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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

Teams has been transformative in the way I work with my team over the last few years, and the pace of development is impressive.

But…

I cannot understand the absence of core functionality like copy & paste from chats. You can select a few messages (maybe a pageful) but there is no way to take a copy of a whole chat. You can’t print it. You can’t export it. Eventually it just gets lost in deep history, and you can only find it if you remember which keywords were in the text.

We resort to filing screenshots, which seems ridiculous.

There used to be dozens of threads on UserVoice crying out for this feature, but they all got wiped when the Teams team stopped using that. At the time the statement was “this is on our backlog” and it had been that way for several years.

I’d love an explanation of why.

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> Teams has been transformative in the way I work with my team over the last few years

I've found it to be a big downgrade from slack.

How has of been transformative for you?

Probably coming from email, not Slack.

I'll speak of the things I like about teams

Granted, I've not professionally used slack so I can't say if it's much better.

- Teams integration with outlook is the best. Makes meetings with remote team members really slick.

- Teams video chat (at least for a smaller group of people) is way better than solutions like zoom. It's just super convenient to be able to do a video or voice call with someone to work something out.

- The ability to create small group chats with people on the fly is awesome. When we need a 1 off async convo with the right people it's easy enough to just add them to a chat, name it something useful, and be off.

- Because video chat has a chat, it's pretty easy to do a message where you can write something without interrupting the current conversation. That also doesn't go away as soon as the meeting ends (ala zoom).

That last point, persistent meeting chats, is really nice

Yup, particularly if you have a series of meetings (for example, standup) then the chat for yesterday's standup ends up being the same chat for today's standup.

Adds a lot of continuity to repeated meetings and can serve as an adhoc meeting notes location.

The things that's been transformative for me is that 95% of the external organisations I interact with have and use Teams. I cannot understate the power of broad uptake.

It's not a feature, or a piece of technical excellence, it's just that it is pervasive.

And that’s mainly a pricing issue. Teams is included in 365, webex charges insane rates nowadays.

Being able to call someone on audio or video, at any moment, without organizing a meeting, is a killer feature. I wish Google Meet allowed that.

In Google Chat, you can attach a Meet invite to a message for an impromptu meeting.

Personally I am glad that people can't just call me up. I would rather be asked over chat first.

It was transformative _because_ it was a downgrade.

> Teams has been transformative in the way I work with my team over the last few years

Same, its been a great way to avoid meetings that should have been an email.

I think it is because of the retention policy many companies have: after a certain amount of time (3 months, 1 year, 3 years are most common that I've seen) data has to be permanently deleted. This means if you make copy/paste/save/backup harder, there is less chance people will do that.

In my company messages in Teams disappear after a few weeks, emails after 3 years. You never know when your chat telling someone the app you just put in production is not fully tested and not ready and that chat will end up as evidence in court. Companies want to protect themselves, this is why they shred all data as soon as possible.

It also doesn't have some core features any multi-user voice chat client should have: change the volume of specific users and LOCALLY not GLOBALLY mute a user. Today I was on a call where one member was incredibly quiet and there was no way to adjust that (he called via actual phone). Teamspeak and Discord have had these features forever.

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