It's so weird -- I use Teams all the time and I've never had a serious problem with it.
It's not the greatest software ever made but it's certainly functional. It's definitely getting a lot of work done to it.
It's not the greatest software ever made but it's certainly functional. It's definitely getting a lot of work done to it.
And #1 is probably an even more compelling selling point if your company is a subsidiary of Microsoft.
I'm fine with asking the meeting organizer to have an account but the participants should just be able to use the web client with a minimum of hassle.
Plus it doesn't work on any browser, even if said browser has capability to run it, or on mobile, unless you install their app.
They proceeded to primarily use Teams as a chatroom to let people know when the Zoom meetings were starting.
Must be nice. For me it simply refuses to start or join any meeting, gives a useless error message about trying again later.
Meanwhile, I remember reading full ebooks on my Pentium which were rendered as a single HTML file with zero lag.
To be fair, despite all the other ways that Slack runs rings around Teams, rendering speed isn’t one of them.
But, yeah, you’d think this would be an easy opportunity for a big win for Teams.
Huh, going the other way, I didn’t notice it get much worse; Slack seemed slow, and so did Teams, but not overwhelmingly slower. Might not have been “rendering” proper, could have been network topology of our orgs installations of each and more latency to Slack than Teams, or something like that.
It rolls back to the past, but lags, so it ends up showing you the wrong part of the history, rolling back to the present or a indeterminate past all while not showing what you searched for.
Poor discoverability of, basically, everything, paste doesn’t support standard options like pasting text only without formatting, so cutting and pasting from format documents takes either manual format correction or using a third app to paste without formatting and the cut again to avoid the ransom-note look. Formatting that supports Markdown entry (kind of), but only Word-style WYSIWIG editing. Teams text chat is a major let down coming from, say, Slack.
Word has some ribbon bullshit: https://www.howtogeek.com/679956/how-to-paste-text-without-f...
It may not be to your liking but isn't it a bit dramatic to say "worst-in-class" without including the "for me" caveat?
I could integrate with my Slack channel in a few hours. I’ve made multiple attempts with teams but it’s just impenetrable (and as far as I’ve found you just cannot integrate with chat at all).
One good example is that teams now tries harder to autoformat code. It will refuse to treat something copied from an IDE as just text, automatically put it into some random quote style box, and the process of getting your cursor out of that box to continue writing your message changes and is inconsistent over time. If the recipient of that message then tries to copy and paste that code, the formatting and raw text content will have been changed in unexpected ways, and you have to manually fix it. This is such a stupidly simple and expected use for a chat app in software development workspaces yet it probably isn't an allowed use case at microsoft. Microsoft fired their QA department, so any code path in any app not regularly used by Microsoft staff internally is pretty much garanteed to wander, be inconsistent, randomly break, and change in unnecessary ways.
Also try to right click on an open image and click copy. Then paste in another application (even a Microsoft one). Comes out as a base64 string. This been broken for years.
I expect a chat program to show me all messages the have been sent in a chat, in so far the other party intends me to view them (have no been deleted etc.). That is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.
I expect an edit (mine or someone elses) to be reflected on all my devices. That is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.
I expect to do the same series of keystrokes in a blank "chat input" field and get the same result. That is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.
I expect the text that I see as have been sent to appear the same (for a reasonable value of "same") on the other persons screen. That is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.
I expect that if I scroll to the bottom, I will be able to make the last message intended to be visible, become readable and copyable. That is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.
I expect that when I select a text and press "ctrl-c" or the local equivalent, the text now in my clipboard is always predictable. That is not an expectation Teams manages to fulfill.
And yes, I have personally seen and experienced each and every one of this things.
As best I could tell, my client would simply lose connection to the server entirely silently. Normally I would find out when trying to send a message to someone, and noticing the delivery animation/indicator was not appearing. Restart Teams and boom, here's a little pile of messages I'd missed.
I see it getting pushed a lot by companies using 365 and in particular all of Microsoft’s security setup stuff (like Authenticator wanting to own your phone), so you have to confine your communications to within the walled garden.
I think higher ups like the fact that it integrates with their outlook calendar (although the teams calendar itself fails to meet expectations for a calendar for the same reasons above - that is, like chat, I expect to see the latest updates to the calendar but they do not appear without an explicit refresh… like it’s still 1999 or something).
Let’s say there’s a chat message with a sentence or two I want to copy/paste elsewhere. I highlight just the text I want and hit copy, and then when I go to paste, Teams has ‘helpfully’ copied not just the highlighted text but also the rest of the message and the metadata such as who wrote the message and the time stamp.
Every day using teams I encounter things like this that frustrate and annoy me.
It’s also one of the few tools I answer customer surveys on so I can share the annoyances back with Microsoft - and at least some of them seem to slowly get fixed (eg clicking show message from the search results now takes you to the message in context whereas previously it would just show the message by itself in the center of the screen with no way to see the surrounding conversation).
Anyway, yes, in my experience Teams is definitely worst-in-class.
I dare you to scroll up in a chat with links, images, or gifs. It's so yanky, it's impossible to find anything.
Or search for a message you know is in a specific context. You will not be able to open the message in its context, only the message itself. Useless.
Or call somebody and then try to use the media keys on your keyboard. They won't work and instead play the Teams ringtone twice (or sometimes infinitely).
Or check the online status of your contacts. Spoiler: they are accurate only 50% of the time, sometimes showing a different status of a person on the same screen (e.g. contact list and chat).
Or try to switch chats quickly. It is so unnervingly slow.
Or try to react to a new message with an emoji with 125% scaling on. You cannot do it because the selection popup is like 30 pixels high because it opens downwards, not upwards.
Or try to share a 2560x1440 or higher screen with more than 0.5 fps over a gigabit connection.
Or try to remotely control another PC over Teams screen share and press Ctrl+, or Ctrl+Shift+Space or simply Tab. All those are getting caught by Teams, sometimes they are forwarded, sometimes not, but they always call a function in Teams and open various menus. All those are integral shortcuts in Microsoft Visual Studio, by the way.
Or try to copy text of a message you got, you will always have the name of the sender and timestamp in the clipboard, which requires me to paste it into a text editor first to copy and paste only the text into e.g. a single line search bar.
Or try to compile and just use Teams at the same time. MSN was more performant on a 450 MHz PC 20 years ago.
It has good outlook calendar integration; joining from a single click in my calendar view is much nicer than having to open the occurrence & find the zoom link.
But What trips me up is that we have a sister company, which also uses Teams. For some reason, when they send invites, I have to open the meeting details and click on the link to join. This happens in both Outlook and Teams' calendar module.
It has enforced outlook calendar integration; by default you create a Teams meeting whenever you create a meeting, choosing to implement the meeting in a competing product is annoying at best.
That said, I feel like I know a lot of devs who think there are a lot of things that are unusable (or the equivalent). Everything from Visual Studio to the display on their iPhone to modern cinema and science fiction in general to In-and-Out burgers. As a general rule, I discount their take on pretty much anything.
Is Teams great? No. Its better than what I used before it though, and its probably gotten better faster than just about any other piece of software I've used. I struggle to generate any outrage at all about it one way or another.
dare I ask what you used before?
I have yet to have a major complaint about Teams. It works, I have my meeting and I close it. I don't know what some of you want in a video conferencing app.
I wish that was true. Good for you. Not good for people expected to be "online" in it for longer.
I mean its not great but I feel like on Windows at least (idk about Mac or Linux) it's just distinctly average.
The only thing about teams that drove me crazy in the years of having to suffer it its search function and how the mobile app puts the logout action into settings (I lost my mind once trying to find it).
Sure there are systems that work probably better but Teams is fine, also the alternatives either don't have all the features of Teams or they are difficult to use/setup. A pro of Teams is that if you already have Office365 is mostly well integrated with the other tools (mail, calendar, Office, AzureAD authentication) and you have to manage accounts only in one tool (I can from the horrible AzureAD administration console create a user and it has a mail, Teams, Office, and can login into the company computers).
To me the reason to have Teams is just that you don't have to introduce another tool, have another account, etc. Of course if you decided to use GSuite instead of Microsoft one makes perfectly sense to use Google Meet, but GSuite doesn't yet have all the feature of Office365 and it's more expensive, and like it or not you have to deal with .docx documents when interfacing with other companies.
When we’re talking about an IDE I can just bring my own, but for chat it doesn’t work like that.
Of course if you use Windows, on other platforms Teams works completely unreliably or doesn't work at all. But that is another issue. I gave up using Linux at work on bare metal and started using a VM (not only for Teams). On macOS it works but not as good as Windows (I have some coworkers that has a mac, they loose notifications a lot)
When joining a video/audio meeting, even though the "Join" button is colored like it's active, hitting enter will pull up some part of the audio or video config instead of joining the meeting.
Messages will remain "unread" until a tab is selected and then clicked in. I have to interact with the fucking tab with the cursor before it will recognize I read a stupid message.
These UI issues are amateur hour shit. I run into them dozens of times a day because my fingers are on the keyboard and I like to use keyboard shortcuts. Using Teams requires not just a mental context switch but a physical adjustment to simply send a reply or just mark a message as read.
This is all besides Teams spinning up my fans with 300% CPU usage for reasons.
This gets me every time. Even more so recently when, for some reason, it started to take its sweet time actually joining meetings.
Someone will invite me to join, I'd click join in the popup and go about my business. Since it's slow, I'm not too bothered if I don't hear anything right away. Then the person will message me along the lines of "so... are you joining or what?
Why, in the name of ... , when only 1 (one) input field is displayed on the screen, why it is not active ? 20 years ago this was the standard. What happened ?
Don't blame Teams for the fact that Linux can't sort out its Desktop GUI situation.
The fact that Wayland still sucks after 15+ years is not Teams' fault.
The fact that nobody unpaid want to work on X11, Wayland, and Linux GUI stuff is not Teams' fault.
It’s somewhat understandable that developers for Microsoft might not be fully across the status of display servers and their respective implementations in Linux, but it’s a reasonable rule of thumb to assume that Wayland is the way to go for any new projects since 2021 at the very latest. If you build your app for X today it’s probably going to be running under XWayland anyway.
MS puts out debs and rpms for teams: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/download-app
https://office365itpros.com/2022/09/19/teams-pwa-linux-clien...
It's easy to miss, because it was only posted to the Office365 Message Center, and not announced anywhere else. Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32678839
that was it, there's apparently no way to ever get it back unless I can remember its exact name (which I can't)
I learnt my lesson
It just feels like it wasn't built for serious scale from the ground up, like some after-thought Todo List app that was thrown in with Office 365 to tick a checkbox.
So much for the cross platform Microsoft.
I only use Teams on an iPhone or company-issued Windows laptop, and almost exclusively for calls within my organization. Maybe some of the issues crop up on Linux and/or reaching outside of your LAN/VPN?
I think a lot of Microsoft hate is clouding judgement here. People want Teams to suck.
Seems like that is something you should have stated in the first comment.
>>Linux/Chromebooks depending on the person in the team and this alone seems to be a major barrier
Something like les than 1% of the world uses Linux on the desktop. Dont get me wrong I love Linux, I used it as my primary desktop from 2005 until around 2012 when I went back to Windows (windows 10)
But calling problems on linux a "major issue" seems to over state the usage of Linux Desktop
further depending on when you tried it, and what client you were using that is likely the root cause
The Linux Desktop client always sucked, so much is no longer a thing, 100% a web app now. The web App teams should work just fine.
I'm sure that if you use the whole Windows enchilada that it may work, but given that Microsoft has shipped a Linux desktop client[1] I would expect that thing to simply work.
It doesn't. Besides wanting to run all the time even when you're not in a teams meeting. Video conferencing is all about seamless integration, it should get out of the way as much as possible and as soon as the tool becomes the focal point of the meeting in my book you've failed to deliver.
[1] https://petri.com/microsoft-replace-teams-linux-client-progr...
And they retired it, apparently because they agreed with my assessment or it isn't worth their trouble.
this is the entire Microsoft business model:
1. identify a competitor's product
2. clone it, but only spend enough engineering effort to make it sound plausible enough to tick the required boxes for evaluation by someone won't have to use it
3. bundle it with your other products (so no need to compete on quality)I'm sure Microsoft will get right on improving that
"DOS aint done 'til Lotus won't run"
Why does Teams occasionally load up with the usual icons showing the broken image icon? Why did my organization create a special “Fix Teams” utility?
As a result, Teams is on my computer, adds itself to the startup items, then opens up to a login window every time I turn on my computer. The X button does not work to close the window. I have to open Task Manager and kill it every time. I can disable it in startup items, but it puts itself back there, next time I join a Teams meeting.
Also, if I am using my computer in the closed position, it still chooses the integrated webcam and microphone every time, even sometimes switching to them randomly during a meeting.
Of course, I am running on an unusual setup that I'm sure Microsoft didn't think to test: I am running Microsoft Teams on Microsoft Windows 10 on a Microsoft Surface Pro computer.
Agreed. It's as bandwagon as I've seen anything else. FFS, I half expect to see M$ written about.
It works fine, have your meeting and get back to work. What is it that people are trying to do in Teams?
I happily use windows 10 for most personal computing (I haven't upgraded, so no comment on 11), VScode, github, word, excel, whatever...
Teams, though, is one MS product that genuinely never worked for me. Last company I was at used it, and they had to upgrade my work machine since teams needed more CPU (old machine was an i5 macbook with 8gb). Google/zoom was fine, but running teams would regularly overheat my computer.
But we have to have shared definitions for words or communications just breaks down
It can not be "your definition of broke is different from mine" if that is the case then language is just noise and we need to stop communicating
When I say it is broken I'm pretty serious about it: we spent a full day because there was one customer that positively insisted that we had to use their Teams setup rather than what we normally use and in the end we just gave up, it isn't worth the stress to me if there is a viable alternative (or even several). But of course if you think that I'm redefining the meaning of the word 'broken' just for the heck of it then you're free to continue to do so.
So you tried it once, as a guest and then banned the entire things with out understand the permissions systems or any other possible causes?
Understand that as a Admin I have the power to block Guests from Joining, Block some features from Guest, and so alot of things that is not commonly possible under other platforms. Often these security settings are aggressive by default, for example we had an issue with one client needing to connect to one of our teams room, teams and the room worked fine but because the security settings the Guest could not connect, everyone else could but the guest could not
This is not something that can be fixed by the guest, nor it is problem with teams as a technology, it is the security controls built into the platform
>Do you realize I'm the idiot that came up with live video in the browser to begin with?
and I am a guy that wrote PHP code in the 90's and love it... so....
That's not what I wrote. I wrote that because someone insisted we said, ok, fine let's invest a bunch of time and solve this and we could not.
Before then we had tried multiple times and even now every now and then we get a teams invitation but I just point blank refuse them. Enough time wasted.
Check TFA: this is a Microsoft subsidiary that needs to be forced to use the solution provided by the mothership. That push really wouldn't be necessary if the people at GitHub believed that Teams served their needs well.
Ok - that really surprised me and from anyone else I would’ve dismissed it as hyperbole… after some digging I ended up reading this incredible story —
https://jacquesmattheij.com/story-behind-wwcom-camaradescom/
Amazing adventure!
After they explained to you it was broken in their official client for their officially supported operating system, you moved the goal post to it's only broken in the client, try the web app instead:
> The Linux Desktop client always sucked, so much is no longer a thing, 100% a web app now. The web App teams should work just fine.
Just stop.
I agree with Jacques that all the pieces (except for high speed networking) were in place in the last century I expected this to develop more than it has.
Given the stuff that ML can do TODAY, it should totally be possible to give the "presenter" a view of the audience where you use a combination of the pre-computed model for people's faces, and a client doing pose estimation from the web cam. If I'm looking at the presentation on my screen, that information should allow the presenter's view to see me looking at them. If I'm looking away it could show me looking down or something. If I leave and go to the bathroom or something it could show my seat being empty. Similarly, raising a hand should present on the speakers screen as my raising my hand in the audience, calling on me with the mouse should unmute my microphone until the presenter moves the mouse/pointer off my face in the audience.
Early, EARLY, on in the Java group the idea had been worked on to provide a "visual environment" for doing things, and of course "Snowcrash" came out at the same time and everyone was doing their own "metaverse." I was looking at the problem and realized that to be successful we'd have to emulate some of the physics that keep us sane in group settings today. (like everyone can't hear everyone else talking in a room usually). David Rosenthal did a study for NIST, as I recall, on the network implications of something like the metaverse and concluded that it would take a terabit of network connectivity to "host" a live concert in the metaverse with the same "feel" as being there in person. (so everyone gets a view from their POV, voices travel 10 - 30' in a cone from the direction of the mouth, sound from the stage follows the acoustics of the modeled room etc. And then that analysis is followed by trimming things out to reduce bandwidth until you reach the "present day" bandwidth numbers and describing that reduced experience. He got back to Zoom like meetings with something like 1mbps/10gbps for the participant/network ratio.
So summarizing; Often people approach the problem without realizing the complexity of what they are trying to do, in part because meetups/communication in "real life" has so much of the complexity taken care of by physics and the fact that you learned what worked as a toddler before you could think so it just "is" in your brain. Stepping outside of that mindset requires deliberate effort. There are likely opportunities here that are not being exploited because of this mindset.