The Horror of Microsoft Teams
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I think the biggest problem with Teams can't be discovered by feature comparisons and performance metrics.
Teams enables a company to "secure" the application in the same way other MS products can be. That makes the product easy to sell, but in practice, it prevents Teams from being an effective collaboration tool.
If I want to create a new channel, I need to get approval from IT. If I want to invite a vendor to participate, I need to convince IT that the benefit of adding this particular vendor to Teams outweighs a raft of vague "security" concerns. In the end, it's not worth the trouble of asking and I end up setting up Slack channels instead.
By creating a product that can satisfy the IT policies of their enterprise customers, Microsoft has unwittingly created a platform completely unsuited to flexible and open collaboration.
Locking down channels is tough. As a company grows, there can be immense confusion when channels pop up all over (especially duplicates). Having some friction to creation can be helpful, but that could be simple public “shaming” instead of getting IT / HR in the mix.
When HR thinks its job is to administrate, the company has lost its chance at having a real culture. It sounds like using MS Teams is like having HR administrate over everything you say at work.
Teams is great for internal communications on long-running projects. It's well suited to that and I wouldn't substitute Slack. When used well, it cuts down on a ton of internal emails and status updates.
I don't really blame IT for locking down Teams. It makes a lot of sense for all the reasons you mention and many more. It's just that by locking it down they prevent Teams from really being a challenger to Slack.
It's not that Teams can't be configured to be just as useful as Slack, but enterprise IT best practices pretty much guarantees that it never will be.
I still hate it.
That depends how it is configured - where I work you can create channels in Teams even if you're not an owner of that Team.
Anyone can create a Team as well - but it is accepted that this is only done for a good reason.
Too much control is bad though, like you say, creating channels/teams/task-boards shouldn’t be too bureaucratic. We were a little too liberal when we first opened up, allowing people to name their own, which resulted in mail-list mayhem. Because Microsoft created an e-mail address with the name people chose. This resulted in the “specialised child care department” creating a “specialised childcare” e-mail address, that would show up in outlook. Which in term led to some rather important e-mails getting lost, because people sent them to the one of the now two “specialised child care” email addresses that wasn’t getting read.
We fixed this by moving creation into our own tool and using the 365 API, so people still get to name their own collaboration projects, but they get a “Teams - “ in front of the name, and that’s filtered out of the e-mail listing so they don’t show up in the outlook address book.
I don’t personally like Teams or Tasks all that much functionally wise compared to other tools, but the fact that they are part of our 365 security setup and the fact that we’ve already paid for them, means I’ll use them.
For any new vendor you can't put the same data unless/until you have all these legal arrangements in place; and if that vendor says "ah, we're in USA, we don't care about GDPR" then you simply can't use them for such data.
I get it, but it seems contradictory, and your workaround is probably beyond reach for many smaller businesses.
That wouldn’t really be an issue when you have 50 employees in the same office. Aside from that, I think Microsoft actually ended up adding a standard feature to hide Teams mail-addresses from the outlook addressbook when we raised the issue with Seattle, we just needed the extra “Teams -“ to make it easier to maintain.
If you can do this without getting fired, what is the problem for you?
At my last job we figured out the fastest way to get your company off Teams: add the CEO to a chatty channel.
Sure there were times where such a feature would be convenient ("server going down for maintenance, please save your work", etc), but overall ripe for abuse. They disabled it in a service pack and took it out altogether in subsequent versions.
I remember the computer administrator coming into the class saying “Are you aware one of your students is sending messages to the entire school district?” My heart sank.
I ended up getting in-school suspension. Considering this was my first ever “offense” in school, I felt like a badass going out with a bang.
We studied at university in the medical faculty, which happened to be housed in the academic hospital. We found out the hard way that the network was not segregated, his netsend command crashed all the ICU terminals...
The professor classified me as the annoying kid, until I surpassed his expectations with the first programming excercises :P
That's how we ended up with 8-player age of empires 2 deathmatches after hours ;)
However it turned out that you could rename them .bat or .cmd and they would execute just fine.
I think Doom 2 multiplayer was extra fun because of the added need to be aware not just of in-game enemies but also the need to be aware of the teacher and be ready to instantly quit at any moment.
Wrote a batch script that used a wildcard - it took them a while to find it and I was very lucky the only 3 persons who knew who it was wouldn't tell anyone. One was a teacher and I am thankful until today that he didn't screw up my life with telling this.
I was wrong. I did something like "NET SEND lol" and it sent out a popup to every workstation on the network. Hundreds of them.
Good times.
There is also the "Channel mentions" setting, allowing you to turn off @${channel_name} messages.
You write it, think about it send it.
In a chat you just type and send as you think and decoding that stuff in hindsight is more work.
I’d rather get one focused and well thought out mail than 20.messages of which a quarter shouldn’t even bother me.
There is no real reason why you couldn’t write Slack messages as well composed as an email. But nearly nobody does.
There's some fun inspecting this data, too..
Developers need to stop building slow applications. This is ridiculous. It's 2019 and software is slower than it was in the 90s.
It must take an enormous number of CPU cycles to execute simple tasks in an Election-based app. It's just incredibly inefficient. I heard similar things about Slack – that it was built on Node, maybe Electron, and was dog slow, especially to open. It's frustrating that developers are bringing the slowness of the web to the desktop. Just build proper desktop applications using native desktop APIs.
At the very least their web version needs to have parity with the desktop application. It's 2019, browsers can handle voice chat and screensharing!
Remember this next time their PR team tries to pull another round of "Microsoft has totally changed you guys, we swear! The new Microsoft loves Linux"
Edit: probably https://snapcraft.io/teams-for-linux
Not really. They are making more money than ever. They don't have customers asking for a Linux client in large enough numbers. That's all it is.
By leveraging browser technology they have a platform that is incredibly extensible. Building that from scratch across iOS, Android, Windows and macOS is not feasible. And the benefit of having people reach to the tools at hand and strengthen Office's position outweighs the performance penalty.
Building a few chat apps is not feasible for one of the largest software companies in the world ?
Almost no other platform can guarantee that a UI elements will look pretty much exactly the same on all different operating systems.
Most people don't mind the extra RAM consumption for some applications... as long as the app works!
Apps are lauded for providing "dark mode" now; when ten years ago I simply switched GTK themes.
To say nothing of accessibility.
We've gone way backwards in UX.
In a perfect world, every application would have minimal dependencies required by the OS, and completely encapsulate their runtime and UI components, making them very portable... which is basically web apps, hence Electron's popularity...
Designers.
End users simply want a functional, working product. Polish on top is a nice added bonus, but these days it's been turned into the focal point of software development. A Teams/Slack-caliber project begins with product requirements, immediately followed by design and UI mocks - the software/tech always comes last.
Now it's all JS and Electron and every single complaint people used against Java is an order of magnitude worse and everybody seems to be happy about it.
Progress have definitely been going backwards.
So if you have an excel file open in teams (which can take up at least 10 seconds - which does speak to your comment!), and want to go back to a channel or chat, you're actually closing that file.
Granted you can open the Excel file not in teams, but this is just an example of how being locked in one window where the tabs aren't your open items, but rather possibly open items, is counter-productive.
That brings me to something else that I find strange, that with every new piece of Windows software over the last 10 years, it seems like Microsoft forgot that it's called "Windows" for a reason. The big deal about Windows was having multiple WINDOWS. And every time you take that away, you stray further from productivity. Don't even get me started on multi-monitor support over the years! /rant
Moreover the ease of developing electron apps has opened the desktop ecosystem to web developers who more often tend to have bad habits because of how forgiving most web dev is.
If they are going to keep doing this they need a way to compile the things to native binaries. I don't know...something.
I personally get really kind of weirded out when I see simple software load Node. Adobe, I'm looking at you.
I'm really hoping that the cross platform dotnet stuff becomes a viable option now that the XAML stack has been open sourced.
My main beefs with Teams are:
- Performance: it's just far too damn slow to switch views.
- Awkward to switch back to a channel or another chat whilst on a Teams call.
- Connectivity: it's better than it was at handling disconnection and reconnection but, overall, it's still a ####ing moron and a timesink - you're still forced to restart on occasion (which takes too damn long).
One thing I do like: when our company switched from Slack to Teams[2] what I very quickly noticed, and what has persisted over the last year(ish) that we've been using it, is the much higher SNR. Maybe it's that Teams isn't so fun to use but, whatever the reason, there's just way less distracting guff being posted and, perhaps to my surprise, it turns out I'm quite happy with that.
Slack gives the appearance of productivity and collaboration without any of its substance. Teams, well, it's still an IM system and therefore always going to be subject to some level of wrath from me, but for the most part it feels like it does what it does well enough and doesn't try to be the centre of attention quite as much.
[1] Where I was mildly irked to read, "Microsoft Teams is the solution that nobody asked for the problem that nobody had," in the conclusion. I mean, really, if you're going to say that you ought to be honest enough to acknowledge that you could say the same about any current gen IM app. I certainly never asked for software that would make it even easier for people to keep disturbing me when I'm in the middle of something else, and I know more than a few people who feel similarly.
[2] Teams came with O365 and losing history with Slack was becoming a problem, but not one that felt like it was worth paying what Slack charge to solve: we felt like there were better ways to use that money, and overall - and after initial reticence - I'm happy with that decision.
And why does it have that crazy "you're offline sorry" thing. That's the whole point of having a local client installation.
All in all, I've never worked anywhere that used Slack or Teams "well"...so I'm not sure why either of them engender so much rage or love.
I just wonder why I have to have Teams and Outlook? Why not meld the two and get rid of Outlook finally. For that matter, why not have a tab in Teams with the web version of Outlook?
And importantly, we use it for file sharing. Each channel is a root point for a team-specific folder. This is helpful because storing common docs there means they are perpetually available to collaborators, as opposed to OneDrive storage, which in my experience has been very hit or miss (sahre links expiring, etc. ). People can trust that team content is there.
There are downsides. It took me a few months to find my 'optimal' usage pattern, I can't have channel-specific sharing, and it takes me a while to explain the above to people on the team. It is far from perfect, but it is better than sharing a bunch of files in email threads or maintaining unofficial google docs in a Microsoft world.
(It really is amazing how much Teams has lit up "we have the ability to do that now" for SharePoint features that have existed almost forever. I was particularly amused when someone asked me why so many Teams features have SharePoint URLs when SharePoint didn't support them and then showing them the three or four step process to do it on SharePoint that has been there all along.)
It's great for ad hoc groups of people to chat or for direct chat. It's also great for meetings. Where it gets cumbersome is in the persistent chat room management.
And as someone who is not a fan of chat rooms as a replacement for emails (I can't even filter or categorize information) I'm glad about that part.
File sharing: apparently still a problem almost four _decades_ after the Internet was invented.
File sharing over the internet means setting up a webserver, after which it works beautifully. But nobody wants to do that. They want to use browsers.
TCP isn't asymmetric in the same way, but who's out there thinking of raw TCP as "the Internet"?
Unfortunately, a lot of the time, people have no idea what you are on about, or even if they do, they are behind a corporate firewall with torrenting blocked/on a work machine and can't install a client.
Even on 1:1 chat sharing a file just uploads it to OneDrive and uses OneDrive links.
Users are pretty meh about it, but legal and compliance are big fans, because their process stays the same.
NB All Teams have 0365 Groups but not all 0365 Groups have a Team.
Honestly, any important discussion that gets too chatty for teams, should be a meeting.
That being said, everyone in my team generally sits on the same floor, so collaborating physically isn't an issue. I am sure a few of teams's shortcomings will become more evident once we start collaborating with remote teams.
Also, why did this have to be developed using electron? If Teams were a native application, or even written using something on the .NET-side, we would probably have about 20% the complaints we do today. Watching an application that is more-or-less responsible for managing basic text and image data on a continuously-paginated basis occupy nearly a gigabyte of memory is simply intolerable.
Teams makes me want to write a clone just to prove how much better it could be. That is how bad Teams is. It makes me want to spend an entire month's worth of weekends writing a native clone that no one will ever use.
[1] https://matrix.org/clients/
I know why they do it: electron is cheap and easy to spam on every platform. I don't know why: people pay for this crap.
Perhaps the issue is that people don't pay for it? Teams is free, bundled with other MS stuff that people are buying anyways. Discord is free. Slack is mostly free (until you are already stuck with it).
Deploying web apps lets you iterate faster, stuff features in faster without ending up with different capabilities across the group of apps. Sometimes the ability to add features too easily is abused to add too many features without thinking through them.
What do your coworkers hate about Teams? I've honestly found it to be an acceptable chat platform and I've gotta say I appreciate the cross-coordination with Outlook.
If you ever do, I'd suggest doing the same with Slack might get far more attention, given that it has a publicly documented API as well as a few thirdparty clients already.
Also, why did this have to be developed using electron?
Probably because Web/JS developers are far more common and cheaper than native ones? Otherwise, even MS itself is saying "Win32 is the future":
Maybe people just suck at communicating?
Full disclosure, I work at MS. And I have never used Slack though would be glad to try it.
Damning with incredibly faint praise, there.
That being said, the Teams UX will slowly and steadily improve. It will be interesting to see where we are in a few years. I hope to see both Teams and Slack support SIP, they surely must already be working on it.
That's not the Microsoft way. It'll accumulate features without ever deprecating bad features, not fundamentally improve. Look at Outlook. That terrible threading has its roots there. There'll be _someone_ out there who loves it, so it'll never go away.
Outlook web is a perfect example. It's 10x slower since the last redesign and their exclusive killer feature - SWEEP no longer works for me.
You think that they people who brought us "The Word Ribbon" and Metro UI are going to make things better?
That's not how M$FT rolls. Their customer base is deathly allergic to change. They lose their minds if things change perceptibly from what they looked like when they bought the system.
The word ribbon is definitely an example to follow.
Metro isn't, because , wtf. They can't make up their mind.
A few more points, in case anybody in the Teams team is reading:
1. Implement filters. Filters for teams, filters for channels, filters for search results. I can't filter my Files by file type, so it's a mishmash of Word documents, OneNotes, Excel, Microsoft Project files, and PDFs. I can't even filter by channel, or search within a specific channel.
2. Search results: Implement filters, as above, but add the ability to sort by anything other than Date Modified. Unless I know a good portion of the document name or it's been modified recently, I'm forced to scroll through the list.
3. Skype integration: We already use Skype for Business. Why is Teams also reporting my missed Skype calls in addition to Outlook and Skype telling me the same?
4. Meetings: Is Outlook transitioning to an email-only client, or are we just going to have all functionality replicated across Teams/Skype/Outlook?
5. T-Bot: I've got this entity in my Chat sidebar; I guess it's the Teams version of Slackbot? Anyway, it sits there saying "What can I help you with today?" Slackbot gives me an example question to begin interacting with it, but T-Bot has the entry window greyed out with the text "Sending new messages to this bot has been disabled." It's not clear whether that's a Teams thing, or something my org did, but why is it even there if I can't interact with it?
While we're on Chat, there's a bunch of people listed in here that I sent a couple one-off emails to. I talk to more people than this; where are those? Why aren't they pulled from my Skype calls?
6. Calls: I see some contacts from one of my Skype groups, but it's also got contacts who a) I've already removed from that list, and b) don't even work at this company anymore. They're still crowding out the people I actually interact with regularly.
7. API integrations: I'm not even sure where to begin. Teams uses the Microsoft Graph API, which requires use of the Azure portal, and if you're already familiar with all that it might work for you. For the rest of us just trying to write a simple Python script integration (a la Slack webhook), it's a bit much.
I'm sure I could think of more, but this non-blog-post is already long enough.
#7: Teams support incoming and outgoing webhooks, very similarly to Slack, but as with so many other things, access to them can be enabled/disabled by organization settings.
What is it again that Microsoft is getting such accolades for? Visual Studio Code is fantastic. Github is great, but they bought that. Office 365? OneDrive? I'll give you those. Hosted Exchange is a thorn in my side. Internet Explorer and Edge are (were?) both a joke.
I don't have any experience with Azure. Xbox is great. Their server products have been fine since Windows 2000. Windows 10 is a joke. The Surface line isn't anything special.
The whole GUI feels like something very poorly thought-out and cobbled together in a hurry by students for their first major school project, and unfortunately it stains the whole OS.
When I opened Outlook to navigate to the open file dialog to add the .pst file, the bottom of the dialog asked what I want to save the file as...
They are hands down the best not-Apple laptops I've used since IBM stopped making Thinkpads.
Their design aesthetic is clearly unique, and their products are well distinguished from each other.
No one else is 3:2 aspect ratios, processing in the screen section of the laptop, the hinge or fabric cover. (which has been shown to not be as fragile as people initially thought)
I am very hyped for the 3nd gen surface laptop and the 2nd gen surface go.
Visual Studio is great.
We used Visual Studio daily. Everyone I speak to wants to switch to VS Code because we're tired of the laggy mess that is Visual Studio 2019. Even with no addons it stutters and micro-freezes all day long with medium-large solutions.
Somehow VS Code, an electron app(!), feels snappier than VS a native app. We're just waiting for feature party (and nothing special, just managing project files/solution files without editing the XML manually, better publishing, and similar C# debugging).
Nothing on Windows comes close to C++ for UI speed (or any other kind of speed).
Even some rumors MS is in the market to buy Zoom.
Edge is one of the best E-pub readers ever, in any platform.
That's the only thing I use it for, but it beats Internet Explorer, that just wastes disk space, never being used.
Chromium-based Edge (not pre-installed on Windows) is great.
Our slack instance has the opposite, a bot that explains how to mute in many "public" channels upon a here.
As is I need to remember to do the same every time I join or get added to a channel or some inconsiderate person on the other side of the world will @channel at a dumb time.
Please do not use @ here in this channel. (You can mute this channel).
I picked it up really quickly. My team picked it up really quickly. The rest of the company started asking me for it, which was my plan. I like the Sharepoint integration, the Outlook meetings integration, the Planner integration. I like that it works with my mac users. Yes it could be a tad quicker...
If you are getting too many messages it is your organisation that is broken, not your IM app.
Most of the other complaints in this article are to do with the set up, which the writer mentions in some cases but not others. As a manager I am very happy that I can control who is added outside of the organisation, for instance.
I hate it. My colleagues hate it. The UI is terrible. Most of the time navigating between the channels is a pain and the UI is just horrendous.
I think the funniest thing that was released lately was the 6 emojis that you can use on a message(thumbs up, love heart ...).
The emojis are of bad quality and look like crap.
Anyway, you can't pay me enough to use this stuff and as the author said in this article, if and when I change jobs I will be making sure that the team I start on will not use this sorry excuse of bloatware.
Maybe an oversite on my part, but I didn't even consider this as I was evaluating an enterprise productivity app...
They will overtake Slack easily since it is a free addition to most 365 plans
Discontinuation is news to me.
They still sell the product, and the hybrid/on premises solution is going to be around for a while. MS Teams will replace the "Online" only. There is no "on Premises" solution for Teams so S4B will be around a while I think.
Lync and Skype for Business UX is an abomination. I rage every day any time I have to use it, and I've been using it for about 10 years.
Its the worse UX in any app I've ever had, I find GIMP easier to navigate than S4B.
Additionally, you can't seem to attach a .json file... though renaming it to .json.txt works. It's frustrating for sure.
Thankfully they finally fixed some issues recently so I can copy chats out of Teams without running into too many problems.
The most frustrating and immediate drawback is the low information density. It's gotten slightly better, but I can still see only about 20% of the information in a chat that I can with Slack.
Also the automatic conversion of things like ;) to animated emoji... please give me an option to turn this off. You have to ctrl+z afterwards to just use the text.
Ran into something very similar during my (very) short stint doing Sharepoint development. I'm guessing it's some sort of limitation burried deep in some default MS code somewhere.
It's absurd that Microsoft didn't just buy Slack when they had the chance. Building this in-house has forced a lot of people to use some really shitty software.
https://www.inc.com/business-insider/bill-gates-passed-on-sl...
In addition, moving folders and files is such a broken and unintuitive pain, there's no way to do it inside Teams, you have to go to SharePoint in your browser.
I'm sure everyone who has had the displeasure of using it agrees with me.
The effect was probably half intended which is to say only the various corp administrators actually used teams, the rest of us just ignore teams save for their randomly blasted 'app is being updated guys!...guys?' and continue to use our half-baked email threads or GroupMe groups or other shadow IT solutions because the Enterprise solution is so painful / pseudo insulting.
Conversations.im / chatsecure / gajim all with an ejabberd server and omemo style encryption works a treat. GroupMe for group chats from legacy groups from before the xmpp days which we plan to migrate to xmpp and yeah we have no need of teams.
a. self-host open-source Zulip (or Matrix/Riot, which is not that good compared to plain old The Lounge IRC) totally free
b. pay for hosted software that’s open-source so their information isn’t hostaged when they decide their solution is crap?
I see these kinds of poor choices made all the time. People usually don’t want to do the research or a salesman walks into the office and they get sold a contract.
It really bugs me because I think: these people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars for taking other smart people on a ride. Is making hundreds of thousands of dollars orthogonal to big picture thinking?
Is there a position where someone hires me to walk into their office and save them thousands of dollars on unnecessary SaaS contracts? I’d do that job with glee.
Self hosting stuff is work for someone, and either needs hardware or rented VMs - it's the opposite of "totally free". This is why this happens.
You get an edict to use the software and the fun begins. I love the idea of including the CEO... have to remember that.
On the other hand, software/service contracts allow you to dodge various responsibilities and blame other people.
I'm using Teams now with a small startup team. It's fine for that purpose. There aren't enough of us to annoy one another.
Slack sucks in some ways. But maybe it sucks less. Most of my clients use Slack and are happy enough with it.
Just shows that the OS is for Microsoft's benefit, not for your productivity.
I believe some teams have used Matterhorn or Slack internally but it was not necessarily 100% approved and not company wide
Maybe, I should but I don't think that the using one solution versus another is such a game changer. People rarely fight about email clients either.
Since we are subscribed to Office 365, I believe Teams is part of the package and it is likely an easier sell.
Pretty clearly, it shows the power of Microsoft and bundle. Also, I am also glad that the "new" Microsoft is really focused on providing better tools, and not stuck with Office/Sharepoint only.
- Caching + searching : Their caching and searching is just terrible. It's surprising how hard it is to search older messages especially in a private group chat. scrolling up takes a long time. Images don't show up in the desktop app, so I have to open web app all the time.
- Centralized control: I agree that Teams is designed for centralized control. some of it might be good, but its a communation software, and telling people how to communicate seems like it'd defeat the purpose.
- Not being able to add External people: Agree with the OP, this is a pain. People in my org did this well with slack, but once we were asked to move to teams, we weren't collaborating with external folks the same way.
- Chat and Teams are two different windows. WHen I am in private chat area, I never see new messages in Teams area. Notifications for chat work fine when I am in teams area.
- Threading: I think threading is poorly implemented, since it collapses the thread when you reopen the app.
I feel like it would be an excellent improvement over email if this came out before slack. But slack has shown what a good chat software can do, and teams falls short in many ways.
That said: what we came from was Skype. No not the business kind, the regular one with blinking ads.
Compared to that, Teams isn’t that bad. Nothing is.
We evaluated Slack and a few others but the cost difference to slack when you already have a huge tab at Microsoft for their tools is pretty substantial if I remember correctly.
I'm working as a contractor so I also use Slack a lot but Slack was a terrible fit for our company and its GDPR compliance is extremely sketchy at best. Also the calling features are practically useless -- I haven't once managed to get anywhere near acceptable quality from that. And don't get me started on using Slack on dodgy wifi (which Slack seems to be either incapable or uninterested in fixing, if my conversations with Slack devs are anything to go by).
If you're already on Office 365 and mostly Windows, Teams is a no-brainer.
Slack is a replacement for IRC. Teams is a replacement for Skype for Business. There is a lot of overlap, especially in how Teams is covered in the press, but ultimately I feel there are more differences than commonalities, especially if you account for software like Mattermost and RocketChat.
You can now only open it from Sharepoint and changing the name back didn't fix anything. Thanks teams.
(Now if only if I could convince my colleagues to use Teams properly with N people in a channel instead of continuing to have N^2 one-to-one chats about the latest crisis...)
Relative to that experience Microsoft Teams would be a significant improvement in user experience.
[0] https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
And teams works better for a/v conference that whatever Microsoft has done to poor skype.
Took me long to realise I was looking at the chat window and to follow along the threads..
In what way, have you found?
I ask because I use both daily, and I like Slack better in some ways and Teams better in others.
Probably the worst thing for me is that Teams seem to be able to hold like 6 chat messages in memory, if I scroll to the past it starts loading and it takes about 5+ seconds to load 6 more. If I go back it starts to load the messages I just seen again. Performance-wise it's catastrophically bad
I've felt this frustration with Teams and Slack. Effective search in any real-time messaging platform seems difficult to deliver. Has anyone else had this problem and found a good solution to it?
Log chats to text files and learn `grep`. Keep chat logs organized in a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly directory hierarchy.
I think many people would be amazed at just how fast their disk can read tens or hundreds of MBs of chat logs; how fast `grep` can find what you're looking for.
Keep your chats short and to the point...I never even noticed there was a search feature
Some people honestly seem oblivious to any current chat status, launching into complex questions and expecting immediate replies just because you seem alive right now. I’m sorry but once I’m “in conference call” or otherwise really busy, you should get the hint. I shouldn’t need a chat client that lets me be virtually invisible just to get work done.
And generally, I hate chat for work. E-mail/bug-track is enough. I want to deal with things when I actually have time to deal with them, not when someone else assumes I have infinite availability.
Regarding the content, "It can take half a day because of all the fiddly little options that are so easily forgotten". What? If you've really been a "long time" Outlook user, then this is 10 minutes. Half hour tops. But a half day? This makes me not take anything you say after that statement seriously.
And your complaints about teams are related to admin policies. Believe it or not enterprises actually have admins and policies regarding their desktops and tools.
Unfortunately this represents what I've come to expect from medium content.
I've never agreed so heavily with a headline and disagreed so vehemently with the actual content. Some of this is right, but a big chunk is wrong and I think misses some of the most egregious horrors of Teams.
I used Slack professionally before in a fairly large org (>200).
Two things the author got wrong:
First - things the author got wrong. Notifications are absolutely configurable by Channel - at least with the bits I'm on and how the internal Microsoft tenant is configured.
Second, a huge portion of the things mentioned by the author are config switches that apparently his tenant admins decided to muck with (auto-adding to Teams, no outsiders, etc).
The biggest complaint I have about this piece is it doesn't actually talk about some of the real, most egregious parts about Teams: Teams has atrocious search, performance (functionally and by footprint, and UI - which the author covered. On top of that, it seems clear that the Teams team didn't have a coherent vision for the user/grouping model, so channels are kinda treated like groups but so are channels? For instance, you can mention a channel from another channel. Wtf. This drives me insane on a daily basis.
The development story is a mess. Not going into details here but if folks in the comments care to peruse the docs, I'd love to hear other folks' perspective.
Other random complaints:
- The emoji story is hilarious. There's a taskbar thing called "emoji" which are animated stickers (some of which are actually fantastic) but definitely aren't emoji. You used to be able to shortcode emoji (ie :smile:) and get a thing that looked like an emoji but still wasn't unicode emoji. AND you could use the actually emoji keyboard on your device to actually type unicode. So, 3 ways to get 3 separate sets of glyphs, all referred to as "emoji". Yes, I know this complaint is dumb but it shows a weird lack of attention to detail.
- The formatting story is the union of every formatting concept ever. Quasi-markdown is supported inline, but its essentially an editor trick that triggers (what I assume is) richtext formatting.
- This is ANOTHER thing trying to be the* dashboard in Microsoft's product suite. There are like... 7. PowerBI, Azure Devops, SharePoint... Teams... I'm sure I'm forgetting some. Which leads me to...
- It was clear from early development that leadership wasn't fixated on "do one thing well" and were trying to be the sum of all productivity goals. The result is chat sucks, feels halfassed and there's a lot of stapled on shit that makes the experience gross.
There are a lot of smart people on this team but the folks at the helm set things on a terrible course that misses the fundamentals, which is super depressing.
As an aside, one thing I'm genuinely curious about from folks that use Slack in very large orgs (>500), how does Slack's usability scale?
I have two problems so far:
1. I'm an engineer that uses Linux. Zoom has a native Linux client that works really well. Teams doesn't work on Firefox and doesn't ship a Linux client - despite being an Electron application. I can use Google Chrome to call in but if I need to share my screen then I have to switch off all my monitors because Chrome's screen sharing functionality is a little bit broken. There is a PR against Chromium to fix that.
2. The UX of Teams is garbage. Nobody can figure out how to use it because it has so many features. With Zoom, there are like four buttons. I can join a call or I can host a call and figuring out how to do either is incredibly easy.
I would never want to use it as a chat application because that would be awful. Our IT department wants everyone in the company to use Teams because they all like Windows/Microsoft and it comes for free with our Microsoft suite contract.
[0] https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
the people who work on teams seem nice though, I actually got a helpful answer to my SO question about emojis:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53384141/teams-webhook-s...
oh and the formatting thing is a disaster. Something slack go so right - (markdown text input, styled on rendering), Teams gets so wrong (a way too easy to break rt javascript horror. entering code snippets is a nightmare, ` type something ` hope the "code" box pops up. `` right after each other - nope.)
We have a fairly large group of users from different departments (IT, admins, engineers) of > 1500.
I would keep it succinct and say it's excellent. We're much more efficient at communicating than we used to be.
I doubt the numbers MS throws around though to show how they are succeeding. If they are bundling Teams with Windows or Office of giving it away for free with Office 365 or Outlook, they could claim every single Windows laptop and PC as an active user and soon be at 1B users. Technically correct but oh so wrong!
Ever since it was introduced it seems more like an unfinished tech experiment (but Slack felt the same to me). It seems to be designed with the aim of increasing productivity rather than making it easier to communicate with people.
IRC is free, has channel administration & granular permissions, a working & functional tab complete, many different clients with extremely low memory & cpu usage. The biggest problem with IRC though is not being able to read back without the use of a bouncer or something like paid IRCcloud.
I asked them if it wasn’t a better idea to just enable that then, but apparently the ability to actually use any corporate software is just not very high on their list...
That said it had some half implemented good ideas, but whenever you found a bug in it, its AWS-based team pretty much told you where to shove that bug report.
Not a Microsoft developer or even read the road map before posting this comment. Ouook, Zoom, etc already do this and it would be foolish of M$ not to fix this soon.
IMO Teams is much worse but I guess it gets the job done not horribly enough.
Teams is just not a serious business tool...
It compares with the competition really well on paper, but the details suck the life out of you.
I think something like Discord for Business could be an amazing opportunity for growth. This isn't the first time I've seen someone bring up the idea.
* No Active Directory/SAML/other SSO. * Gaudy/gamer orientated look-and-feel, messages and notifications is hard to sell to business. * No/Poor implementations of "Enterprise Features" (read: eDiscovery, DLP, etc.)
Of those the first and second are arguably the most important as it is often a requirement for businesses of any size. The third is a bit more larger/enterprise-y business.
That's just not true. The Desktop app of Whatsapp is imo excellent.