> It’s available right where employees already spend most of their day — in Microsoft Teams.
Depression and dread is coming through me. All the repressed memories are flowing back up.
Depression and dread is coming through me. All the repressed memories are flowing back up.
Doesn't mean it won't sell, congrats to OP, but god I hate everything about Teams.
Right now it's showing me calendar items with times that are wrong, they'll switch to the right time in a few minutes... probably. I didn't change time zones, I didn't do anything, it's just something wonky about their new calendar setup. If the time updates I'll click to open the calendar item, and it won't show me the join link to join the meeting ... well eventually it will pop in there, maybe.
It's not just annoyingly designed and slow, it's constantly buggy with new and exciting bugs every few months.
Isn't getting this right, like, _the_ purpose of a calendar?
I can't share photos in a channel w/ a customer. Why? No idea. There's no feedback at all. Drag and drop simply fails. Uploads won't go. I went through support and there's 5 different places in the admin to check. All of them seem fine.
It's amazing as outlook used to be consistent, but now that its calendar is tied to teams too... it has inherited the suck.
Video conferencing for me Teams isn't the issue as much as it is a compromise when it comes to everything else.
Do you have a laundry list?
I think that causes some of the issues you are mentioning.
Now I don’t personally see any communication app like slack that is any better than it. They all sort of suck but I feel like I had a better time with IRC apps back in the day than I do with modern communication apps.
These are...identical apps. That's the point of packaging with electron.
And then there’s the “helpful” way teams resets the calendar view: let’s say I’m going back through calls from last week to see how long they took. In Teams, I go back a week, click the calendar item, record the time in my app, then go back to the calendar view and…I’m on this week. Neat. Intuitive.
Are they on a VPN to another time zone?
And we're not talking edge cases, just "It's been solved since the 60s" meat and potato use cases.
it's because they hired "frontend" developers to develop these features, likely someone with little actual compsci experience, and have little to no room to make the feature and under a tight deadline.
Tell me more about "frontend" developers please.
I contacted support two weeks ago. So far they have asked me to check the Teams admin recycle bin (3 days) and then the SharePoint recycle bin (7 day). I had shared screenshots of both of these in the initial support request, both are empty.
Only 3 people have admin rights in the company, one of us deleted the channels, and even if we did there's supposed to be a 93 day recovery window. But they're just....gone.
I asked for them to escalate 3 days ago. No reply.
Heterogeneous computing environments provide diversity to isolate and contain failures. So when email goes down, we can still chat and meet.
And to be fair, you can just tell Teams to open in the desktop office apps by default (settings > Files and Links), and Outlook has a little radio button to turn off whether meetings are also Teams meetings. All the enterprise productivity apps seem to accumulate complexity and resultant scar tissue, usually in the form of busy settings or painfully opinionated defaults - painful when the defaults don't optimize for your use case.
A lot of open source projects insist on using Telegram or Matrix instead of an issue tracker or forum and have the same problem. If you want to spend 90% of your time answering the same questions again and again, be my guest, but as a user I won't do more than a cursory search of chat history, and won't try to follow intermingled replies anymore. I will simply ask again and explicitly say "the chat history on this can't be followed and there's no forum, so...".
Professionally I also won't try to keep up with most chats. Someone mentions me on something and if I can't read their one message to get the context needed, I just reply with "I'm not readinf everything said in the last X days. What's the context?" and make them re-explain it.
My company even recently added AI assist tools for our chats, and I occasionally will use it to summarize everything I haven't read just to see if there's any topics I should know about. But I won't use it to try and get context for a question I've been asked.
The chat systems are basically like being in a physical room with everyone coming and going and having their own verbal conversations around you. I'll pay equally as much attention and effort ignoring it to get work done, and ask people to repeat things if they suddenly pull me into a conversation. I'll also drift out of conversations the same, but now they can't see me going back to work to take the hint its time to wrap it up.
Once you do, you will realize the DB grows REALLY fast
Features it had 6 years ago that I desperately missed when we had to start using Teams are pretty much all gone now. Its such a slap in the face of how Enshittified it's become.
Could you point out what has changed? I guess calls are called "huddles" now for some reason, that's a bit weird but doesn't really bother me.
I now have to constantly manually check in a special tab to see if someone ACKed my message.
They're fixing that by replacing Outlook with "New Outlook" which is a terrible half-clone of its predecessor.
For me, it's basically exactly the same except the sidebar is now wider because of the multi-slack thing, and the home/DMs/activity nonsense bar, which I could do without.
Otherwise it's just channels with messages in them. Which has improved since I started using it, when there were no threads or reactjis.
The bad thing: it all moves to private messages
What was the reasonable thing that they should have done?
The there's the whole mess when using multiple a mobile and desktop app. It often happens that I get slack message notifications from my phone in my pocket while the open desktop app sometimes takes another minute to get the same message. The same happens with huddles, why does my phone ring abut not my desktop app? And one of my colleagues even has the problem that when he picks up a call on the desktop it opens up on his phone.
I agree that teams is a mess, but IMO mainly because of the mess that is calendering... around it. The calls and messaging parts are OK. In contrast slack can't even get it's core competency right.
A business owner might conclude 'ah, less time jawing, more time working', but hardly the case. In fact, I think that was a big factor in what ultimately killed the company off a couple years later - through both people literally quitting over it, and a complete breakdown in communication.
The other competitor to Slack is Discord, and if you remove the playful "gamer" elements I think it'd be a lot less jarring to people used to Slack, because they follow a lot of similar UX and design patterns.
At one point Discord tried to rebrand into something a bit more serious but it didn't work, but I think they should try again; create a Discord Pro or something like that, get the certifications, add SSO support, etc.
These moves are always penny wise and pound foolish if you ask me.
None of that mentions the terrible UX(why do emojis take 10s to load?). When your company is remote first, it's a complete disaster.
I only have to use teams as a contractor thankfully for a single client. Not a single meeting I’ve had in two years of using it has been free of someone having some kind of issue specific to teams itself, including me.
Source: I run a SAAS where we have to unfortunately support integrating with MS Teams (for training etc).
Jira on ghe other hand.....
Features that worked in mIRC in the 1990s are broken, like sending messages. Right this second if I click to reply to someone's message, I can't add a message in Japanese unless I copy-paste it in. This happens every few months. I can't tag people who have non-English names reliably.
It crashes my browser. There are weird security settings, and when you have multiple environments, it is completely unusable without having multiple browsers. Sometimes you can't log in without clearing your cache completely.
It is sheerly anti-organic, adding features no one wants.
I'm literally taking time out of my vacation to complain about it, fml.
I would also not that I've never been a huge power user or rely heavily on it for anything really outside of calendar or channel conversations so for me, on a basic level it works.
You can truly create some workflow nightmares and there's nothing in the app to discourage it apart from org culture.
That can be said about any tool/platform that gives near complete control to the user.
As far as a tool, it's perfectly fine. A lot of my bad feelings came as a result of wanting it to be simple ("What should I work on next") but it being twisted into a series of incantations and rituals by those looking to bend it for the purposes of more and more intricate views into how we spend every moment of our day.
The whole channel experience is horrible and really degrades any attempt at having open communications in a company.
However, if you are a "flat" company that does everything in the open, Teams is going to work against you; this is one of the qualities that makes Slack great. Its whole approach pushes more things out into the open for more collaboration.
Teams is a different beast
Disrupting the space now doesn't seem any less hard now than it was 10 years ago when slack and zoom did it.
But yes, if your point is that it's hard, then indeed. It is hard. Should that stop someone? No!
And something being harder stopping your from doing it is ubiquitous in life. It's a good skill to know how much effort something will take and weighing the risks and rewards.
What is it about enterprise IT that is preventing us from building a better alternative?
How can we get around those hurdles?
The hurdle is producing a full suite covering everything Microsoft sells in one package, which seems impractical without their funding to start with.
Enterprise chat might not be a commodity quite yet - SSO, DLP/data classification, auditing, retention, compliance checkboxes - but these seem insurmountable at first glance to get a FOSS solution to reach a viable enterprise feature matrix.
Killer features as a moat might help, but while almost everyone uses chat, everyone probably uses chat differently, so that means discovering killer features for a niche and trying to own that segment before expanding. Unfortunately this is the "Draw the rest of the owl" part, because while I have quibbles with chat apps, I struggle to envision a chat app that does something radically different than any other chat app.
Your comment is just fake empathy noise.
There are already open source alternatives built for both Teams and Zoom. The issue is that open source projects don’t have salespeople that will promise compliance and integration (whether or not they can actually deliver).
Hard disagree on the "only" modifier. Surely integration helped, but I've used Zoom, and I hate it every time I have to use it. Teams is comparatively a godsend.
It basically works the same as every competitor, I'm not really sure why you'd need to do things 'any other way'.
Granted plenty of office drones can't imagine / use much else at this point.
Teams is not popular because it does something that no other app does. It is popular (IMO) because it does everything (calendar, chat, videoconference, and wiki - all of it badly) and, if you're a Windows user, you're paying for it one way or another.
All that Microsoft had to do during the pandemic (which is when they unleashed Teams) was to approach a higher-up and pitch "why would you pay for Slack and Zoom when our product does the same? And since it's already included in your Office license you're already paying for it, so really, you're throwing money away". I know me and my friends complained about it, but so what? The company saved on licensing costs and IT people are always complaining anyway. And while the bundling of Teams got Microsoft in trouble in the EU [1] they still haven't paid any fines for it (I think) so it's hard to argue that they shouldn't have done that.
</rant>
[1] https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-teams-eu-european-union...
Oracle have a dark team working on what will become "Oracle Team Fusion".
I'm looking forward to the competition.
In what?
- operating systems? The Mac has over a 20% market share in the US. I haven’t used a Windows PC for work since 2017. I’ve used Macs across 4 companies
- Office Suites? GSuite has a higher market share and the company I work for now uses it.
- Chat? Slack has 25%.
Absolutely no one in the industry is afraid of Microsoft anymore
Just a quick internet search shows that PowerBI has around a 25% market share.
I worked for a client once that refused to let us build and manage databases for things that needed it. The one option in the end that we could get approved was using Microsoft SharePoint lists and CRUD'ing to them through the Javascript API.
A lot of problems have lame constraints, but having an option at all to solve them is pretty nice.