Global availability of Microsoft Teams | Hacker News Reader

Global availability of Microsoft Teams

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All of the file-sharing features are tied into "OneDrive For Business," which isn't OneDrive and is just some Sharepoint garbage. The new sync client helps a lot, but it doesn't work for the sharing part at all, which is what Teams uses. It's a huge liability for Teams until Microsoft can make OneDrive For Business not terrible. And when I evaluated it, it was missing any kind of snippet support, which I consider a dealbreaker (some workflows may not think this way, which is fine).

You mention onedrive, funny (perhaps not) story: I've seen 5~ situations at different organisations where malware in the form of cryptolocker spreads through onedrive destroying everyone's files and connected computers more often than not, also interestingly I've seen onedrive completely mess up its versioning system and rid the organisation at hands files dated and resulting in days if not weeks of re-work. I can't believe these things seem to go unreported as if I've seen it (at least) 5 times others must have witnessed it many more, onedrive seems like one the carrier of bad all that is bad and vulnerable in the Microsoft ecosystem. Note: I am not some anti-corp / anti-ms fanboy, I'm simply stating what I've witnessed which I have not with other platforms.

I assume the organizations were using ODB as on-prem only? If they were using it with SharePoint Online they could request a point in time restore. --With on-prem solutions, they have to be managing their own backup strategy, which many companies are horrible at. In this respect, I don't think it's really any different than it would be with Dropbox or another cloud provider, although I suppose they could have tools that require less manual intervention to do the restore?

No, at least three of them were online / part of the O365 bundle (fumble if you ask me), it was an absolute nightmare dealing with Microsoft support, the level of incompetence they showed two of the times (when I was involved) was astounding, I'd heard bad things but it was next level and what made it worse is they were paying for the service, both with money and with the downtime while they were messed around both by the initial disruption and the messing around with the seemingly endless running with Microsoft support engineers, finally files were restored but the damage from the downtime and time spent on trying to get the vendor to deliver the cost to the business in at least one of the cases (I'm under an NDA for the one) was immeasurable but large. They experienced had previously experienced many problems with MS support and with the O365 (completely online / hosted) platforms it is enough that they're now underway evaluating alternatives, it might be the same products but on-prem or something entirely different but I am not involved in that process.

They will probably fix it over time, and also closely integrate with everything else, like LinkedIn, O365, Word / PPT / Task Tracking etc..

I highly doubt that, the yammer, SharePoint, onedrive, O365 etc... integration is abysmal and every product seems to get worse as they seem to tie them together with silly string behind the scenes.

With as long as I've been using OneDrive For Business -- yeah, they'll probably fix it over time. It's been getting fixed over time. It's just happening really slowly, and I wouldn't be optimistic about it getting fixed on a timeline I cared about.

They did the same thing with Skype for Business, which is just Lync, warmed over.

Skype for business is bad, you can't do simple things like share a file through the chat, you have to send an email attachment.

I have stability issues with Skype for business, but I share files daily with colleagues. Are you sure that's not some restriction put on by your IT department?

That might be the case :)

Yeah, there are some glaringly simple things Skype For Biz has trouble doing. Try to figure out how to view your chat conversation history.

The established standard UX across IM apps is that you click on the contact you are interested in, and scroll up in the chat window to view your old IMs. Not on Skype for biz.

My work is a bit of a mess, we've historically never been that joined up of a business, but on the same floor we have people using Skype, Skype for Business, Slack and Teams.

Skype - Actively getting people to move away from this, fairly easy as new people in to the business don't setup accounts, everyone has experience with Skype, it's not a business tool.

Skype for Business - Clunky, conversation history is there, then disappears, sometimes it appears in your Outlook (in our case in a folder), sometimes it doesn't. Feels like a half-baked platform, but as my office is very Office365/MS-in-the-cloud they force it upon us.

Teams - Better than SfB, but still not usable. It tries to do everything, such as integrate planners, to do lists and so on. It dresses up as a business tool, then it has 'make your own meme' generators, which makes it seem a bit of a confused app. My biggest bug bear is when you're viewing a conversation, if someone replies to an old message, the entire message thread then appears as the 'newest'. I've missed countless conversations because of the funky ordering of chat.

Slack - Awesome. A bit memory hungry, but a really well thought out app in terms of UX. Does exactly what you need it do, clicking a username does what you expect, as does mentioning and so on. You can apply themes, tons of plugins and extra stuff.

Whilst Slack is everyones preferred app, the business refuse to pay for it as they pay for Office365. wORK are, for that reason, promoting both Teams and SfB, because Teams has planners and so on, but SfB has somewhat usable VOIP. Anyone slightly technical uses Slack though on the free plan, it's just a lot better and features like Code Snippets are great for tech teams.

There are a subset of us that are thinking of moving to IRC, which has the added feature that PMs and managers can't figure it out.

I still don't get why everybody is hyping slack so much. I have used MSN, skype, hangouts, MS office messenger thing, IRC, hipchat and slack in my professional life and it is really all the same. You chat, you send files, you make calls. Nothing stands out really. What is so great about slack, that everybody is going nuts over it?

At low volume that's true. Slack stays easy to use, keep up with, &c at high volume - which is what I like about it.

IRC and Slack are nearly the same, but IRC comes with some overheads of finding or setting up a server, figuring out your own backlog, &c

The exact same can be said about HipChat, yet it receives no hype at all..

I would not say the exact same about HipChat, any more than I would say the exact same about Microsoft Teams.

I've had the (fortunate?) opportunity to use both, and neither of them feel like they do as good of a job.

I even used HipChat first, so it's not just bias. (Wanted to stay in Atlassian tools)

So perhaps it's just the added polish Slack seems to have?

I know the Hipchat for Android app was god awful. Just the worst.

Microsoft Teams didn't consistently scroll down automatically for new messages when you were already at the bottom for quite some time - supposedly that's fixed now.

Perhaps the example you should bring up is "MatterMost" - though I certainly have not used that.

Because HipChat sounds like a sex thing. I'd feel silly talking about it in professional company.

What is so great about slack, that everybody is going nuts over it?

Easy access to all your conversation on all your devices and search that works better than any of the other platforms

I only use one device for my work. Important stuff goes into email, not chat.

I guess our communication patterns are very different.

Everybody is going nuts over it. That's what's "great" about it. As you say, it was done several times before.

Slack does what it needs to do. SFC can't even keep messages in sync across devices. Everyone is going bonkers because they didn't go crazy

I always had the feeling that slack is paying people to hype it wherever they go.

We're a tech org, the ability to get data in/out of Slack with ease, using any scripting language, makes it awesome.

What is all that data that you put into a 3rd party chat system? Serious question.

We're aware that data is being piped in to a 3rd party system, so obviously some things don't go in to Slack.

An example of usage could be, we have a StatusPage.io site. Rather than subscribe everyone to email updates or similar that works here, and maintain that list, we simply have a plugin that pipes the updates in to Slack. That way if someone raises a status page update for a web server being down, everyone is aware that this is now public information on StatusPage.

This is just one of a lot of examples, but things like that once embedded become the norm quickly and you wonder what it was like before them.

> really well thought out app in terms of UX. Does exactly what you need it do, clicking a username does what you expect,

How do I see a person's username instead of their real name when hovering over them?

It says their username at the top of the conversation if it's a private conversation, if it's a channel then selecting the user and pressing view profile will reveal their username.

The great UX is that you don't even need their username, you can type the @ sign and then either their account full name or username, either way it will find them in an easy to use list.

Just keep adding to the sludge! More proprietary protocols and islands! The biggest problem with "Unified Communications" in business is effortless federation with your vendors and customers. Teams just makes a bigger mess, but then so does Slack and Cisco Spark. So add a Web conference tool or two (I have WebEx and Skype for Business conferencing), but the audio is annoyingly poor on S4B business. Don't forget our phone system, SharePoint, OneDrive and Yammer. And while you are at it, have you kept up on LinkedIn and Twitter? To communicate with international colleagues, you will also also need Whatsapp. Perhaps you are working at a company with Google Apps with Hangouts, and may your deity of choice help you if you have Salesforce Chatter (A torrent of mental diarrhea) Of course bots are the future because I always wanted a text interface, or better yet, an ASR/TTS interface because I like practicing my English with a 3 year old.

This is a cluster and it is quickly getting worse. None of these companies are actually trying to help. So far as I can tell, they just want to grow their adoption numbers, try to preserve some revenue as long as they can and maybe kill the PSTN, but I can't even make a phone call between any of these systems. Then, with one small blip an entire system goes down, so I have to call you and send a email with the file you need.

XMPP is dead, SIP/SIMPLE isn't appropriate for IRC/Slack type apps. WebRTC is great for clients, but what about the backend, and federation? I love what I see with Riot, and I appreciate Google trying to move forward with the IMS replacement of SMS (Good luck explaining that one to the public, let alone market it...)

While all of these companies will babble on endlessly about being open and committed to international standards bodies, real time communication applications are where they are at their worst.

Meh. I've tried to use it, but I quickly filed it in the "totally useless" bin: the amount of windowdressing vs actual content is staggering. I'm not exaggerating that in a 1680x1050 window, I get maybe 6 lines of content, the rest is spacing and navigation.

Then there's the abysmal threading features: conversations are collapsed by default, and are not kept in chronological order. When trying to read back a conversation, you're constantly working the mouse to click folds or scroll back and forth.

The icing on the cake was its memory and cpu usage: it got so bad (with only 4 teams joined) that my entire laptop slowed to a crawl. I uninstalled it and told my colleagues to just send me e-mails if they really want my feedback. I'm dreading the day my company makes its usage mandatory.

We've had preview access at work. It seems nice enough and I'm looking forward to playing with the APIs. It does still rely on the other o365 components for features, which just shows up how janky lync and sharepoint can be.

we've had slack and irc and hipchat. honestly I don't care which chat system we use as long as internally we can all come to some kind of agreement. That speaks more to our er diverse user-group than the quality of any given chat system though.

I haven't been able to log in from a linux system unfortunately. The browser user-agent detection barfs on both chrome and firefox for me.

So Teams is clearly Microsoft's answer to Slack. But, how does it relate to Skype for Business (Lync)? It doesn't seem to interoperate much.

Teams will snipe any incoming Skype for Business IMs that you receive before you can accept the toast on your real Lync client, which is always fun...

It's either got the Skype for Business Web SDK or raw UCWA jammed in there to log you into Skype, deal with presence, and handle messaging.

Teams is built on top of Skype for Business/Lync, Groups and OneDrive for Business. Under the hood they're the same platform I'd expect that as Teams matures the ability to interoperate will improve

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