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And, then, in the end... it didn't work. I was trying to teach a class, but my students couldn't see what I was doing. I had no idea why.

Were you on a mac?

If so, you may have encountered https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_... which has been outstanding since October and has no sign will be fixed properly any time soon.

The workaround is quit programs until you find the one that somehow causes Microsoft Teams to not understand that it really does have permissions. For me it seemed to be XCode. But it could be others...here is a partial list:

  - Harvest – Confirmed
  - Sonos – Confirmed
  - Cisco VPN – Issue reported by others
  - Microsoft To-Do – Confirmed
  - Contacts+ (formerly FullContact) – confirmed
  - Apple Photos – confirmed
  - Teamviewer – reported by others
  - Prompt/popup for app review from App Store – still have questions here. This seemed to be it, but haven’t been able to confirm
  - Brackets – reported by others
  - Citrix Workspace Version: 19.10.2.41 (1910) – confirmed

This is an example of why "just works" is so important.

You're right, MS Teams is definitly better placed as an org-wide communication/collaboration tool, not an external one. They really need to make it easier to communicate with people in external orgs, the org switcher is my biggest complaint.

FWIW, IT can allow people in certain groups to make their own teams, it's an admin setting.

Working within the US NIH, we are forced to submit a ticket for creating any new teams and the entire Teams/Office 365 ecosystem is entirely crippled for us. All new features take forever to be approved and brought online, as well as additional connectors and apps having to go through an extensive 6+ month-long vetting process before being approved.

Makes using Teams quite a hassle, but with Skype for Business being the only other approved option for internal chat, it's better than nothing.

Those are all organizational decisions, and not out of the box defaults. Microsoft is trying very hard to persuade organizations not to make those decisions.

Completely free teams creation does come at a cost. It makes data governance much more complicated. People creating duplicate places for things they didnt know already existed. A lack of naming convention, to be able to analyze what exists. Microsoft is pushing for people to just be able to get things done, at the expense of organization.

When they mention "connectors and apps", right now there is a very serious amount of phishing fraud going on involving one click links that ask you to authorise a malicious app. Users see a "please click yes" prompt, they never have to enter their password and they think that sounds fine.

I wish Microsoft would try a lot harder in persuading businesses to make the decision to take oauth approvals out of the user hands, because the volume is at a point where I really feel anyone following the "empower the user" discussion almost certainly has a compromised mailbox in their business.

Teams specifically is the spiritual successor to Skype for Business / Lync / Office Communicator - its main benefit is integrating with Outlook, Exchange, OneNote, and SharePoint. If it's not deployed with that in mind, that's a lot of wasted effort, IMO.

Did you try Microsoft Teams live events? Which seems aimed at your use case.

Zoom doesn’t just work. If the students want privacy, they are just helpless.

Edit: downvoted for speaking up for student rights. Sorry if it is inconvenient for the teachers

universities are organisations, which all force some incarnation of an internet usage policy. better still, the students are paying an arm and a leg for their lack of privacy. wouldn't it be great for the non-technical end user if these Just Works™ software could just bypass firewalls by way of VPNs, common ports, obfuscated servers or the like?

> If the students want privacy, they are just helpless.

This isn't true actually. As a student, send the following email:

"Hi Professor, I just read this webpage [link], which outlines some privacy concerns with Zoom. I know some other classes are running Software X, could we try that instead?"

My university isn't mandating Zoom. Indeed, they recommended several software packages, of which their top recommendation was Blackboard. (Which is what I've been using so far. I have mostly joined others' Zoom meetings; I've only initiated them for a D+D game I'm participating in.) MS Teams was their second recommendation as I recall, and Zoom was below that.

At least at my university -- and I expect that this is typical -- individual faculty members are deciding how to best fulfill their own responsibilities. And I have emphasized to my students that I have never done this before, and that I'm happy to change what I'm doing if people have good suggestions.

> "Hi Professor, I just read this webpage [link], which outlines some privacy concerns with Zoom. I know some other classes are running Software X, could we try that instead?"

Hi [Student],

I appreciate your concern; however, our university has conducted a thorough audit of this software and found that it satisfies our needs. We will continue using it for our lectures.

Regards, Dr. [Professor]

Senior tenured chair of [Department], distinguished lecturer, [University]

It does not "just work" for me. First, it required a separate client, when even Skype does not.

Second, it does not support my browser.

Your unstated criteria for "just work" are "just work in browser", which differs from the definition used by the comment you're replying to.

That is not universally shared among others, including the non-technical folks that Zoom is being widely adopted by.

You’re being downvoted fairly heavily, which I think is unfair. Even though some other people might not agree, it’s a valid argument to make.

This is what I was getting at with my parent comment, it "just works" for everyone. But it doesn't fit some of the niches technical or privacy minded people have. And in the end, we are bound by the common denominator. I can push my open source privacy respecting solution all I want. But unless it "just works" for the lowest tech user I'm at a loss.

There's a parallels here with security in the uphill battle to get users to respect the caveats of the solution they choose.