1) Have you ever been exposed to alternative communicators?
2) What features do you enjoy about teams
3) What platform are you using it from (Windows Desktop / Laptop? What spec)
4) Have you ever written a bot or integration?
5) Can you take me through a very brief working day for you, with a focus on collaborating with others.. (file sharing, online chats, IRL chats, meetings?)
1) WebEx and the open source chat that Oracle appropriated. Fortunately Zoom came and went too quickly.
2) Searching the Exchange corporate directory. BASIC features: status, embedding pictures, attaching files that Outlook would block. Sharing links that aren't obfuscated.
3) Can you even run Teams from Apple / Linux?
4) Ha! Imagine the nightmares for the person linking Atlassian and Teams.
5) Group texts, file shares, voice calls, recorded meetings. Meetings with groups from other companies is almost painless.
Ok, then I can see why Teams ranks among them. I would invite you to try something like Zulip or Mattermost but I think ignorance is bliss and you should avoid knowing about anything that could be better. Your mind might do this for you (rejection) but best not to tempt fate.
> 2) Searching the Exchange corporate directory. BASIC features: status, embedding pictures, attaching files that Outlook would block. Sharing links that aren't obfuscated.
Appreciate the list, the only one of these that's Teams specific is searching a corp directory. Do you use the "Teams" functionality, or do you use the chat exclusively?
> 3) Can you even run Teams from Apple / Linux?
Yes, it's very slow. It's also very slow from laptops, the best "Teams experience" I've ever seen has been in GameDev where we all ran Windows 7 on dodecacore CPUs with 128-256G of DDR4.
It was still slower than Slack on my macbook air though.
> 4) Ha! Imagine the nightmares for the person linking Atlassian and Teams.
Yeah, people do. People also use Excel from within Teams.
Writing bots for Teams is a special nightmare, but webhooks can work.
> 5) Group texts, file shares, voice calls, recorded meetings. Meetings with groups from other companies is almost painless.
Do you spend a lot of your day face-to-face or more of your day in Teams?
Do you find yourself arranging meetings to sync rather than using the chat functionality?
Do you find that people have to ask around a lot to get an answer and then ask again later when it's forgotten, or can they find their answer in history?
Guess this means I wont' get to run Teams in the company I'm joining, which is doing all its security attestation via Microsoft;
Yet more vendor lock-in.
I also notice it works way better in firefox if you set the user agent to Edge on windows. Some features which are broken in firefox suddenly work totally fine. Which reinforces my belief that they are simply doing this to bully people into using Edge.
My preference is text chat but we do a lot of unscheduled voice chats when screen-sharing is involved. In-person meetings are nice when possible, it's been easy enough to connect a Teams meeting from a conference room phone.
Before Teams I set up a Mattermost instance, and I think RocketChat integrated to GitLab? Nobody used those. As we all know the value in these things comes from network effects; with Teams corporate IT can set Teams as a startup app by Domain policy, now everyone in your company has to be online. That's the real killer feature.
To me, what I really don't like is that you can present the files and wiki via network file share, but the format of the wiki is read-only in that mode... it would be significantly better as user editable markdown with front-matter. It's some strange quasi-html extensions that you aren't going to be able to really even use.
I don't like that they separated the chat channels out... you now have unread, channels, chats, meeting chats... going between them is now a mess as I'm usually in a combination of meeting chats and 1:1 chats mostly.
While I do appreciate the integration of outlook's calendar, I really don't want meeting notifications for anything more than a couple days out... it can wait until I check my mail.
The real time video chat is okay... I think Zoom and Slack both have lightly better video quality and features though. I don't like Zoom's chat/discussion features nearly as much... I like Slack overall slightly better, but don't think some of the externalized integrations are as good as Teams.
Overall, it's "okay"... I don't love it as I think it's gotten worse over time while Slack is getting better, slowly. I'm not vocal enough to raise hell one way or another for/against it. I've used it on Linux without much issue... so it works well enough.
Unfortunately. Teams is just as performant on MacOS/iOS as it is on Windows.
That's how I run it.
I've used both Teams and Zoom (and others). Honestly, I'd rather use Zoom instead of Teams.
> BASIC features: status, embedding pictures, attaching files that Outlook would block. Sharing links that aren't obfuscated.
Status is settable by just about any competitor to Teams. Slack and Zoom both can set your current status.
Embedding pictures and files is also not unique to Teams.
Obfuscated links? Just a matter of time before Microsoft changes that to some microsoft link for a "vulnerability scanner" and then charges the company for the privilege to block random things it doesn't understand how to scan.
> Can you even run Teams from Apple / Linux?
Yes / technically yes (not supported any more)
> Group texts, file shares, voice calls, recorded meetings. Meetings with groups from other companies is almost painless.
Slack and Zoom are better at all of these.
Last time I checked Zoom was a pig on resources and required a weird background worker- and you couldn't even send files.
I can tell you I've successfully been in Teams video conferences from my Linux desktop, in the browser. I was surprised too.
We already have to bite the bullet and pay for office, at least we get free chat
I wish Teams integrated better with Github Issues/PR, but it works well as a company-wide chat
Poor mac users.
To be fair, zoom is somewhat slow too. Not to start up, but joining a meeting is like 5-10 second delay. Lord help you if you turn on your webcam.
I've been an msft employee for a couple of years and teams... Was ok. I prefer slack, but meetings, video, messaging, formatting, etc. was just fine in teams.
It's control-space. It is global on Windows as far as I know. Unfortunately you can't change it because I would love to have a single key I don't normally use assigned to it. I use a Mac keyboard with 19 function keys so there's plenty that I would never touch.
I agree with all the other criticism by the way, it's a messy slow clusterf*k.
And it would be a problem if it was, as ctrl shift is the default binding for show suggestions in IntelliJ and Rider.
All of the following you've already mentioned but I forgot you mentioning them in my rage at MS. Figuring out if I'm holding it wrong or not revealed another silly issue however: the push to talk button is hard coded to ctrl space, unlike other keybinds it doesn't show up in the keybinds dialog.
Seriously, it's outlook levels of broken. Markdown doesn't work, I don't know what markdown engine they use but it's certainly not compliant to any sort of standard. Copying whitespace is just unbelievably fucked, your code becomes unreadable.
Which would be fine... If we could bulk indent. But do you know what highlight + tab does? Not indent, no, it selects the send button.
Teams, fuck you.
well I have news for you ;=)
I pity the people who have to deliver news like that from time to time.
Teams, that application IT is forcing me to use because they are a "Microsoft" house. Same application currently stating I'm on the _Calendar_ screen on the Task bar but actually in the _Chat_ screen; _Calendar_ bloatware feature and others have been removed and will always. Even when _Microsoft_ screws the user and force a reinstall of features after a Teams update.
Microsoft is a trillion dollar company that rejects quality user experience, QA, and is great at producing crap-ware. There is not a single product sell that I will spend a penny on. Still waiting on that 7+ year request to destroy | delete dangling pull request in Azure.
This is the kind of thing that gets tech people a bad reputation. YOU don't need Excel. I don't need excel - but that guy? You have no idea what he needs and if the people he's supporting need (or just want) Excel to get their jobs done it is incredibly arrogant to tell him what he does or doesn't need.
Now, I've loathed Microsoft since the 90s, but that makes me a weird and special little petal - it doesn't count for squat in business.
Excel is a great definition of _Law of small numbers_ when it comes to praising Microsoft. Major of all Microsoft solutions are not great and there are better alternatives. Even the most popular ones where not created by Microsoft and bought.
Microsoft does not have any user experience standards. This was ingrained with Bill Gates making CTRL+F _Forward Email_ in Outlook versus a constant of _Find Text_. Number one complaint I see from Microsoft employees in their feature tickets is lack of _muscle memory_ designs. Their file listing algorithms still think 109 < 74 where quality file listing should show 109 after 74, not before.
Microsoft produce products _You have to pay me to use_. I have not bought a Microsoft product in years and never will with my personal income. This doesn't not mean I don't know how to use their junk-ware -- that is more tools in the tool box. It is the mentality that once you know one spread sheet software you don't need any other. Once you know how to use Microsoft tool X, you don't need to know how to use tool Y, even when tool Y is a better fit for the solution.
Then again most people like to short their brain and only know the tools they were taught or used in school.
You literally wrote "You don't need Excel."