Meanwhile, Polish gov't uses Microsoft Teams [1] as one of ways of verifying citizens who are applying for trusted profile service.
[1] - https://moj.gov.pl/uslugi/engine/ng/index?xFormsAppName=Wnio... (in Polish)
[1] - https://moj.gov.pl/uslugi/engine/ng/index?xFormsAppName=Wnio... (in Polish)
It's really astonishing how governments, especially the European ones, don't cluster on open-source and self-hosted resources for all of these things. To be honest, I know the "easy answer" to this: "IT consulting firms, incompetence, bureaucracy and corruption", but even with that, it should be possible to do it with open system and not just rely on some other countries even for the software.
Navel gazing at open source isn’t a great use of the limited resources of the taxpayer. There’s 100 other priorities to expend resources on, many of which have a meaningful open source component.
This effectively means that the critical advantage of FLOSS - just install it and see if it works for the users - is effectively killed by the red tape. Only software that someone actively sells can ever make it through.
EDIT:
And to be clear, this is not about customer support and whatnot. Number one complaint from most of the public servants who contract out IT services have been that the suppliers are not helping them, are overcharging them and in some instances they even threaten and withhold documentation and read access to their software databases.
I’ve seen large contracting firms get the boot for pulling the let’s withhold docs to get another large change order for producing said doc. It’s BS games.
Only software that someone actively supports*
On the other hand, there are very large budgets available for purchasing software with support contracts and even more so for IT consultancy services. In practice, this neo-liberal push to outsource rather than develop in-house capabilities results in all sorts of inefficiencies and deficiencies in the ability of public servants to provide a quality public service.
Preface: Teams is horrible and it's super bloated for a simple chat app, but it's a mainstay for remote work along Slack and Zoom unfortunately.
It's still better than the architecture using ID.me they built for unemployment benefits during COVID which in FL was subsequently hacked and leaked all kinds of personal info (that was already leaked with Equihax). The CEO then brazenly said it was not his company's responsibility to secure for attacks from hackers!
> The DEO hired ID.me last spring, an identity verification company, in order to confirm the identities of agency clients when they access their CONNECT accounts. However, ID.me was not hired to protect against hackers. Nixon said the DEO recommends that victims of the hacking “monitor their financial accounts, and if they see any unauthorized activity, they should promptly contact their financial institution.”
This kind of nepotism has to be called out for the crime that it is, good on Hesse for taking the initiative to do so, lets see if they move to FOSS. The Libre suite does everything word used to do without all the cloud BS that makes it entirely un-useable if you have ever spent 10 mins using a Linux distro.
I just found a quote from a ID.ME rep on their subreddit [1] that 'didn't age very well' as they say in light of what happened soon after:
Security and the protection of our users is our BIGGEST concern. This is why we are very much user based. Any information that we have is sent through users. You are able to revoke your accounts at any time. We have security teams that work overtime to make sure hacks and fraudsters do not happen. Thorough investigations and screenings happen on the backend to protect our users.
And it gets worse in 2022 [2], they swapped CEOs but the MO remains in place: fleece pubic agencies and lock people out of their UI benefits.
0: https://www.bocaratontribune.com/bocaratonnews/2021/07/hacke...
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/IDmeSupport/comments/n3exk9/comment...
2: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/01/24/biometric-tech-company-i...
Uses a lot of memory and is slow
Frequently crashes my machine
The UI for discussions I find poor. No one uses the "teams" concept and everything is done in private chats.
The audio in conferencing also renders it unusable.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/downloads/pro...
Yes, the thing that consumes more resources uses more resources. Because it can do more things. People are also mad about that btw.
Saying "well, x uses more than y" where `y` in this case is using about 5x more resources than its contemporaries is just an insultingly weak argument.
I find that hard to believe.
With everything else that runs, you're out of RAM pretty quick: Our production software takes around 1 GB when running, Firefox/Chrome with a few tabs, Acrobat Pro...
I'm lucky that I've received an upgrade to 16 GB because I need special software for my work. For the next system I'll ask for 32 GB and 16 GB for my teams. Don't understand why the corporate IT is so sparse with RAM...
520/8192 = 0.0635
mIRC used to use ~2MiB when I had 256MiB in 2003 and I was in a lot of channels.
I know this because I used to count every megabyte of usage back then and MSN Messenger with the "animated images" was the real hog back then.
Ha!
Even though I know this was addressed to me, you clearly opened the floodgate on the very vocal customer complaints section on HN that has clearly struck a nerve with many more than you anticipated chiming in.
With that said, yes it's full bloat and sounds like utter crap even with audio only on every time I've ever used it; I typically use Signal and only revert to conventional apps for work purposes and it always struggles worse than the other.
What does this mean?
Apparently it's corpo/PM speak [0] for meeting #'s, which judging by his stance on the poorly reviewed Teams app so far makes me think that MS product market fit strategy worked in this case: it knows who it built Teams for.
Just look at who this is aimed at:
> Where the Action Is is a book for leaders seeking to make sense of their meetings and master their business.
0: https://www.lucidmeetings.com/meeting-types/team-cadence-mee...
This comes up all the time, to the point where I think people are running different versions of Teams. I would be interested in exploring that angle tbh-
For me:
* The client is "heavy" when compared to contemporaries.
It isn't uncommon for me to need to choose which "essential" apps to turn off to get something done on a maxed-out MBP. So Teams gets turned off, and maybe someone gets annoyed that I don't respond to something, while I run a few VMs in Teams' former memory space.
That aside: why should I severely impede my battery life, cause my fans to spin (audible discomfort) or create discomfort due to heat on my lap: for an app where there are better alternatives that don't do that?
* Web version only works with Chrome.
Firefox, Qutebrowser, Safari have severe limitations. Safari needs to have some security controls disabled globally otherwise it won't even open.
* Notifications are absent or overly-verbose
I miss notifications that are timely and important on the App (like calls which get forwarded to my phone) but an unrelated message on a topic somewhere else will get "promoted" to me.
* UI design leaves a lot to be desired, things are all over the place, finding things is hard.
* New UI refresh for meetings is "top heavy"
Most Video Conferencing programs are trying to make it so that you get close to eye contact with other participants (behind screen cameras in phones for example!); But for Teams: lots of elements are loaded in the top bar which makes people appear to be looking down at something, because the subject they're looking at is lower down on the screen. This is the only video conferencing program to do this.
* Video quality is very low compared to contemporaries.
* Screen Sharing is extremely low quality too
You have to really bump the font point, they've recently added the idea of "content awareness" too, as in sharing Powerpoint slides directly from OneDrive, but it's janky as hell.
* Whiteboards are some kind of extra application which has to be enabled - acts like an external website, not at all integrated and does not live at all with the meeting.
* Having external people invited still requires you to manually allow them into the room (unlike Google Meet, which treats externals that you allow as part of the meeting)
* "Teams" are linked to Sharepoint and will cause Chaos with Onedrive and Sharepoint if you don't remember certain things: like uploading something to a channel will drop it in a weird folder with open permissions, or that "private teams" make brand new sharepoint sites: your org probably has hundreds of these.
* The Client randomly hangs on my machine during meetings (freeze, blocking all incoming and outgoing audio/video) My machine is a Threadripper 3970x with 256GiB of ram: there is no fucking way it's due to resource exhaustion.
* the latency in audio is at least 3-5x higher than contemporaries
* when attempting to launch a meeting in a hurry, it's almost as if teams knows and spends 30s loading. I suspect there is some "Join now" function for a meeting in progress that is actually causing an adverse affect here as I've been able to repeatedly measure this problem.
I suspect that some of these issues are because I'm in Europe and the servers are hosted in the US. It could also be because I use Linux and MacOS.
I often also find that _people who like Teams_, have only really used other Microsoft collaboration tools in a professional setting. (Or worse ones that are known to be worse like AT&T Connect.)
I am also not a huge fan of how they push Teams on people by embedding it in everything else, you could argue that this is vertical integration: but a lot of things do not integrate well with Teams, even outlook (for an example of better integration just look at recorded meetings and presented content in google calendar! it backfills the meeting with the recorded content so you can easily see it! outlook doesn't do that!): https://blog.dijit.sh/teams-microsoft-monopoly
> I personally find it the best conferencing tool for recurring cadence
"Best" is so insanely subjective that it's difficult to answer this.
Audio/Video Quality and ergonomics are better with Google Meet: but Jitsi works absolutely fine on recurring meetings: you just put the link in the meeting request.
To the extent that I'm forced to run Teams by my coworkers' choices, it sure would be nice if it were less of a bucket of ass.
What's wrong with that?
Microsoft is trusted vendor