What is the specific complaint against it? Better yet can you come up with tools that you use instead of Teams? Is it xoom? Slack? Discord? MS is not my favorite company but my MS Teams experience has been relatively smooth.
The software is confusing, and at least, in my experience, doesn't have a consistent user experience or do a good job of guiding the user in how to use it.
The way it is used varies significantly between the four main user accounts I interact with (son's secondary school account, daughters primary school account, one non-profit I work with, one business that I work with).
As an alternative, I frequently find myself using Google Drive for document collaboration and sharing, and use Zoom or virtually any other video conferencing software.
Don't get me wrong, I would like it to be better, but I have also had the luxury of spending at least two extended afternoons speaking with product/program managers involved in it during a social event, and they seemed pretty ambivalent to my feedback. It's not a tool designed for users of the software, it's designed for organizational owners to mandate specific policies or behaviours, and for business owners that's fine. I just happened to have spent too much of my career working on empowering and improving user-focused and user-centric tools to care about using those bad tools unless I absolutely have to.
> I regularly am confused by what I am meant to do, or how to resolve errors that occur;
Just to provide two examples of specific complaints from the parent post.
- ms teams on my windows laptop turns it into a raging heater. While i dont even have my webcam on.
- ms teams is so multi-functional you can do anything with it. Office suite, create polls (that are very laggy). It is so bloated there’s clearly no straightforward UX flows. Buttons all over the place. Desktop UI feels terribly slow.
- typing in chat boxes is laggy as hell.
I’m not alone. My colleagues experience similar issues as me.
It’s so strange that so many people can have completely different experiences with the same software.
Why does it need to have excel implemented into it? Why is the search function still there if it literally doesn't do searching. Why does it take 20 seconds to open a PDF?
Many more issues and questions stand out if you've previously used a platform where none of those are issues.
Maybe it's a team size thing, and Teams just blows monkey chunks when you're one of fifty thousand employees at a company?
I’m baffled as to how so many people here on HN have such horror stories with Teams, while I’ve not experienced nor heard of anything remotely so bad at the companies I’ve worked.
With teams , back when I used it, you could search no problem. What you couldn’t do is go back to a conversation and get the context. I’m not sure how on earth you ship a search feature without the ability to go back to that message In a chat application.
But there are other issues, too. In meetings (about 12 people at a time), the video gets terrible. People randomly getting kicked out of the meetings are a fairly common experience. At least 3 days a week, people have problems joining the meeting.
We tend to budget the first ten minutes of every meeting as disposable time, so that whatever the problem of the day with Teams is can be worked out enough that we can finally get everyone in the meeting.