or the UX is over-complicated Teams definitely falls in this category. It is dog-slow, but even worse for a chat application it randomly just drops messages(!) quietly(!!) which makes for very confusing discussion threads when different people have different sets of messages. That is arguably the very most basic feature that one can expect from chat, and Teams fumbles even it.
- user_named 3y ago
  You didn't just propose Slack?
esperent 3y ago
I think MS Teams gets a bad rap that is doesn't deserve. I don't know if the experience has improved or something - maybe Teams used to be worse and people are reacting to how it used to be? I've also been using MS Loop a lot and it's pretty great actually. It's clearly still under development and missing a lot of features but leaving that aside, I don't think it's fair to dismiss it as a Notion clone. It's far simpler than Notion and for writing things like company handbooks that's a good thing, actually. Sometimes simpler is better. If you need all the tables as database stuff, then use Notion. If you need a simple and clean documentation source, well I've tried a lot of these kinds of apps over the years and Loop is shaping up to be one of the better ones IMO. I say this grudgingly, BTW. I strongly resisted choosing MS for our business. But as a small company in Vietnam we get an amazing value proposition from MS 365 that isn't even close to matched by anything else. We pay about $3.50 per user and we get Teams, video conferencing, office apps, Loop, Visio, Whiteboard, SharePoint (ok that one is genuinely quite bad), and also a load of business automation stuff in the form of Workflows that I'm still exploring. Oh and Shift scheduling. OneNote. About a hundred other things that I forget right now. Even still I resisted but the final straw was that automatic translation is included in Teams for free. As a bilingual team that's vital for us. By contrast, just Notion would be $8 per user. I think Slack is $6 per user. Not a lot for a western tech company, but we genuinely can't afford that. MS 365 wins by being "just good enough" at _loads_ of things, and way cheaper than the competition.
- probably_wrong 3y ago
  MS Teams is... bad. Even if they were to solve the bugs and performance issues, and even if they actually implemented any of the features that the community has been asking for (push to talk comes to mind), the entire concept is flawed. Two problems with information are duplication (too many copies around, all of them slightly different) and finding where it is. MS Teams makes it easy to store duplicate data and hard to find it later: did you upload the data as a file in the "development" channel, or as a link in the "updates" wiki? Nobody knows, not even the search function. And with each new project manager creating five channels per project, two of which will actually see any activity... I think MS Teams wants to be everything for everyone and succeeds at neither.
bsuvc 3y ago
> MS Teams, makes me wanna stop working all together I think this is what some people just don't understand, especially executives or managers who are too far removed from individual contributors' day-to-day activities. The wrong choice of IT tools can suck the life out of your organization. Sure, on paper two tools can seem equivalent, but in reality, they are not the same.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  I don't know, I may be the only person on the planet who actually likes Teams. Like, it's still a pile of shit like almost all software designed in the past 10+ years - but it's better and snappier and prettier than Slack ever was for me. Maybe the difference is that my employer fully embraced the Microsoft stack, with Office, Outlook/Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams forming a coherent and well-integrated whole.

by fjodir 3y ago

kqr 3y ago

I briefly led an underground incentive to use something other than Teams among the engineers at a previous employer. It gathered quite a bit of steam even though none of the alternatives proposed were great. Tells you what people think of Teams! (It petered out when my priorities shifted, though, so I guess that tells you how much bandwidth people actually have for caring about their instant messaging. (There had already been a successful underground movement to use something other than Teams for video conferencing.))

lbriner 3y ago
Personally, I don't mind if a tool is rubbish as long as I can use the bits I need to use and the rest doesn't get in my way. I don't like Teams but mostly keep to chat and video calls and that works fine. Sure, there is other stuff that might be junk like files, tasks and apps but I just don't use that. That is the old adage about keeping the main thing the main thing. It depresses me how many major apps doesn't even do the basics well, either performance is terrible or the UX is over-complicated.
- zokier 3y ago
  > It depresses me how many major apps doesn't even do the basics well, either performance is terrible or the UX is over-complicated Teams definitely falls in this category. It is dog-slow, but even worse for a chat application it randomly just drops messages(!) quietly(!!) which makes for very confusing discussion threads when different people have different sets of messages. That is arguably the very most basic feature that one can expect from chat, and Teams fumbles even it.
user_named 3y ago
You didn't just propose Slack?

esperent 3y ago

I think MS Teams gets a bad rap that is doesn't deserve. I don't know if the experience has improved or something - maybe Teams used to be worse and people are reacting to how it used to be? I've also been using MS Loop a lot and it's pretty great actually. It's clearly still under development and missing a lot of features but leaving that aside, I don't think it's fair to dismiss it as a Notion clone. It's far simpler than Notion and for writing things like company handbooks that's a good thing, actually. Sometimes simpler is better. If you need all the tables as database stuff, then use Notion. If you need a simple and clean documentation source, well I've tried a lot of these kinds of apps over the years and Loop is shaping up to be one of the better ones IMO. I say this grudgingly, BTW. I strongly resisted choosing MS for our business. But as a small company in Vietnam we get an amazing value proposition from MS 365 that isn't even close to matched by anything else. We pay about $3.50 per user and we get Teams, video conferencing, office apps, Loop, Visio, Whiteboard, SharePoint (ok that one is genuinely quite bad), and also a load of business automation stuff in the form of Workflows that I'm still exploring. Oh and Shift scheduling. OneNote. About a hundred other things that I forget right now. Even still I resisted but the final straw was that automatic translation is included in Teams for free. As a bilingual team that's vital for us. By contrast, just Notion would be $8 per user. I think Slack is $6 per user. Not a lot for a western tech company, but we genuinely can't afford that. MS 365 wins by being "just good enough" at _loads_ of things, and way cheaper than the competition.

probably_wrong 3y ago
MS Teams is... bad. Even if they were to solve the bugs and performance issues, and even if they actually implemented any of the features that the community has been asking for (push to talk comes to mind), the entire concept is flawed. Two problems with information are duplication (too many copies around, all of them slightly different) and finding where it is. MS Teams makes it easy to store duplicate data and hard to find it later: did you upload the data as a file in the "development" channel, or as a link in the "updates" wiki? Nobody knows, not even the search function. And with each new project manager creating five channels per project, two of which will actually see any activity... I think MS Teams wants to be everything for everyone and succeeds at neither.

bsuvc 3y ago

> MS Teams, makes me wanna stop working all together I think this is what some people just don't understand, especially executives or managers who are too far removed from individual contributors' day-to-day activities. The wrong choice of IT tools can suck the life out of your organization. Sure, on paper two tools can seem equivalent, but in reality, they are not the same.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
I don't know, I may be the only person on the planet who actually likes Teams. Like, it's still a pile of shit like almost all software designed in the past 10+ years - but it's better and snappier and prettier than Slack ever was for me. Maybe the difference is that my employer fully embraced the Microsoft stack, with Office, Outlook/Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams forming a coherent and well-integrated whole.