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Microsoft Teams gets a free version

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53 pointsdjug24 comments

> Once they’ve download teams, workplaces will be hooked into the Microsoft 365 suite.

One of my absolute favourite comments ever on HN was by basch in 2017-04-20:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160809

It's a beautiful, heartfelt, almost entirely lowercase, description of the state of affairs of Microsoft's 'naming of things' (remember, there's only two hard things in computer science).

This year I've had to fully (re)embrace the challenges of Microsoft's (re)naming, (re)branding, and (re)invigorating of some of their old products. Oh my.

James Mickens is doing a bad job of going incognito. Tanquam ex ungue leonem.

Is that claw sufficient, though?

It did feel like a carefully and beautifully crafted long-suffered rant -- but on the other hand, I've worked with people who've understood Microsoft products (and the renaming / rebranding / incompatibilities between then all, with that same (disturbing) level of understanding <sic> ... however it's rare to find someone with the ability to tie it all together that well.

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i sometimes wonder if i am more of a crazy person for a) believing in the existence of kafkaesque madness within their product suite, one that isnt quite actually as bad as i make it out to be or b) my delusion that no one at microsoft understands better than me how bad it really is. why is no one fixing this /sobs. Why is there no Steve Jobs esque person who stands up and says “look, usability is more important than features?” I ask this earnestly, how does ANY company actually successfully deploy Office 365 and use SharePoint OnLine cross platform?

almost all my frustration comes from simply trying to coherently respond when someone asks an incredibly simple "how do i?" It is IMPOSSIBLE to communicate a correct+coherent+concise+laymen answer to an office 365 question. (Why doesnt my Office 365 Group Team Site Document Library aherm Group OneDrive, show up in my iOS OneDrive app? You didnt press FOLLOW in the SharePoint Web Interface...)

I honestly dont think its as hard to fix as Microsoft seems to be making it.

GIVE CLIENTS AND SERVERS DIFFERENT NAMES. Exchange/Outlook. SharePoint/OneDrive. Lync/Skype-Teams. IIS/Edge. SomethingServer/Windows. Do not deviate.

FIX FUCKING FOLLOW/SYNC in OneDrive. I should be able to Right Click the system tray icon and see available group team site document libraries for sync. I should be able to see potential groups to sync in File Explorer. I should be able to select "sync this group to all my devices." Stop Driving people into a maze of webapps (owa, sharepoint, teams.) Maybe get rid of the word sync entirely. If I FOLLOW a group, it should appear in every Microsoft client I have.

End this default program madness. If I set Acrobat or BlueBeam to my PDF viewer, leave it until I tell you otherwise. Never reset it to edge. Dont hide the interface to change it behind an ad for edge. My new favorite one is Windows setting Mail as my default mail app, when I have PAID for the enterprise Outlook product. Settings > Apps > Defaults > Mail > "Click > Outlook" > "Are you sure you dont want to try mail." Ill be honest and say this new "are you sure you dont want to try our product" when changing a default is borderline anticompetitive.

Probably buy an Intranet Overlay company like Powell365 or Bonzai, and clean up the SharePoint/Yammer/Teams mess. Out of the box, there is no well integrated way for cross functional communication across companies. Yammer is a partially deserted Island, Teams isn’t for big groups of people who don’t know each other to create consensus.

Microsoft still doesnt own UserVoice. Microsoft's products are so inefficient at helping teams communicate and gather feedback, that they turn to a third party product.

Microsoft has actually done a decent job of merging Microsoft Accounts and AAD Accounts. They’ve eliminated the Outlook Groups app.

Skype for Business is still one of the most confusing renames in history. Start using PRO as the high end name for everything. OneDrive Pro, Skype Pro, Word Pro, Surface Pro, OneNote Pro, Windows Pro, Teams Pro. Make Pro a feature that gets turned on in each client, not a separate program.

I'm still amazed that neither in OWA for iOS nor Outlook for iOS could I send an email/reply with high/urgent priority. You'd think mobile was an important use case for this sort of thing.

https://outlook.uservoice.com/forums/293349-outlook-for-ios/...

FWIW, everything I've heard & read about what goes on inside Microsoft suggests that it's perfectly possible -- highly likely in fact -- that no one within the organisation has the same level of understanding of these problems as you do.

The silo nature of every product line, the competitiveness within and between teams (not Teams), the frequent rebuilding or reinventing of similar-but-never-quite-same fundamental components for different products ... also explains why even if someone within the organisation did understand all that was wrong, wouldn't be able to effect change.

Depressingly it may simply be an ineluctable effect of large organisations producing software.

For the past five years I worked with a vendor who sold a range of application & network optimisation, monitoring, reporting tools -- many of those were acquisitions -- and the work to properly integrate all those (by themselves, coherent) applications was clearly never going to be completed, despite claims and some efforts to do so.

Nowhere near on the scale of Microsoft, and certainly the problems and workarounds were understandable by every engineer and sales person in the organisation, but for whatever reasons - resourcing, prioritisation, technical, etc - it simply wasn't going to happen.

This year I've started working in a shop that uses the whole Atlassian suite (last exposure was with a few components only at a gig in 2011 - I haven't come into this role with high expectations).

It suffers similar (again, not to the same scale) problems. Some doubtless due to acquired products never really fully being integrated back into the mothership. Others are brought upon themselves -- notably the breathtakingly annoying feature disparities between SaaS and on-prem versions of the same product. As per your frustration arising from not being able to answer a simple question with a simple answer, their forums are full of people asking very simple how-to questions ... and then needing to get used to disappointment.

Wow. That's a pretty app description of how bad their products interact and are named.

I worked at one place where we had a girl who called herself a "Sharepoint Evangelist" and was really pissed we were hosting our knowledge base on Confluence. I tried using Sharepoint and it was piss poor terrible. I totally didn't understand her loyalty, or any software loyalty really.

Yeah I have to go through this at work every day: >Install the TFVC (Team Foundation Version Control), wait or is that VSOVC (Visual Studio Online Version Control)? on the SCVMM VM

MS is super bad at naming things.

Oof, too real. I'm still struggling to understand the difference between onedrive and sharepoint, after getting documents shared to me from them for the past year or more.

OneDrive - a client and an api. Decendent from Windows Live Mesh, and tacked ontop of Document Libraries. OneDrive is how you either access or sync documents to your client device. On Windows its a system tray sync agent that adds virtual folders to File Explorer. On Mobile its an App. In Desktop Outlook its a Button that exposes content available to you from SharePoint. In a web browser it is a javascript based web client for accessing stored files (like Google Docs.) ((tangent, google docs/maps gets credit for this, but microsoft invented XMLHttpRequest and reloadless pages for OWA.))

SharePoint - a server. SharePoint lets people make Team Sites, little sub instances of SharePoint. Team Sites have different types of sub-modules. One is called a Document Library. Document Libraries hold files and folders, but also have version control (you can see any iteration of any file ever.) By Default, each Office 365 Group has a Document Library called either "Documents" or "Shared Documents" depending on how the client renders the name. If Microsoft had a modicum of respect for the english language, they would rename "the 'Shared%20Documents' Office 365 SharePoint Team Site Document Library" to be called a Group OneDrive. Other major Office 365 Components stored on SharePoint include OneNote and Planner. (exception to this rule, the SharePoint iOS client. This product has no reason for existing, all its features should be a part of iOS OneDrive. Unless SharePoint=Intranet, OneDrive=DocumentLibrary, in which case file access should be stripped from iOS SharePoint.)

The line blurs when you have a 365 Group Document Library. On the web, accessing it calls it part of SharePoint, in Windows accessing it appears to be through OneDrive. If you can remember that OneDrive is one of many ways to access a SharePoint Document Library, analogous to Chrome is how you get to Google, you should be good.

Teams - a web app that replaces Skype and OneDrive. It embeds a SharePoint (Word Online, Excel Online) iframe, anytime you click a file stored in a Document Library. No Syncing, all streaming.

One of the biggest frustrations I've had after switching from Slack -> Teams is the lack of support for syntax highlighting or 'code snippets.' Also, I can search for past comments, etc.. but for some reason it doesn't take you back in time to view the context around them - it only shows you the exact search result.

If you use web client then it takes you back in time. It's the limitation of the desktop client for some reason.

Interesting - thanks for the heads up.

But still no Linux version unfortunately, despite it being the #4 most requested feature (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams/Nativ...). This is hugely painful for my organization, were a significant number of the devs use Linux. The IM feature works fine on the web, but audio only works under specific circumstances, and screen sharing doesn't work at all, effectively excluding these users.

You could try something like this in the meantime:

https://rambox.pro/ https://meetfranz.com/

If only it had custom emojis... It's the one thing keeping us on Slack.

Getting Downvotes here, but I wonder, aren't custom emojis important to anyones communication culture out there? We use them to signify specific states of acceptance for MRs for instance among other things.

The question is: are you getting the down-votes for wanting emoji, or for the suggestion that you might want to move away from Slack?

Agreed.

Emojis allow us to convey way more information than any text(s) could, and in less key strokes.

As silly as it sounds, emojis are surprisingly important in how people communicate. It's very hard for most folks to indicate emotions over text and emojis help support that. They've also been an effective way to communicate better across language barriers.

That was the case, at my previous workplace. We tried both Slack and Team but decided to go with Slack. We first started with Slack and found the custom emojis extremely useful, usually for indicating specific actions or status of a thread. Later on, when we had to decide between the two, most engineers and non-engineers wanted Slack.

Also I found the slack UI/UX to be far more pleasant and inviting and more fun than Teams. I don't know why, but something seems to be off in the UI/UX for Teams.

This seems like a poorly chosen headline from TechCrunch. Not being someone who keeps up with Microsoft chat programs, on first reading it I though "Teams at Microsoft get a free version of what?"

Teams is a Slack competitor, where cat gifs don't seem as cool, for some reason.

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