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Comment by annoyingnoob | Hacker News Reader

As a person that sets direction for IT in an organization that uses Office 365, I can say that I didn't appreciate that MS forced Teams on us. And the controls that you mentioned were not available from day 1.

I don't support Slack here but MS really forced Teams on us like it or not.

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Not being an office 365 user, how is it any different than other software? For instance, I believe the LibreOffice installer defaults to install all the modules. But I can change it to just install writer and calc.

When it first rolled out the office install actually adds a teams installer rather than teams itself (and no choice to avoid it). So then teams would reinstall with every restart after being uninstalled and pop up front and center asking you to sign in every time windows started.

You then needed to sign in before it would give you the option not to start with windows or to only start in the background.

Obviously you could avoid this by uninstalling teams and ALSO it's auto installer. I'll add the caveat this may have only been the behaviour for those with skype for businesses installed or those in NZ(I've heard NZ is occasionally used as an early roll out/testing zone for some microsoft products) rather than more generally.

This was an accident. It took a bit to remedy but that was not the intention.

I don't use MS Office, 365 or otherwise, but my understanding is that there wasn't an option to set it to not install teams on initial install.

I'm not familiar with Office licensing. Do you have to pay more because they bundled Teams (maybe) or do you have to use it? (that would be surprising)

Anyway, at least you can self host Exchange. Slack is centralized.

We had an O365 plan that included Skype for Business. Skype was replaced by Teams. MS force 'upgraded' our O365 tenant to Teams - I was given notification but no option to completely avoid Teams. We don't pay extra specifically for Teams, we do pay extra for PSTN dial-in to Teams meetings.

No, we don't have to use Teams. But we were using Skype, so we were going to move to something. No one was already using Slack and paying for just chat wasn't going to be in the budget. We can certainly uninstall it. But you have to be sure to uninstall the machine-wide installer they stick on there or it comes back.

After covid, we hold most meetings in Teams now and its been fine. Wish I had more control at the beginning and it didn't just show up where we already had Skype.

Teams replaces Lync/Skype for Business which are gonna reach EOL soon.

I’m guessing that’s what they mean by it being forced upon their users.

Right we were using Skype. Then one day I got an email about Microsoft moving us to Teams. I was able to delay the Teams roll out by 1 month but I could not prevent us being moved to Teams. Skype was part of the Office 365 level that we subscribe to and we were using it. MS replaced it with Teams.

Honestly, Teams is better than Skype. But it wasn't until covid forced everyone home that we really started using Teams, that first week was painful.

I was fortunate in that I moved my team to Teams (I still find the name terrible) well before MS put a mandate out.

So our folks were comfortable once the MS EOL statement came out and the company started moving everyone over. Everyone else had quite a bit of a struggle for a week or so though.

On the plus side, I think there were very few complaints after a couple of weeks. Which probably had a lot more to do with how bad Skype for Business was (much worse than Lync) than how good Teams was (it was still fairly unpolished at the time...it's much better now...MS has been adding features and fixing issues rapidly).

Agreed, Teams quality has improved and I get very few questions about it now.

What do you mean MS forced Teams on you? IT has always been able to control what apps install with the office suite, including Teams. Teams being freely offered as a bundled service certainly incentivizes its use, but there has never been any penalty for using an alternative service other than, of course, the cost of layering on another service.

When we installed O365 desktop apps Teams wasn't a thing. I used an administrative install. We installed Skype because about half the company was already using it.

Then one day in June 2019 Microsoft informed me that Skype for Business was going to be upgraded to Teams. I had the option to request a one month delay but I could not stop the roll out of Teams. At some point Click-To-Run (the installer for O365) put Teams on every computer that already had Office. In addition to the Teams app it installed the Teams-machine-wide-installer, which installs Teams to every profile that logs onto the computer, making it run at logon.

Its that part where I didn't get to choose because I already had Skype for Business that bothers me. The machine-wide installer is annoying too. Yes one can uninstall those things but that takes admin rights (some action by IT).

That’s just because SfB was being killed and replaced with Teams. So if you used SfB, it stands to reason that you would want to keep using its direct replacement. It would have been silly to just tell you “SfB is dead” and then not give you a replacement.

If I was informed that Skype was going to die I missed that notification. I was given 30 days notice and no choice. We didn't have to use Teams and could uninstall it but its not clear I could have blocked the install.

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