1. The worst brand management this side of 1984. "Skype for Business" has nothing to do with Skype and the .exe is still called "lync.exe"
2. SDK: Trying to use the C# SDK for even simple tasks leaves your app deadlocking or spinning 100% CPU in threads you didn't create or throwing native exceptions that doesn't make any sense as they are referencing raw hex 0x12345678 pointers or COM objects you never even touched. And if you try to watchdog all that have fun with 5 orphaned lync.exe's claiming your USB audio/video device.
SharePoint's virtual path for its SOAP services is "_vti_bin". VTI = Vermeer Technologies Incorporated, the makers of FrontPage and the FrontPage Server Extensions.
Then there was Groove (brought in Ray Ozzie's luggage) that was renamed SharePoint Workspace (groove.exe).
SharePoint Designer (which didn't actually have a visual designer in the 2013, and final, release) crashes when performing some operations in source files ... With an exception in the FPEDITAX.DLL (FrontPage Editor ActiveX).
Those can all almost be forgiven - they are like vestigial organs after each product evolved into something else.
Until you get to OneDrive. smh
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/2ex10y/onedrive_f...
If it wasn't such a huge PITA to find a compatible SIP library, or write one from scratch, I'd have dumped it long ago. Sadly, I've had to do enough with it that I'm probably an "expert" at it now...
I think this explains a lot of poorly designed but complex enterprise software (e.g. MS). People eventually learn to deal -> poor design becomes less of a pain point -> less incentive to fix issues.
Slack? I use it, but I don't see the attraction. It's just another chat client with a couple of cute features. I'm really not clear on why the world seems so enamored with something that's really not much of an improvement on something we had in 1995.
Saying that Slack is "just another chat client" is sort of like all the old arguments about how much more powerful PCs were than Macs because they have more features—it's ignoring the value of design and conceptual elegance, and the real impact that has on UX and productivity.
... is that not the hallmark of a great product?
The fact that you could log irc transcripts, index them, give them a web interface, and write bots to chain things together is not the same feature as Slack integrations. If that is your bar for a feature, then we might as well give up trying to write innovative software, because it all uses the same opcodes anyway.
> I'm not saying Slack is bad, just that it's nothing impressive or innovative.
The attitude that a new product is not innovative because its features resemble features from past products leads to no logical conclusion except that nothing is innovative. Everything is based on previous ideas.
If a product were merely the sum of its features, then Apple would not be alive today.
I'll have a look though thanks!
This was on Windows 7.
The problem seems to have been solved when we upgraded to Skype for Business a few months ago. There were a lot of other weird nonsensical bugs like this too, but that one was the one that caused me the most grief. Lync was been by far the worst piece of chat software I've ever used.
Even basic stuff like keeping track of when you're actually in front of your computer or idle doesn't work properly in Lync. I'll be typing away for hours and it thinks I'm "Idle: 2 hours" to other people in my contact list.
Then there's the whole, "You can't add this person to your contacts because they have been added to too many other people's contact list" problem. W T F ? How is that even possible in this day and age? Sigh.
Subscriber limits are also a joke. Although I'd be happy to be able to add contacts to my list, or even at times, see the people that are already there. Turning off the integration with Outlook (because it does awful things, like locking your .pst/.ost files so you can't open Outlook and Lync at the same time...) seems to screw up all the contact list related stuff.
At the moment, Slack and Skype for Business have different feature sets. Skype for Business is geared towards voice and video conferencing, as you say. But now Slack is moving into Skype territory with video-conferencing services. Given their ability to deliver high-quality clients for multiple operating systems, they stand to make Lync (oops, Skype for Business) obsolete.
Lync 2013 was even worse! The message window was laggy in typing words out of the box and every UI animation was choppy. This was on a really beefy Dell (I forgot the specs). I was stuck in this awkward position where I had to defend the implementation even though (a) many people hated it (myself included), and (b) I actually used Pidgin because it was so much lighter (even if user discovery and lookup wasn't as great).
Fuck Lync. I love Slack. I can see why Microsoft attempted to acquire them, and I am super glad that they didn't.
Why did you have to defend something you hated? Where I work if something doesnt have an advocate, it stops being a product offering.
Nope.
1. http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/2/11147778/slack-voice-callin...
What I don't like with Lync 1. Screen sharing sucks. Its slow. Is it possible for them to use a technology similar to FreeNX? 2. Does not support multiple-client notification. I use multiple desktop and when you are logged on multiple Lync clients, messages will only go to a single client! 3. OSX client always crashes
What I don't like with Slack 1. Cool UX but sometimes the UI hangs and shows only a white, blank space
It may be relevant that I often work on remote teams. I can't just say aloud, "Hey, anybody know about foo?" In a Lync world I have to individually message one person at a time and await their response or open a chat with everyone which will go away almost immediately after the question is asked. And generally once people have said their no they close the window, the helpful response will not be viewed by most of the team.
Also, OSX doesn't let you tag packets, so we have to do it at the network layer.
MS is promising us Skype for Business on Mac will be great. We'll see.
Brilliant.
This. This exactly. Is it really unbelievable to assume Microsoft wouldn't attempt to build their own IRC+ clone and save a few billion while they are at it?
I do agree with you, Slack is much better than Skype, but I would add that Lync is just as good. I went from Lync to Slack (after changing jobs) and I would say that Lync not only works just as well but has more features a team would find useful. For instance, multi-user video+voice chat w/ great screensharing/presentation functionality.
Edit: Should mention I was using Lync in a Windows shop and now Slack in OSX. In Windows it worked perfectly but I could be convinced it had issues in OSX.