It's not as pretty/lovable as Slack, but it has an additional level of organization (each team gets their own set of channels), you can add tabs of related apps/sites to each channel, etc. As far as I could tell having used both simultaneously for a few years, Teams is a complete superset of Slack.
The calendar integration is nice and the video chats are good, but The Linux version of their client just stops pulling audio all the time unless I do a `killall -9 pulseaudio` and restart it (and it's the only app left where I still have to do that).
Teams gets a big "Meh" for me on calls and awful for text chat.
Yes, it's odd. For those who haven't used Teams, it defaults to showing you a team's channels you use most frequently (I guess? I never quite understood the logic) and then you have to click to see the full list. Maddening.
As a result, I ignore them all.
They need some sort of “feed” feature.
Unfortunately your killall workaround does not work for me. I have to restart my laptop every time I have a Teams meeting -.-
I'm quite a happy user of Teams, the only thing I'm missing is ability to share my desktop with giving control to a remote caller - but I only needed that maybe once or twice over this entire year so far.
Note that outside of audio being disabled on a regular basis (and there being no way of setting it back up properly), I am also happy with the product. It beats Skype Business, which I could never get to work on Linux.
But then I got a member of a different Team, for one of our customers, as part of some integration work. And boy is that a CF.
Unlike Discord you either have this team or that team active. Notifications from the other are horribly unreliable, and there's no way to chat with someone in one team while you're in a call with someone from the other team besides running a separate client.
So as such, "Teams" really should have been named "Team".
AirSend gives you a few simple (chat, voice/video, files, tasks and wiki) but powerful tools and then get out of the way.
This was largely fixed, you may have to enable the "new meeting experience" though, which starts your meeting / call in a separate window from the main client
Last tried this a couple of days ago.
I see now that what I've always thought of as "channels" is called Teams, no idea how I've overlooked that for over two years but there you go.
My point is in Discord I can be on a dozen different servers with different administrators and seamlessly go between them. Not so in Teams. I'm stuck to one tenant (team) at a time. Which sucks if you need to switch between them.
You are correct that Teams today does not support Multi-Tenancy but that is really not an issue for 99.5% of organizations who would only ever have 1 tenant anyway
Teams is structure as
Tenant -> Teams -> Channels
Anyway, up until this became an issue, Teams has worked quite well. It does what we need when we need it, so can't complain really.
1. Many users have issues where the unmute button is unresponsive. Typically the workaround is to turn off incoming video feeds which isn't exactly ideal. This is a major turnoff.
2. Difficult to stay involved in multiple channels as described by another comment. I find it tedious to find what's happened if I've been away for a while.
3. Slack has bots that do various helpful things including leaving channels you don't use, asking you for your daily standup feedback if you don't have an in person meeting, referencing external content, etc. I assume Teams must have something similar but I've never seen them used which likely indicates its a lot easier to do with Slack.
4. Nicer UI as you allude to yourself
5. Slack works with several video chat options including their own (based on AWS tools I believe?) and Zoom. I actually prefer Slack video chat over Zoom or Teams for pair programming as its so easy to annotate the screen without clicking into a bunch of menus or being the meeting owner or something. You literally just start drawing on the screen and your coworkers see it
6. Excellent mobile app which is quite important for a chat client
7. Ability to run a small chatroom for free which AFAIK Microsoft doesn't offer (its included with other Microsoft products that were paid for usually)
8. Not tied in to only Microsoft products
Looks like there's a free [0] version of teams that supports unlimited search, unlimited app integrations and meetings of up to 100 attendees. Compare to free [1] slack that has limitations of 10k searchable messages, 10 app integrations and only 1-1 meetings
[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/microsoft-team... [1]: https://slack.com/intl/en-au/pricing
Good grief! Teams, suck!
The integration and embedding of office/powerbi/etc is neat, but it forces it into a Teams frame.
For some reason, some things launch SharePoint with its own bag of shit for trying to make its own version of web sites.
I’m in a big org with Teams for almost a year. We have thousands of employees who aren’t as active as hundred person free slack open source projects. People aren’t using it to communicate much with each other.
They keep emailing, or texting or IMing. I get more Skype IMs a day than Teams. And do you know how horrible Skype is?
Because of this, I think it sucks as a superset of Slack. Sure, it nominally has all those features, but in practice they aren’t usable.
I hope that MS just keeps iterating and it eventually gets better. I think it’s better now than a year ago.