No links
You can’t link to conversations. This means if you want to add context to a Jira ticket or in a code comment, you can’t easily do so.
Inconsistent UI
The UI between a Teams channel and a chat with multiple people is not consistent. Direct chats:
- do not have the ability to thread; so you end up with quotes all over the place and interleaved conversations.
- don’t support ``` for code blocks. Channel chats do. Why? I have no clue.
Notifications in channels are easy to miss
It’s really easy to miss notifications from channels unless you get messaged directly about it.
The emojis are bad
They aren’t customizable, but even the ones that are available are not great.
Compared to Slack
Teams lacks these features that I find useful in Slack:
- Don’t have time to address something immediately and don’t want to forget about it? Right click → Remind me later.
- Instead of struggling to communicate a screen location, draw on the screen when a co-worker is sharing their display. Ok, Teams introduced this recently. But the first time I tried it, I ended up stuck in annotation mode and had to quit Teams to be able to interact with my applications…
- Integration with Jira for automatic linking to mentioned issues by Jira Issue Key, e.g., PROJ-123. I think this one is just a limitation because my company hasn't added the integration.
- Notifications when when activity occurs in Bitbucket or Jira. Ditto.
The hold music sucks
The music played when alone on a call sucks. I suppose this is more subjective than the rest…