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Comment by simfree | Hacker News Reader

Teams is shovelware. Force bundled, with questionably reliable messaging, okay video calling (if your organization policies don't break it), and a fairly useless Phone System component that misbehaves often.

Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought that has rough edges and inconsistent reliability.

The recent changes to end webhook support, kill Linux desktop support and do yet another rewrite are inane. Don't expect features you use today in Teams to work in 2 years...

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My org went all in on Teams over 6 years ago. Removed all PBX systems and desk phones. Pulled out Cisco phones from 20 offices. Ported all numbers to MS. By all accounts it was unremarkable to the end users, and when WFH mandates started it was seamless. Definitely a lot less IT support for configuring and troubleshooting a phone system too. There is far less downtime because Teams will ring through to your cell phone if the office internet is down or your laptop is off. That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions

> That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions

You could do it with other software hosted outside the office though. There are definitely options here.

yeah, thats why people just use Teams

It was, in fact, even with existing Microsoft products (Lync/Skype for Business). It was even possible if you had paid for those features for UCM from Cisco. Teams was simply the cheaper option (although they tried to keep charging my org Lync prices, and we had to threaten to uproot MS products and go to Cisco before they gave us the new pricing).

Maybe in 2020. Teams is the defacto IM app for enterprise now. It may not be to your liking, but most workplaces don't need apps to constantly be adding new features. They need videoconferencing, chat, meeting recording and AI transcription and note-taking. All synced with everyone's Outlook calendars and authenticated by the same SSO used org-wide. Teams has had all of those for years.

> Teams is the defacto IM app for enterprise now.

Slack has more mindshare

For the 1000+ headcount companies who sit outside the Silicon Valley webdev/software dev world, it doesn't. Silicon Valley looks at these as "products". Purchasing managers see these as "commodities" that need to be interoperable with the rest of their stack first.

Only because they use Office and Teams is bundled, everyone using it that's heard of Slack wants to be using Slack instead.

Honestly prefer teams over slack. Slack is good at text threads, while I'd still choose Teams for calls and meetings.

That's fair, in my last org we used Teams for meetings despite Slack for general chat etc.

Partly I'd say that's due to MS giving it subpar experience in O365 calendar/mail/outlook - you can't join a call directly, best you can really do is link to the channel as location.

They're ending webhooks? Bummer. By the looks of it, they're going to introduce a more complex alternative. No, two, because why not. Why make something work when you can also make two things that work half, right?

> Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought

Yeah great for in person and email companies.

Direct webhooks have been removed but you can still use webhooks to send messages to Teams using PowerAutomate.

It's messier to set and maintain but it works as intended and also you can add more things to the workflow.

If you just want a URL to send json to, the new way is awful. But if you want to have more control, now you can.

Sometimes I like the PowerAutomate way, sometimes I hate it...

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