Until MS figures out notifications, I won’t be switching. It is hard to understate how annoying it is to not be able to trust accurate notifications and notification settings.

Most messages don’t have an expectation of a timely response. But of those that do, I need to be able to rely on notifications.

I just gave up eventually.

Have you spoken with Slack directly about this? I've brought up several issues to their "Feedback" area and usually have very quick responses for a company that services as many people as Slack does.

Of course Discord has the image problem of being marketed to gamers (and that's fine, because it lets them focus their efforts), but as a tool it is pretty well crafted.

I've only really evaluated Teams for one use case and there were limitations that made it impractical. I was hoping to set up Power Automate rules that would let me forward an email to a group and have it auto-create a Planner task, auto-create a Team Channel with a link to the task and a copy of the original email posted, and reply to the email with a link to the channel. Then all conversation about the task happens in the Team Channel and someone can own the task to make sure it doesn't get forgotten. When the task is closed, the channel gets archived. However, there's a limit of 200 channels per team, so it's not good for short lived channels. Planner also has some crazy low limitations, but I don't recall what they are.

I know that sounds a lot like an issue tracker, but the hope was to trend towards the other scenario you describe where email, IM, SMS, etc. are all replaced by a single tool. Just email + SMS are enough to de-thread a conversation and cause confusion / miscommunication.

How are you finding the Teams limitation of only 9 people on screen at once in a videoconference? That is the one major flaw that Teams lags the competition in, e.g. Zoom.

Nine people on the screen is a nice ratio, and if the 10th person says something, they take the place of the person that hasn't said anything the longest on the grid.

There are other reasons I dislike Teams, but this isn't one of them.

This is just a recipe for excluding people who don't speak up. In a larger meeting I particularly want to prompt juniors to speak up, for example. I also want juniors to see each other so they feel more a part of it.

If you are only interested in the last person to speak that's fine but you might as well just use a voice call for that.

I turn my video off during video conference calls, but others may not feel they have the autonomy to do so.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200421-why-zoom-video...

My vision of video conference is that one person is sharing their screen or something, why would I want to watch other peoples avatars or rooms in all kinds of video quality

I'm in the process of "refactoring" my training approach to a videoconference approach (using Zoom).

I'm actually really surprised at how intimidating the process has been. I've been doing training and speaking in person for a long time, but not via Zoom.

It will work out, but the biggest issue that I'm encountering, is not having access to "immediate feedback."

A very good article on the topic was written by a well-known (and extremely effective) trainer, Erica Sadun, here: https://ericasadun.com/2020/03/11/so-youre-going-to-teach-re...

Once i taught a guest lecture in zoom. I ended up using directpoll.com to approach the polling features I'd normally use. Lots of yes/no questions, easily asked and answered (always same url, can watch answers coming in), some exercises.

Extremely positive response. Simple, oft-used interaction truly is a game changer - even if limited to yes/no.

Because it more closely mimics the experience of being in a room. For example maybe I want to listen to, or be, the person speaking while gauging reactions from facial expressions. I have a 30" 4k monitor, I can easily have 20-30 faces on screen at once in software that supports it.

If you read the MS forums there are plenty of complaints about this, a typical use case is a teacher or lecturer who wants to see their entire class.

I am totally OK with the number of faces on screen at once being a user-configurable parameter in the client - but 9 is a hard limit baked into Teams.

Say, "this is how I want the grid to be arranged", and maintain that arrangement over many meetings, with absent people blank and not repacked?

Also, if you are a host/co-host, the order of the "Participants" list keeps shifting. I end up accidentally muting/unmuting people, because their position changed between my moving the cursor over their name, and clicking.

For a service that's probably being marketed a lot at schools, that sounds like a perfect feature for the classroom and you could use it, as well :)

FWIW We are still dealing with the four persons on screen limitation and even then there is a good chance of no one having video. Management wisely decided against forcing the issue. Plus throw in that many times we end up with someone sharing their screen.