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Comment by unixhero | Hacker News Reader

MS Teams is the best way. Worth the dollars.

Microsoft really screwed up not taking advantage of its Skype acquisition and furthering the technology that Skype had a large and early lead at. In my opinion, MS Teams is in many ways comparably worse, not that Skype was ever a technological darling. Regardless, on my Mac laptop, Teams is incredibly slow, difficult to use, and has all sorts of challenges with screen share. Might be my setup, but I simply don't have those issues with other conferencing apps.

Teams is a usability disaster. I have to restart it a couple of times a day because it will not show the people list when i press the chat button. Aparently i shall not use a laptop screen to access Teams.

Nah. It isn't. We use it with 5000 users. Stable stuff. Productive.

EDIT: Not trolling. I just care about having functionality that works, not necessarily speed.

Well I use it daily and I can't even scroll up through chat history without it getting totally janky. The search basically doesn't work, I routinely have to restart it and often text shortcuts (like Ctrl+A to select all) just stop working completely.

It's not stable at all. Audio calls are generally okay, but often screen sharing just doesn't seem to come through either.

Yes, very productive. My favourite is when i'm in a meeting and somebody is sharing his screen. MS thought is a good idea to throw a toolbar at the top of the screen and some meeting participants icons (big) on the right. This eats around 33% of screen space (i'm being generous here). To be able to see something i need to go in the menu and select full screen. This will make some space on top. Now i need also to go in the menu and select focus and now i have an image which is approx 85% of the screen. The issue is that sometimes the lower part of this image is cropped with no possibility to scroll (scrollbars are so last centuury). Of course i can scale the image till it fits the screen (ehich will scale also the programm) but then it is not readable anymore. I guess some things are just hard.

This is 100% trolling, right? Teams is so painfully slow and inefficient compared to almost everything out there.

I’m convinced that a lot of the problems with Teams is your installation and the servers behind the system.

Teams was widely used at Whole Foods when I was there (I left in August of 2021), and that’s not a small company. And it worked very well. Better than any other chat/video conferencing solution I had seen to that date.

Now that I’m working at AWS, I’ve used Slack more extensively, and I’m still not convinced that it’s a better chat client. Maybe. Maybe not.

Internally, Amazon and AWS primarily use Chime for videoconferencing, and it’s getting better. I think Teams is still a lot better in that role, but Chime is catching up.

I have hated on Microsoft since at least 1984, if not before. And I dearly loved the early days of Skype. But even I must grudgingly admit that Teams is not a horribly bad solution in these spaces. Less bad than most others I’ve seen.

Disclaimer: I speak only for myself and my own personal experiences, not for my employer or any previous employer.

Have they fixed the problem where if you have only a few participants, and one is on a connection that is I a separate region from the others, that participant will show the symptoms of the queue they are on being stuffed instead of flushed, and e.g have audio and video freezes that never catch up, and not be able to see screen shares even when video is off?

This was an issue for much of last year. In larger calls this didn't happen, but it made teams a painful waste of time and energy for actual team communication, rather than big announcements. Hangouts/meet and zoom both work fine in the situations I'm thinking of.

Yes, it works well enough; but it's sometimes a pain, but not enough to move away

MS Teams has a free version now.

Free as in free beer. There is a difference.

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