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Comment by tormeh | Hacker News Reader

If you dislike Slack, have you seen Skype for Business? Its text chat function disproves the existence of Cthulhu, since something so mind-bendingly horrible would surely have awoken Him, if He existed. Imagine sending your colleagues single-line Word documents and you're basically there.

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Couldn't agree more. We use Skype for Business and its lack of obvious features is amazing. To give people an example, you cannot even send a link!

Skype for Business is one of those terrible products that makes me want to speak to someone that helped build it and ask "what happened?"

Huh? I've only used Lync 2013 and before, but the IM client doesn't prevent links. It's basically like MSN Messenger with some enhancements, for internal use. At least it doesn't have the deliverability and ordering issues Skype has.

Group chat isn't anything amazing with it but I haven't found it deficient. Maybe I'm using it wrong.

You can send links, but it's copy/paste functionality is "quirky".

How do I send a link!! Seriously would love to know. I paste it in and I think it gets reformatted for the person on the other end. What is that??

How 1994!

Using Slack is like a dream compared to Skype for Business. Sure Slack may have some dumb default settings but Skype for Business finds a way to somehow sabotage 5-10 mins of most meetings with some sort of technology issue.

Out of curiosity is this on a Mac?

I've recently joined a new company where everybody loves to complain about Skype/Lync stating similar things to this. But I have zero issues, and had near zero issues at my prior company where it was widely used and improved remote working considerably. The only difference I can see is in this new company everybody is using MacOS (and admittedly when I tried it on Mac it was terrible).

Skype for Business was bad enough I had to create Serious Business Cats in order to embed images...

https://github.com/adzm/BusinessCats

By the way: we make a Skype for Business [Server] <> Slack bridge, if anyone is interested (see https://cdn.sameroom.io/enterprise-admins.pdf).

The current solution requires persistent rooms to be enabled, a new AD account, and a VM running our proxy.

Once set up though, you can do 2-way, real-time sync between Slack channels and SfB rooms (https://vimeo.com/174265102).

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