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As someone who does all his work through teams I must say it's only strong point is integration with OneDrive and sharepoint. Other than that the application is a nightmare. On Windows its the slowest thing I'm running at any point, I understand its an electron app but there are no excuses for its performance. On android it keeps missing notifications. After a while the concept of teams in teams is being overlooked in favor of less formal chats which yet don't have all the features of teams. Now teams have channels which make zero sense if everyone from the team can also see them and there is no way to fix that.

Sharing code requires 4 clicks and there is no keyboard equivalent way to get to it.

And the list goes on.

The sad truth is that if teams didn't come for free with office 365 it wouldn't be able to stand on its own.

Chat and channels and so forth are a big mess in Teams, but multiple channels in a Team do make sense, as topics.

We usually start a channel for each program, and each project gets a channel as needed. It works really well as an organizational scheme.

sharing code - do you mean ``` ?

otherwise i kinda agree except it's years ahead of lync, so for microsoft shops it's still a net win. my personal pet peeve is lack of a global mute keyboard shortcut (win+f4 for lync).

Thanks didn't know the shortcut. Only issue doesn't let you choose the language for syntax highlighting.

> Now teams have channels which make zero sense if everyone from the team can also see them and there is no way to fix that.

You can create private channels within teams. When you go to "Add Channels", there's a Privacy option that's set to Standard by default, but you can toggle it to Private and invite only specific team members to join.

I'm not sure how this relates to Teams whatsoever and why you're drawing the comparison. Teams is for organizations who have Office 365. Duo is person to person chat... think Apple Facetime.

I can't call up my Mom on Teams. I can with Duo.

There's a free tier that is open to individuals.

Here's what their faq say:

"Who’s eligible for the free version of Microsoft Teams?"

"Anyone with any corporate or consumer email address can sign up for Teams today.…"

Those elusive "consumer email" addresses.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-team...

I have no idea what a "consumer email address" is and the page does not explain it.

Consumer of what? If they meant to say "any email address" they really should rethink their language to be less dehumanizing.

Yeah but... I'm not putting my mom on Teams. Ever. She figured out Duo in 5 seconds because there's almost nothing to figure out.

Sure, but there is a difference between Teams having a corporate focus and Teams requiring an Office 365 subscription.

Please read what I said again, I think google should move more towards an integrated application that has several different kinds of communication modes in it vs. half a dozen applications in various states of languishing, usability, and availability.

They do, but this isn't it. You are comparing their personal video chat offering to Microsoft's business offering...

Google Chat and Google Meet are the equivalent of Teams, and have a fairly similar feature set.

It's funny, because a friend of mine wanted to video chat yesterday. I wanted to use Hangouts, but he doesn't have an Google account (he's a director of his own company so he lives and dies with the company email), in the end he said: - No problem we'll just use Teams. Not having to create an account was kind of mind-blowing for me (in the "where's is the business incentive in not taking my email, and spamming it?!" kind of way).

You should try https://meet.jit.si. Started using it this week, works great with no login necessary. And open source :)

Crashed the tab for me on Safari and they themselves say it's Chome only.

Will be following it though!

> Crashed the tab for me on Safari and they themselves say it's Chome only.

It apparently does work in Firefox, but only at higher bitrate HD mode so it's not great if you don't have the bandwidth.

Works great on Firefox for me

Skype for business, zoom, WebEx all don't require you to give an email to join a meeting.

https://www.skype.com/en/free-conference-call/ has had web video calling with no sign up for years now, although they were terrible at advertising it, because when they re-told everyone last week it was reported by almost every tech site as a new feature

> so he lives and dies with the company email

While I don't see too many people take advantage of it, you can make a Google account without an associated Gmail account. You just have to choose "Use my current email address instead" on the signup page[1].

[1] https://accounts.google.com/signup/

I mean, that's just G Suite -- Chat + Groups or Plus + Drive + Meet + Meet + Drive + Drive + goodness knows what else.

I've never used Teams, but it seems like an awful lot for one app to handle. But the Google way of splitting it up across the logical apps seems to work well, since everything's integrated anyways.

At the end of the day, does it really matter if you're using different icons in your home screen or different icons in a menu?

Aside from the single sign-on, I don't find the integration of Google products to be anywhere close to Microsoft's.

When Google releases a new product, it's like the almost expect you to use it in isolation, but with your same account. And they love releasing new products. Google Calendar, Tasks, Keep, etc.

Microsoft Teams brings together Office 365, Exchange, Share point, OneDrive, and then adds collab features on top for comms and organisation.

You get your full existing Outlook Calendar appearing in teams, you get all your Outlook contacts, you can link to any doc in your OneD, shared edit, you get group chats and channels, you can create "Teams" (where the name of the app comes from) made up of different people in your Exchange org.

For anybody using Microsoft AD/Exchange within their org, Teams is a natural choice. You don't need a new account, everybody else in the org is immediately searchable and contactable, there's no data import needed. It just works. And "it just works" has been the central driving feature of anything that has taken off during this lockdown.

I mean, if your org already uses Microsoft then of course it makes sense to use Teams.

But I guess I don't see how Google apps are "in isolation", it's the exact opposite. All my contacts appear in every app, whether Calendar or Meet or Docs. Links work everywhere. The Google concept of a team is basically that when you create a Group you can generally use it everywhere else (to share a doc, to create a calendar event, to add to a Team Drive, to start a chat, to notify of a comment, etc.).

And heck, the "side panel" functionality literally allows you to load Keep inside of Gmail, or Calendar inside of Docs, if you don't want to open a whole new tab. Clearly the opposite of isolation.

Maybe you've just never used Google apps this way, that you haven't seen their integration? I find it entirely natural to have a tab for Mail, Calendar, Keep, Tasks, and several Docs and Sheets in my browser. Perhaps for me, my tabbed browser window is the same as your Teams app?

In either case, it seems like the functionality and integration is largely identical. Again, it's just a matter of whether the icons are at the browser tab or home screen level, or whether they're inside of a single app. It seems to be a very minor distinction at the end of the day.

Theoretically I'd agree with you. And tbh that's how most of us saw teams before this situation. It looked like yet another over engineered enterprise "communications" tool that was bound to have a lot of half-assed hard corner cases -- so we just ignored it and hoped it would just go away.

Now that we've all been forced to use it and come to terms with it, the deep integration is extremely powerful. In fact the couple areas within it where the integration is still a little thin stand out because the workflows around those end up being a bit fussy.

It can be difficult to explain to somebody who doesn't use it, but it's not something Google has sorted out yet, not even close. It's like saying "I have all the ingredients for a cake in my pantry, so they're all together, it's basically the same as having them together in cake form."

Google has all the pieces to do something even better than this, but their corporate culture is like a hammer shattering all the pieces into different bits with only the most superficial connections between them. They may be allergic to even try given what happened with Wave, but even a half-decent copy using the building blocks they have would be pretty great.

The critical component, MS Teams, is missing in G Suite. Google Chat feels more like posting on an internal message board, since it centers around creating threads rather than actual chatrooms. I can see why companies using G Suite, including ours, prefer Slack's UX or MS Teams' central approach to collaborate in Office 365.

There are rooms on Google Chat. The threads are in each room.

What is missing is a way to sort through the threads (no title, no list of threads, no way to jump to the ones you have a notification for…). And probably a way to sort the rooms too; I'm part of 23 rooms and it's all over the place (and growing).

I am not sure Teams does anything well, but it does many things! Actually, I take it back, it is the best interface into SharePoint!

I was surprised after hearing all the negativity about it on here and other places that I actually like it. I don't see any major flaws - what problems do you have with it?

We used slack before and teams definitely feels like a step up.

Personally I have issues with the Android app. For instance I sometimes can't join a meeting from my phone (I can see that the meeting started but there is no way to join in). The only solution is to join in from my laptop, only then does the Join button magically appear in the app.

The channel or team messaging part is unusable. You can't leave channels, you can't ever get the right people in a team. Everyone just ends up using group chat, which is way more closed. For channel messaging it does not compete with Slack.

On MacOS, I definitely have an option to "leave the team" or "leave channel" either by right clicking on one or hitting the hamburger dots.

As many good things as I say about it, there's still some rough edges.

- Starting a group telecon from a channel doesn't seem to exist. You have to start a chat with the same people and then you can start the meeting.

- The screensharing selection interface is kinda wonky and doesn't show certain applications, it consistently won't give me an option to show Excel, but every other thing I have open is visible (MacOS).

- It gets hung up sometimes if people paste lots of images into a long chat.

- It needs better management of old chats, channels and so on, for example there's certain old chats from last year when we were first testing it that I really don't need around anymore and I'd like to get rid of.

- The notification system is a bizarre mess, I can't quite seem to find the magic combination that turns off notification sounds, but plays a sound when somebody calls me for a voice or video chat.

I haven't used it in a year so things might have changed, but it seemed to only have the last 20 or so messages with a person stored in memory and I'd have to wait for it to load if scrolling up to see more, and then only load them in batches of 20 or so at a time after that as well. It also didn't like me trying to paste screenshots directly in to it. instead I'd have to save them as a file and then upload that.

For my use case at the time, which was getting engineering support as a software salesperson in an organisation with poor documentation, that was a huge downgrade from slack. Those extra seconds waiting or it to load or messing around with image files hurt when you're on the phone with someone.

"best interface into Sharepoint"

^ Candidate for all-time best illustration of the phrase "to damn with faint praise".

> .. so there's no excuse for anybody to not have it on their phone as well.

Unless you are one of those people (like me) who don't want to put work related things on your phone. I like to have a separation between work and personal life. Thus why I don't put work email (or other things) on my phone.

I'm guessing they are referring to a work phone.

That's totally fair. Lots of people I work with have a separate work phone. My point was, even without a dial-in number, the app works flawlessly on a phone.

Even my Linux loving, MS doubting self is mostly happy with teams. It's the only video chat I've found that properly handles multiple screens when sharing my screen from Linux. Most apps will only share the entire X "screen" which means it shares all 3 monitors as a single screen but teams allows me to select the actual monitor I want to share.

If they got rid of the excessive whitespace at each side of the chat and used libnotify like civilized folks I'd be super happy.

>If they got rid of the excessive whitespace at each side of the chat and used libnotify like civilized folks I'd be super happy.

I wouldn't hold my breath. They use the same custom notification on Mac os and even on Windows.

Oh, and on Linux, have you tried using it with a tiling wm ? The notification gets its own regular window. The first time it happened it was quite jarring to have it fill half my 32" monitor. Even since that happened, I've went back to using it through Firefox, which honors the system notification setup.

Windows has an option to use native notifications, idk if that's where their headed towards or just an experiment

I do indeed use it with a TWM, if you're using i3 like me you can fix it with the below in the i3 config, probably something similar in other TWMs.

    for_window [title="Microsoft Teams Notification"] floating enable

Still not as useful as system notifications but it doesn't explode whatever I'm working on!

That's weird, since sharing each window or tab is standard in most browsers. It's just a 'navigator.mediaDevices.getDisplayMedia' call. So I would expect any webRTC solution to support it.

Zoom allows me to choose which monitor to share in Ubuntu.

Good to know!

I am a bit sad you forgot to mention Teams also works fine in Linux (Ubuntu) as I use it every day.

My Teams currently has 5 processes using 750MiB total. I don't need that running on my phone.

It has a very little usage of ram on phone. Basically 0 when you don't use it.

Even better yet, say I'm on my company's Teams instance. And I'm talking with a customer, who is on another Teams instance.

I can cross over to their full videoconference with an invite, share screens, put notes in chat, whole 9 yards. For a moment, The company is just a logical division of the whole Teams infrastructure.

That's powerful.

For the last few weeks, I've been on a weekly 50 person conferences with people from 6 entirely different organizations/companies and it's been absolutely flawless. Presentations, slidesharing, filesharing, chat, driving somebody else's computer, the works.

I've never experienced anything quite like it even if on paper it sounds like half a dozen other conference systems. It blows anything else I've used out of the water.

If you're not into Microsoft ecosystem then you don't really need it.

In IT company where Mac and Linux dominates we are already accustomed to other software and don't see any benefit in changing everything to use One Drive.

You are conflating two very different business models. Google needs these products to generate ad revenue. They already have the GSuite stack that competes with Microsoft.

Forget the business models. Duo and hangouts don't present me with ads for example. So that doesn't matter in any way in this comparison.

What google needs to do is to stop fracturing communication modes across every single conceivable strata they can identify.

Teams has an option for PSTN conferencing so if that's the only reason holding on to WebEx, it might be cheaper to add the PSTN option to Teams and ditch WebEx.

Pricing: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-team...

That's a good point. I'm regularly going back and forth between Teams conferences and Webex conferences and the Teams ones seem to take a quarter of the time to get started compared to the webex ones (with all the "are you on mute?", "I can't hear you" nonsense) and the quality tends to be higher.

If I could junk webex entirely I'd love it.

Teams does a lot of things but not a single one is done well. Even the text chat, which has been working well for decades, is horrendously broken. The video calling is worse than Skype used to be before MS ruined it. I could go on.

Google is doing something at http://chat.google.com/ Looks like a fresh start and has features similar to slack and MS team.

It's a rebranding of Hangouts Chat: https://gsuite.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/products/chat/

I only just noticed Duo as a spare app just hanging around on my phone the other day.

If Google couldn't care less to bring it to my attention, I couldn't care less to try it.

And now it's suddently important to them?

Do the right thing at the right time. Invest and believe in your product becuase it's great.

Don't try and jump on the bandwagon now that you've just suddenly reversed your decision to sunset the product because of what's going on.

/rant

Gsuite has a well integrated group video conference app.