I'm still mad about this. It was such a great piece of software, and then Slack bought it and literally killed it without offering anything to replace the lost functionality.
The fact that so many people use Slack, but then do all their voice, video and screensharing in Zoom or some other tool says a lot about Slack as a tool and company.
My wife uses Teams for work. It's rubbish in many ways, but when she's using it they do everything in it. Somehow slack has failed at this despite having many of the same features built in.
I’m literally astonished to read this.
Teams is the king of “press a key and wait for the screen to unfreeze”, or the “launched but all you get is a white box until you restart”.
It also features what I politely refer to as “no search”, which is where you search your chat history, and conversations just aren’t there... until you go back through your history and find them, and then wow! Suddenly you can search for it.
Screen sharing can cause a meeting to drop out for no reason.
Want to upload a video? Or an image? Well, you can get an empty white box and when you click on it, you’ll get an empty white pop up. Great job.
Now, all of that said... that’s on windows.
Now try using it on a Mac. Ha! Haaaaaa!
Usable? Yes.
Good?? Not in my books.
It’s one of the poorest chat applications I’ve used, personally. /shrug
To be fair, I haven’t had much trouble with the mobile app on iOS, but I don’t use it much, and it’s seems on-par to the slack one to me.
...but I certainly wouldn’t call it a marvel of engineering; it’s just deeply integrated with outlook and it’s mandatory; so people who don’t do “chat” also use it.
I guess you’re just lucky? Or we’re unlucky?
...but we have about 900 staff using it, so it seems like a strange outlier to me.
I’m absolutely astonished to hear that you don’t get the “missing image” bug; that one happens all the time with larger images you share. It literally happened to me yesterday morning.
Maybe it a regional thing, and the Australian infrastructure is just rubbish behind the scenes and we’re seeing latency issues?
No idea; also don’t really care that much; teams gets my thumbs down. It’s rubbish as far as I’m concerned; hopefully others have better experiences with it.
Never faced issues on the things that you mention - screen sharing, uploading of a video or image etc.
Perf no issues, conduct internal as well as external conferences with college hires and interns (session attendance can go up to 70-80 people).
Yes there are some usability issues - the most notorious among my colleagues being the very clumsy meeting link share.
Never heard any issues from my colleagues either, including the less technically minded at sales which usually come running if something doesn't work.
While I think it has room for improvement, for basic stuff it just works for us.
The focus on video conferences might be the most annoying part. Most of the time, I just want to see the shared screen at best. There's an option to stop incoming video, though this one isn't on by default. There also flat-out isn't a way to stop looking at your own face when sharing video.
Meetings with Teams links tend to inflate the history, dozens of chats that could've been one thing now cause dumb questions like "should we stay here or go into the other call?". This was already solved by apps like Teamspeak more than a decade ago. It feels immensely clunky, but the culture also doesn't provide an intuitive way to avoid this problem.
The last bit highlights my biggest problem. It's mostly culture. It feels as restrictive as your average enterprise program, yet it also feels chaotic in all the wrong ways. Many problems have already been solved and plenty of cultures, like global social gaming, have already experienced ways to handle this. Had I not had any experience with other apps, I likely wouldn't feel this way.
I also realize part of the problem is how Teams is configured, which I have no experience with. But then it once again boils down to "here you have this tool that can do a lot, but it's not intuitive and we don't give you a lot of guidelines" despite the fact most companies have zero experience with remote.
The only problems I have had with Teams is the robotic-voice quality and the strange fascination that Microsoft has in changing their UI's from update to update leading me to keep hunting for that button which was there previously but can't be found now since its moved to some other place.
Our Teams instance has the calendar disables making it a pain to join meetings if you don't have easy access to your outlook calendar. They've also disabled any sort of api access which really limits what can be done in terms of integrating it into our other workflows.
In terms of general usability the app is lacking in information density. I routinely miss messages in team channels I've collapsed.
I’d also add that since my company moved to 365, about once every two weeks I get some email from it dept talking about service level disruptions.
And in the meantime it emails it’s creepy “we were watching your productivity” messages weekly.
Not a fan.
This sounds weird, like a configuration or permissions issue. Those basic features work flawlessly.
Also, maybe it doesn't make it better, but it sounds like Slack didn't intend[1] to do this.
[1] https://www.notion.so/Screen-Making-WFH-Work-57df16351a884bc...
They claim they did, but Slack screensharing is nowhere near what Screenhero's was.
A more Screenhero-like replacement is Tuple: https://tuple.app/