I've use Teams every day in education for a couple of years now.

My favourite file access "feature" of Teams (I verified it was in fact working as intended, at least until the pandemic and the warts started getting more obvious) was that class teams had read/write access by default for all files in a team. This meant every student in a class team could modify what you uploaded by default. Of course fixing this required opening up the team in Sharepoint and fiddling with permissions, totally something every teacher is expected to figure out right?

Not really a software feature, but their update rollout style is awful as well. Announce features 4-8 weeks in advance of rolling out patches. Inconsistent rollouts, so my home desktop might have the latest feature patch, but my work laptop won't (I was around 4 weeks out of sync at one point). Manual checking for updates won't apply the latest patches. Meanwhile their consultants in education are crowing about all the new features or bug fixes.

I actually like some of the feature set, and it's very useful in an educational setting now they've brought some of the new features online (3 months later than would have been useful for the pandemic lockdown in my part of the world, but oh well), but enough frustrating elements that I'm constantly supporting workmates in its use.

> Rearrangement of messages in channel based on threads

Wait, what? Do threads move when they get replies or something?

Yup. Straight to the bottom of the page. Did you know, they're pushing it into schools? Every time a student asks a question, all other students lose track of which pieces of work they've still got left to do.

I don’t think putting all the work for students to do is seen as the use case for teams channels - it’s for chat and discussion.

If you are trying to get students to do work, maybe use something like planner, sharepoint or any of the other myriad of tools actually designed for collaborative working rather than chat.

The intended Teams place for these things to be is either Assignments or the "_Content Library" section of a Class Notebook. Both of them are harder for teachers to use than a channel called "homework" (or just the main channel; creating a channel is hard, too).

Why not one channel that pushes work and another that is for questions?

Good suggestion.

I think this is actually a useful design feature - if the thread didn’t move and it was up in the message chain and I wasn’t tagged in a message then I would miss it, but as I want to still read everything in the channel, the fact it comes to the bottom of the channel means I see it.

Apps like Slack solve this by having a dedicated “Threads” channel where you can see new messages in threads you’ve participated in. There’s also the concept of an “Activity” view where you can see recent activity in a channel, if I recall correctly. There’s no need to re-arrange message order or rewrite history to draw attention to new messages. Worst case, just insert a message visible only to you with a link to the thread when updates occur.

Makes sense, but all that is a design trade-off.

If you do it like teams does then you don’t need an activity view and a dedicated threads channel.