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Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by CharlesW on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @05:04PM (#25270616)
Unpopular HN opinion: Teams doesn't suck.

It's not as pretty/lovable as Slack, but it has an additional level of organization (each team gets their own set of channels), you can add tabs of related apps/sites to each channel, etc. As far as I could tell having used both simultaneously for a few years, Teams is a complete superset of Slack.

Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by djsumdog on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @05:33PM (#25270944)
The way rooms is organized is really annoying. It's not just a straight list of chatrooms like ... every other chat app on the planet. The rooms also show what appears to be IMs for group chats (the style/UI) instead of a chatroom.

The calendar integration is nice and the video chats are good, but The Linux version of their client just stops pulling audio all the time unless I do a `killall -9 pulseaudio` and restart it (and it's the only app left where I still have to do that).

Teams gets a big "Meh" for me on calls and awful for text chat.

Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by CharlesW on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @05:43PM (#25271043)
> It's not just a straight list of chatrooms like ... every other chat app on the planet.

Yes, it's odd. For those who haven't used Teams, it defaults to showing you a team's channels you use most frequently (I guess? I never quite understood the logic) and then you have to click to see the full list. Maddening.

Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by prepend on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @09:48PM (#25272736)
Clicking in every channel to see what’s new is insane. I’m in 15 “teams” and they each probably average 10 channels. I see the alerts that there are new messages but I would need to go into each one to check them out.

As a result, I ignore them all.

They need some sort of “feed” feature.

Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by isolli on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @04:10AM (#25274694)
Yes, this is infuriating. And users report similar problems with audio in Windows too...

Unfortunately your killall workaround does not work for me. I have to restart my laptop every time I have a Teams meeting -.-

Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by pferde on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @04:24AM (#25274783)
That's odd. I'm using Linux Teams client in a Docker container, and it gets many days of uptime (and many voice calls per day) between restarts (for unrelated reasons). No problems with integrating with host pulseaudio server.

I'm quite a happy user of Teams, the only thing I'm missing is ability to share my desktop with giving control to a remote caller - but I only needed that maybe once or twice over this entire year so far.

Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by isolli on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @06:43AM (#25275504)
Thanks for the feedback. The Docker container is a good idea! Let's see if it fixes my audio issues.

Note that outside of audio being disabled on a regular basis (and there being no way of setting it back up properly), I am also happy with the product. It beats Skype Business, which I could never get to work on Linux.

Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by magicalhippo on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @05:36PM (#25270968)
We use Teams at work, and for that it works quite well. Calls and desktop sharing work well, the channels do what they do, integration with OneDrive and the wiki thing is nice etc.

But then I got a member of a different Team, for one of our customers, as part of some integration work. And boy is that a CF.

Unlike Discord you either have this team or that team active. Notifications from the other are horribly unreliable, and there's no way to chat with someone in one team while you're in a call with someone from the other team besides running a separate client.

So as such, "Teams" really should have been named "Team".

Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by shreyshrey on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @08:11PM (#25272179)
Shameless plug. AirSend (https://www.airsend.io) offers the bare essentials one need to collaborate with both internal team members & external clients in one elegant package. Collaborating across organization boundaries is really hard with both ms teams and slack. Thats the problem we are trying to solve with airsend.

AirSend gives you a few simple (chat, voice/video, files, tasks and wiki) but powerful tools and then get out of the way.

Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by syshum on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @08:13PM (#25272186)
>>and there's no way to chat with someone in one team while you're in a call with someone from the other team besides running a separate client.

This was largely fixed, you may have to enable the "new meeting experience" though, which starts your meeting / call in a separate window from the main client

Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by magicalhippo on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @08:33PM (#25272298)
I have that enabled and I still get the message that my call will end when I try to switch teams while in a call.

Last tried this a couple of days ago.

Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by syshum on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @06:08AM (#25275343)
I am not sure what you mean by "switch teams". Are you attempting to Switch Tenants?
Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by magicalhippo on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @09:55AM (#25276851)
Guess I'm using the wrong words. To the left of my user name, next to the minimize/maximize buttons, I can switch (in my mind)... something. I guess tenant is the word, but in my mind that is the team.

I see now that what I've always thought of as "channels" is called Teams, no idea how I've overlooked that for over two years but there you go.

My point is in Discord I can be on a dozen different servers with different administrators and seamlessly go between them. Not so in Teams. I'm stuck to one tenant (team) at a time. Which sucks if you need to switch between them.

Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by syshum on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @10:41AM (#25277303)
I see, I am not sure how common that is. Most places you only need 1 Tenant unless your are contracting with Multiple companies but even then you would be set up as a Guest on their tenant not have your own independent user name for each tenant you need access to.

You are correct that Teams today does not support Multi-Tenancy but that is really not an issue for 99.5% of organizations who would only ever have 1 tenant anyway

Teams is structure as

Tenant -> Teams -> Channels

Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by magicalhippo on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @03:53PM (#25281469)
Yeah I guess it's a bit different since we're so heavy into complex integrations with our customers.

Anyway, up until this became an issue, Teams has worked quite well. It does what we need when we need it, so can't complain really.

Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by mrgordon on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @06:55PM (#25271680)
I definitely prefer Slack. Here are a few reasons off the top of my head.

1. Many users have issues where the unmute button is unresponsive. Typically the workaround is to turn off incoming video feeds which isn't exactly ideal. This is a major turnoff.

2. Difficult to stay involved in multiple channels as described by another comment. I find it tedious to find what's happened if I've been away for a while.

3. Slack has bots that do various helpful things including leaving channels you don't use, asking you for your daily standup feedback if you don't have an in person meeting, referencing external content, etc. I assume Teams must have something similar but I've never seen them used which likely indicates its a lot easier to do with Slack.

4. Nicer UI as you allude to yourself

5. Slack works with several video chat options including their own (based on AWS tools I believe?) and Zoom. I actually prefer Slack video chat over Zoom or Teams for pair programming as its so easy to annotate the screen without clicking into a bunch of menus or being the meeting owner or something. You literally just start drawing on the screen and your coworkers see it

6. Excellent mobile app which is quite important for a chat client

7. Ability to run a small chatroom for free which AFAIK Microsoft doesn't offer (its included with other Microsoft products that were paid for usually)

8. Not tied in to only Microsoft products

Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by nkerkin on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @09:05PM (#25272482)
> 7. Ability to run a small chatroom for free which AFAIK Microsoft doesn't offer (its included with other Microsoft products that were paid for usually)

Looks like there's a free [0] version of teams that supports unlimited search, unlimited app integrations and meetings of up to 100 attendees. Compare to free [1] slack that has limitations of 10k searchable messages, 10 app integrations and only 1-1 meetings

[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/microsoft-team... [1]: https://slack.com/intl/en-au/pricing

Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by mrgordon on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @06:57PM (#25283497)
Fair enough, not too surprising Microsoft can offer a limited version for free. The Microsoft free version is much more limited than you imply though. The "meetings of up to 100 attendees" are for 60 minutes maximum versus the Slack ones which have no cap. Not to mention many people use Slack + an external video chat app so they wouldn't care.
Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by jasonv on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @05:18PM (#25270787)
Switching channels/teams in Teams is far less efficient than moving through channels in Slack, which means I'm less likely to engage well in Teams.
Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by blackrock on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @05:24PM (#25270842)
I’m going to say it again.

Good grief! Teams, suck!

Re:Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack by prepend on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @09:45PM (#25272724)
Teams just doesn’t seem very good for team collaboration outside of video/audio. Their client feels cramped and stifling and their web version is not feature complete. Basic stuff like just linking to a document or wiki page or tab in Teams doesn’t work well so you end up with stuff like “Open the Foo team, look in the Bar channel and click the second link in the header to see the dashboard.” instead of just adding a link to it.

The integration and embedding of office/powerbi/etc is neat, but it forces it into a Teams frame.

For some reason, some things launch SharePoint with its own bag of shit for trying to make its own version of web sites.

I’m in a big org with Teams for almost a year. We have thousands of employees who aren’t as active as hundred person free slack open source projects. People aren’t using it to communicate much with each other.

They keep emailing, or texting or IMing. I get more Skype IMs a day than Teams. And do you know how horrible Skype is?

Because of this, I think it sucks as a superset of Slack. Sure, it nominally has all those features, but in practice they aren’t usable.

I hope that MS just keeps iterating and it eventually gets better. I think it’s better now than a year ago.