Comment by wenc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wenc | Hacker News Reader

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It's called Microsoft Teams, and in its current iteration, it's surprisingly good. I actually prefer it to Slack. It is highly integrated with Office 365 (supports live collaboration etc.).

The HD video quality is surprisingly solid -- comparable to Zoom, far surpasses Webex and Google Hangouts -- and uses a different protocol, codec(s) and network than Skype for Business, which I have always found spotty. MS Teams is the slated successor to Skype for Business (good riddance).

https://www.djeek.com/2018/01/microsoft-teams-and-the-protoc...

It can handle up to 250 participants for group video chat (similar to Zoom), and there's an MS Teams Live Events edition that can handle 10k participants. (20k during COVID)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-live-e...

It actually does a few things better than Zoom -- its virtual background feature is able to better detect and eliminate complex backgrounds. It recently introduced on-the-fly automatic closed captioning (through speech recognition). Later this year, it will have a larger video grid (currently the limit is 3x3) and AI-based noise cancellation on mic input -- previously the domain of offerings like krisp.ai.

On iOS devices, it even lets you do live screen-sharing on mobile (using Apple's Screen Recorder mechanism), which makes it easy to demo mobile apps on a video call.

EDIT: --I don't think Zoom let you do this (yet?)-- not a true statement, but leaving this here with strikethrough.

My company tried MS Teams for about two days before canning it and switching back to Slack + Zoom. I've never encountered such a poorly designed product [1] other than the one it was supposed to replace, Skype for Business.

Why the does chat need to take up so much space on the screen and why is everything presented in basically an old school SMS layout (I'm looking at you too, Signal). I tried a handful of their integrations nothing worked correctly. Trying to simply enable github commits/PRs/etc was a confusing nightmare of authenticating multiple parties and ultimately all it did was have a chatbot privately spam me, but couldn't have it reside in a channel.

Screen sharing is a disaster for everything business oriented too (ms teams, zoom, slack, whatever google's thing is called this week). They're slow, laggy, frequently crash, and resolution is unreadable most of the time. If you need to have screen sharing where your voice chat happens at the same time as your video actions, Discord is the only thing that works flawlessly. It's superior on simple voice chat too, persistent voice chat rooms, etc. It's lovely software.

[1] https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/02/teams-bet...

Screen-sharing on Teams has been pretty solid -- after all, screen sharing is an enterprise's bread and butter. As someone who averages 10-15 meetings a week, most of them with screen shares, I think I have a pretty good sample size to come to that conclusion.

I can't comment on aesthetics since that's fairly subjective. I can't comment on integrations either since I've only tried a few, but I find it integrates fairly effortlessly with Azure Devops (ie Microsoft's attempt at replicating Github in what was previously Team Foundation Server) [1].

Here's the thing about Microsoft stuff -- generally things work well if you remain in the Microsoft ecosystem. Otherwise, you'll likely have to do extra work.

That said, Teams has improved drastically since 2017. Microsoft's philosophy these days seems to be move fast, ship crap and get better quickly. Not in every product line, but I've definitely seen this happen with Teams development and I've actually come to like what the Teams product has become today. I have to confess, Microsoft under Satya Nadella is a very different company from what it once was.

[1] We're not allowed to use Github in my organization (bigcorp, IP etc.) but I've found Azure Devops to be quite a decent substitute. It plays well with a git pull-request workflow, has almost full feature parity with Github as far as I can tell, plus has a built-in kanban board.

I like Github -- it's more tightly focused and simpler -- but I've been able to carve out a part of Azure Devops that is similar to Github and maintain my previous git workflow without much trouble. Azure Devops is not the dumpster fire I'd expected it to be -- it's actually fairly good in parts.

(the only pain-in-the-neck with Azure Devops is licensing cost -- it's not free. In the enterprise, it has named-user licensing which can get costly. I wouldn't have used it if we didn't already have it and couldn't use private Github.)

> We're not allowed to use Github in my organization (bigcorp, IP etc.)

Is your organization aware that Microsoft owns Github and your Azure stuff is most likely hosted inside Microsoft data centers exactly like Github? Seems like a weird line in the sand to draw.

> Microsoft under Satya Nadella is a very different company from what it once was.

Yeah, Microsoft is doing great things in other areas. VS Code, Windows 10, WSL, DirectX on WSL, the massive focus on open source and giving back to the community. I just found MS Teams in particular is unusable garbage, but I'm very happy with Microsoft otherwise.

I don't know if you're old enough but MS Comic Chat was significantly superior to Microsoft Teams.

Our source control has to be on-prem (our Azure Devops is on-prem).

I've never used it but I'm old enough to remember Comic Chat. Fair enough, we have different positions and that's ok.

Ah, yes, I've been asked to use Microsoft Teams for a call. But only once? How is the OS manufacturer behind the curve on popularity if it's integrated into Windows 10 and Office already?

It's just quite surprising. I don't know if they did a bad job or if the momentum was just unlucky. But I have no idea how the OS manufacturer wasn't able to dominate this market.

It's not a default install, and it's free to individual users but not free for enterprises. I believe it's $5/user/mth for O365 subscribers.

Zoom lets you do screen sharing on iOS like you’ve mentioned... and it has for at least the past 2 months.

I stand corrected then.

Zoom, does and always had, but apps like Hangouts and Slack don't. We used to use Slack calls a lot, but after quarantine I found myself saying lets move to Teams/Zoom so I can share my screen on my iPad.

wenc, do you folks in your organization use the channel messaging part of Teams? Aka the teams chat part, or do folks tend to use the one on one or small group chat. We see folks actively avoid the channel based messaging in teams. Like 99.5% of messages are in chat.

I see folks use both, but definitely most lean heavier to group chat for some reason. It's an interesting sociological phenomenon. If I had to guess, the reasons are probably: there's no #random or #general channel, so they use group chat as a substitute; they prefer linear rather than threaded discussions; similar to Slack, there's no user security in channels, so group chat is a way to include/exclude certain people from conversations.

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