There's so much more in Windows to be angry about, lmao. You must adapt to this Windows world that has been made for us -- it SUCKS, but... you adapt and you evolve and you learn ways to make your workflow work for you.
- All the channels are named General for every Team I am part of and it shows several "General" channels in my pinned list. Unless someone mentions me, I simply miss those conversations in other channels.
- Search is pretty bad and it never works. Slack is pretty powerful and conversations in Slack are like KB.
- If a screenshot is shared, sometimes it takes forever to show when I click it.
- Every time I have to click 'New conversation' to post in a channel.
- I use a 34" monitor, when I expand Teams app - it hardly uses 50% of the real estate. Content is centered and lot of whitespace (or blackspace in dark mode :p)
I can go on and on.
The current minimum width is 2x my smartphone which is kinda weird considering the app runs fine on the phone itself.
And basically anything coming out of Atlassian. How do you actually make software that's so indelible, while still being overly complex and sloooow?
We all have software we hate, I'm sure. We must, right? Everyone uses slack
Simple: you make it super customizable with options, configuration, and plugins so managers and administrators can implement and mandate any sort of workflow they can dream up, no matter how nonsensical, counterproductive, or downright user-hostile it may be. Then you do the same for reporting and dashboards on whatever misleading metrics they want.
After that, the PTBs will cling to the illusion of control it gives them to their dying breath.
All the highest-paid programming jobs are not MS-bound.
Teams, on the other hand, is an UI nightmare:
- It has noticeable UI latency even in the best computers.
- If you open a document within it, there is no way (that I know of) to get back to the chat to discuss something about the document, and then back to the document again. Once you go to a chat, the document is closed and you have to navigate the whole file system to find it again, click it, and wait for several seconds for it to open because lag.
- If you search for messages with a given word, it shows you a list of the messages but it doesn't allow you to click on each to look at the context, which is what I want to do like 99% of the time I search for a message in a chat app.
- If you have it set up to launch on startup, it will open private conversations and again, take a couple of seconds to close even if you're a fast clicker, because of its ubiquitous lag. Incredibly inconvenient if you use the laptop to give a presentation (of course I know that I can just set it to not open on startup, but I shouldn't need to do that. It makes sense to have it on startup 99% of the time as I almost always use it, just don't open a private chat and stick it in front of the screen with focus as the first thing you do!).
- The filesystem is a nightmare (not only Teams' fault, but the whole Office ecosystem): files associated to a team, vs. files on someone's OneDrive, vs. SharePoint. After 2 years of using it, I still don't get the difference between OneDrive and SharePoint and I'm still not able to find anything without stumbling around, and I'm supposed to be a tech guy.
- Sometimes you drag a file on a chat to send it to the other person and it makes you explicitly set permissions (using a laggy UI, of course) so the other person can access the file. Why would I send a file to a private chat if I didn't want to show it to the other person?
- Calls don't scale. Quality degrades fast.
- Sometimes a "team" will go bold for no reason. I click on it, and there is nothing new. Or a chat window will go blank and only come back when someone types a new message.
Mind you, it has good things (I like the simplicity of partially typing a few names in the search box, having it autocomplete, click on the people and starting a group chat, for example) but the UI is a dumpster fire. I'm not anti-Microsoft as a whole (I like Windows, and kind of like Excel) and while I kind of tolerate it, there are plenty of reasons to get angry with it. And some of the issues above (like search not showing context, rendering it all but useless) are really basic, I don't know how they could even pass QA.
- I have chat and documents open for collaboration all the time - how have you missed it?
- don't have it set to open on startup, perhaps? We're not allowed to have any apps open on startup that aren't of the handful of "approved" ones, so my first task every morning is [command] (I run VDI on my MBP) then click Outlook and Teams from my start menu. Takes about 10 seconds
- never had issues with the Teams/OneDrive integration ... and I've been using it for a couple years now day in, day out
- never saw a perms issue sharing/sending a file ... is it a restricted file type by your organization, perhaps?
- been in Teams calls with well over 500 people. Hardly a dropped sound.
- chat windows do age-out after a certain period of inactivity; they're still "there", but they're not in the most-recent list any more
I especially like the task cards you can create and monitor - and how comments/updates create their own chat threads, so you can tag someone via chat, and it'll bring them to the task card just by dint of replying to the conversation ... THAT was brilliant
I also like that when you create a meeting in Teams, it auto-creates the Teams room/links for everyone invited. Whereas if you make it in Outlook, you either need the Teams plugin enabled, or you need to manually add the conferencing info after the fact
What are the other options? Zoom? A lot of companies ban Zoom for security reasons and the connection to the CCP - even without that it's not really that much better than teams anyway.
I think gathertown is pretty cool, but really all of these video chat services work well enough for what you need them for.
Slack was probably my favorite of the bunch for non-video communication, but now that they've sold themselves to salesforce they'll probably wither away and die (or at best remain in stasis) like everything else that company acquires.