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Comment by jen20 | Hacker News Reader

On that basis, Microsoft are also hampered by a lackluster chat client - Teams is atrocious. Slack is pretty much the only game in town that isn't bad (and even that needs native clients, because the UI is poor and not system-integrated).

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I think I have this discussion on HN everytime Teams comes up but it really is a great piece of software for a typical office worker. File sharing is incredible. You get a SharePoint and collaborative editing in a seamless way. Video conf is great and work great with Teams compatible room booking system and room video material. The chat part barely matters. People don't use Teams to chat. It's a collaboration hub. That's what Google is missing actually.

Slack is very much developers software in comparison.

File sharing using Scarepoint is incredible. Incredible bad, that is. Everything is stored in mssql server behind the scenes, in the most inefficient way you could imagine. Scarepoint is the opposite of seamless, number of wasted man-years on it must certainly be in the millions, if not billions. Its ”wiki” sucks. It’s bad software that not even ms themselves want to touch, that’s why many of their other server softwares have migrated away from using it.

Are you thinking of the AllUserData table? :) Yeah, it appears pretty abhorrent if you’re coming from a DBA background.

Meanwhile, last time I had a video call in Teams, when I went into the call settings to change my microphone, my computer slowed to a crawl and became inoperable until the person who called me ended it. We eventually settled on a phone call. When I try to share a file over a certain arbitrary size limit, Teams refuses to do so, indicating some undesired and complicated permissions interaction with Teams and SharePoint.

Anyone who thinks Teams is great because of SharePoint is living in an entirely different universe to the one I’m in.

It's not though. There are seams everywhere - between Sharepoint, Teams, OneDrive and so forth. It's the worst possible approach. Fortunately the company I work at switched to Slack the day I started (co-incidentally), so I've been able to compare and contrast the two live. Slack wins for every single use case _except_ video and audio (where Zoom or Webex are the only games in town), hands down.

That's on top of the fact that the Teams client is an absolute pig, and is incapable of remembering basic things like "which of the two cameras do I want to use" and "which audio output is appropriate".

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