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Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

I'v read this thread and there are soo many rants on teams.

What specifically are teh workflow issues people have with teams?

My experience is that someone books an online meeting, i get a teams link. When the meeting comes I click the link, everyeone's face shows up, we have the meeting and then close teams.

I've never had any issue with teams, not even once.

What are the issues people have with teams because there are a lot of rants about teams but no specific issues are mentioned.

As a meeting tool its perfect, its there, just works and then goes away.

Are the rants directed to it as a chat app? or a company wide messaging app?

Because I use teams4-5 times a week and cant' think of a single time its failed me or crashed or slowed down during a meeting.

its the definition of a tool that just works and then goes away until I need it again.

What is making everyone so angry at the tool?

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> What specifically are teh workflow issues people have with teams?

The "channels" and accompanying wiki/file store is simply sharepoint with a different web-ui -- and it inherits all the problems of original sharepoint, i.e., it is where documents go to die.

It fails miserably to recognize when the system is "locked" and to "STFU" with its bleeps/blurbs/rings for new IM's/phone calls/whatever else it decides to be noisy about. Locked system means "not at work" which should mean "no noises from you, ever".

If you first initiate a screen share with someone, you can not add in a voice call (thereby making the screen share rather less than useful in most instances). Yet, if you begin a voice call first, you can then add in a screen share and keep the voice call going.

It is an "electron" app, so it is the single biggest resource hog (second only to Win11 itself) on the system. It even manages to out-hog Google Chrome by about 50% or better, which given Chrome's legendary hogginess is a testament to MS's ability to produce bloated software.

Just about the only thing it does get right is holding meetings. Click the link, meeting widow opens, hold meeting, click "leave" when done.

> "It is an "electron" app"

No, it isn't. It moved away from electron to WebView2 for better performance: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/...

It's still horrible slow.

Performance is no longer it's main issue. There are serious bugs that show up randomly for example sometimes you send 4 messages in a row and they arrive in reverse order. Imagine trying to explain something to someone and this happens in the middle of the chat, without you realising.

This true. There are so many bugs with it, it's almost like the people prioritising bugs and features either don't actually have to use it, or aren't promoted based upon delivering a produce that isn't complete shit but instead by tying to another completely unrelated Microsoft product that no one who uses it wants.

Performance is still abysmal.

> Locked system means "not at work" which should mean "no noises from you, ever".

Many companies auto-lock desktops after a few minutes of inactivity. If I go to chat to someone away from my desk, I definitely want Teams to make noises if somebody is phoning me - especially since I no longer have a desk phone.

I want to join a meeting.

I open Teams. First, Teams opens two windows. Why?

Afterwards, Teams finds my audio devices. This works sporadically.

I join the meeting. The audio input device I chose isn't sending audio for some reason. Need to close Teams completely and join again.

I am finally in the meeting.

If I join from my iOS mobile, chances are good that I'll be able to join, but exiting and re-entering the app will put me back on the login screen. While I can get back into the meeting by typing anything into the Name text box, it's still bad UX.

Then there's screen sharing. When it works, there's no guarantee that it will keep working for the entire meeting. Especially on mobile. It will die for no reason.

Zoom has none of these problems.

But Zoom is expensive because Teams comes with Office 365 for free. Just like Google Chat and Meet (two other not-so-great collaboration tools) come with Workspace.

> What specifically are teh workflow issues people have with teams?

Quoting myself regarding workflow: Two problems with information are duplication (too many copies around, all of them slightly different) and finding where it is. MS Teams makes it easy to store duplicate data and hard to find it later: did you upload the data as a file in the "development" channel, or as a link in the "updates" wiki? Nobody knows, not even the search function. And with each new project manager creating five channels per project, only two of which will actually see any activity...

> When the meeting comes I click the link, everyeone's face shows up, we have the meeting and then close teams.

When I get a Teams link I first try to open the web interface - there used to be a native Linux client, but it has been discontinued. That interface has consistently failed me for at least two years - it enters an infinite loop where I can join a meeting but get kicked out immediately with no explanation in Firefox, Chromium and Chrome. Nowadays I can only join from my phone.

> cant' think of a single time its failed me or crashed or slowed down during a meeting.

When MS imposed Teams on us during the pandemic I had to request a new laptop because the one I had could not keep up - it was fine for PyCharm which is not precisely lightweight, but Teams was just too much. Whenever I had a meeting I had to close all other programs. And do you know what what was in short supply during the pandemic? Toilet paper. But also laptops. So I spent several months dreading every single meeting until I could replace my perfectly-good machine with a newer model.

I have so many issues with Teams that it's not even funny anymore.

Sounds like you don't use teams.

You get invited to meetings by those that do.

:) Is that not using teams?

Actually using teams, to the point where you can truly experience the suck, involves having it running 8 hours a day, using it for private messaging, group chats and organizing calls/meetings.

I believe the rants are directed at its crappy performance as yet another bloated web app masquerading as a native program.

Try opening teams.microsoft.com in Edge and compare the memory usage with the app. On my system the website uses double the RAM.

Oof, you chose the wrong place to ask that question ;) Or maybe the right place.

I won't pile on to the endless list of examples you asked for, but I'd like to say that this statement:

> My experience is that someone books an online meeting, i get a teams link. When the meeting comes I click the link, everyeone's face shows up, we have the meeting and then close teams.

made me sceptical of your motives here. This has never been the case for me, or anyone I know. The first thing we do now when we get an external MS Teams meeting link is request an alternative like Google Meet.

Sysadmin here.

Teams audio / video calls are really good.

Chat is full of intermittent bugs that makes you question your own sanity.

One would have thought chat would be the easy thing to get right. My experience matches yours, meetings are solid.

This morning, it acted connected and showed me as away for hours. Eventually I noticed because an error message appeared asking me to log in. Like WTF, yeah log in bitch, that's what you are supposed to do. I clicked the login button and it connected again (??). Then I had to manually set myself as available.

Things were going so well...

For me personally, it's death by a thousand cuts. It works fine, when it works, but the number of small annoyances & quirks is very high. I personally don't hate Teams, but I wouldn't call it a joy to use or anything.

I personally love teams. I don't particularly like my job, and Teams is so buggy that I can blame it for all the miscommunication.

Example: I've not responded to a message. Is it because I was away for 2 hours, or is because Teams shat the bed again? You'll never know!

It also makes my severely limited, monitored and controlled work laptop even more sluggish to the point that it takes a whole minute to simply start a shell, and 10 seconds to run any command on it (before the command actually runs). When coding, any keystroke takes a second to register. Is my productivity shit because I hate my job, or because my laptop is a dumpster fire in large part because of Teams? You'll never know!

How do you start an online meeting in Teams? I can’t figure it out. I’m using the iPad app. There is no button or link for starting a meeting. With Zoom I have a static url and just send it to people.

I would use Teams for my classes but the interface is so bizarre and user hostile. What the hell is a walkie talkie for if there is a chat feature? Why is there a calls button and a walkie talkie and chat? I don’t get the user interface. I think Teams is a terrible piece of software.

I have no clue but I guess the walkie talkie is a symbol for those voice messages you can do in chat that exactly no one use?

I think Teams is the best “all ‘round” for chat and video and screen sharing.

Slack is best in class for chat though.

Teams chat sucks in a few ways:

* Posts? Why can’t messages be more lightweight.

* No custom emojis like party parrot.

* Total crapshoot whether it converts my three backticks into a code block.

* Please fuck off with trying to offer me apps every time I paste a link.

> * Posts? Why can’t messages be more lightweight.

The alternative is group DMs but those come with many issues as well:

* They tend to proliferate every time you need to chat with a slightly different group of people;

* No support for threads whatsoever;

* Why is it in a completely separate place from "teams"?

> * No custom emojis like party parrot.

Custom emojis and gif search integration. I know Teams has the latter but it's clunky.

> * Total crapshoot whether it converts my three backticks into a code block.

Agree. Formatting a message in Teams is like playing the lottery. You have a chance of winning but really in all likelihood you will lose.

Slack's WYSIWYG editor is pretty bad as well, but: it's much, much better than Teams's; and I can disable it altogether.

In the privacy settings "Optional connected experiences" will turn off the app previews (and web previews).

I was very excited to turn this off, but it turns out it's already off.

Umm... Where to start?

It randomly won't connect to meetings on the PC. Calls drop regularly. Screen sharing sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. If I have joined on the phone so I can get audio working, it's a total crap shoot whether I can also open it using the PC client to see anything someone else is sharing. About half the time I have to join using the browser rather than the actual client. Nobody uses the actual team groups, the notifications of new messages appear in the activity section along with loads of other irrelevant things. It constantly pops up a window telling me I'm muted and when you close it, it pops up abother one. I could go on...

I think the poor performance (memory bloat) on Macs is probably the reason. Very loud complaints from a tiny segment (for Microsoft). The other is Slack users who think searching past content is way better. In my experience, and I'm on Windows, Teams is rock solid never had any issue, Slack went to shit after SF bought it so all these complaints feel a bit exaggerated.

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