But in all seriousness Teams is fine for chat and video.
Voila. Channel. You need to know someone in the channel to add you to the channel, but suddenly you can avoid that threaded bullshit.
God I hate using teams
What am I missing?
It's funny to hear this because if I were looking for a job one of the selling points for me would be if they used teams.
I'm on it all day, I present and run video meetings on it. I use it on different devices. It's not perfect by any means, but I'm confident that it will do what I need it to do.
My only guess is you're on a linux desktop and you don't use an enterprise deployment of teams and perhaps you're using the web version of the client. In that case, yes I feel for you.
Is there an enterprise deployment of teams that makes it not suck on linux?
For example, sometimes the window just disappears when it's in the background. When that happens I don't get any notifications, so unless I notice that Teams has bugged out I'll miss when someone tries to contact me. And recently, video has become weirdly bugged -- I see people twitch around like I'm watching a bad horror movie, and sometimes they flash red. No idea what that's about but I can't seem to fix it. It's not going to kill me but it's uncomfortable to watch.
More minor, but search is a mess, and notifications aren't great.
Other than that I guess it's OK.
It seems to have something to do with the fact that, when on a call, Teams is active in every desktop (with a stupid little video window). But it persists even when you're not on a call.
About the only thing I can say in its favour is that I've rarely had trouble with video or audio quality.
It is an unbelievable performance hog. It launches something like 8-10 processes, one of which defaults to running at above normal priority. Despite this, frequently text chat messages will lag ~30 seconds between notification and appearing in the actual chat window. Even clicking on UI elements like buttons will often have a lag of 5-10 seconds. If I'm on a video call, it uses more CPU than any other process, including my browsers (~50 tabs open across ~10 windows) and a Kali Linux VM running in VMware Workstation.
The UX is awful. For example, there is no way to permanently reorder the list of channels you're in (not even sorted alphabetically). It's always the order you joined them every time you start up Teams. My list of channels is something like 50 long, so I basically just have to search for the one I want, because the alternative is to scroll through the list and read every line.
There are bizarre bugs. Sometimes I'll join a video call, but it will be a "ghost call" where I can hear the participants, but there's no window for me to interact with, so all I can do is close Teams entirely and start over. Sometimes I won't be able to unmute myself, so everyone will wonder why I'm not responding. Today I saw a new one where random members of the call had their video feeds replaced with empty black space (no profile photo/letter).
It's unbelievable to me that I could use IRC, MSN Messenger, and any number of other chat apps on a PC 20+ years ago and get a snappy response time, and yet Teams still feels like it's mired in a swamp running on hardware that's something like 100x faster and with 20-50x the amount of RAM.
Something like 15 years ago, I was troubleshooting a SharePoint issue and discovered that even though it was using a SQL Server database to store everything, instead of taking advantage of the power of a good database design and platform, all of the kind of object affected by the problem were stored as enormous XML blobs inside a single column, with SharePoint doing a SELECT * and then acting as its own terrible inner faux-database layer. I have to imagine that Teams is a similar "don't ask how the sausage is made" kind of situation, where MS basically shipped an early prototype instead of productionizing it.
Oh yeah, this has been happening to us lately. Quitting Teams (not just disconnecting from video meeting) and restarting seems to restore.
Also, let's save the National Socialism comparisons for examples involving antisemitism, genocide, and authoritarianism. It is better to have dynamic range in our conversations, otherwise it all gets watered down.
Have you _used_ MS Teams? I'm not exactly a fan of Slack, but it's like telepathy by comparison.
I find the whole premise of these kind of chat tools, combined with cultural patterns of using them, to feel like forced distraction.
I don't get why upper management thinks they have anything to do with how I communicate with my colleagues. I can only assume they would want us to choose a platform that allows us to work effectively.
The organization has to pay for whatever commercial offerings their teams are using, and any non-commercial offerings are likely to either expose the organization's information or at least put it out of reach of controls like legal holds. Use of some free/trial services for business purposes might also introduce legal/contractual liability that the organization is responsible for.
Auditing and compliance.
Hahaha...if you want collaborative editing of anything, use GSuite. The MS tool suite is a joke for collaboration.
Some of you don't understand you live in a very tiny bubble and entreprise needs are very different from your experience.
You can tell where Microsoft spent their energies (outlook, teams, maybe onenote?) and which web app products feel just about the same as they did when they were sharepoint web apps.
ARE still sharepoint apps. At least that's how they feel.
Every discussion about Teams boils down to the same thing: software engineers needs when it comes to collaboration are low so they are happy using an expensive text chat client and they don't understand how the rest of their company actually works and what they need.
I suppose I work in an organization with few true "technical" folks, and everyone is under Microsoft licenses so it doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
I've used both slack and teams. What am I really missing out on here?
Most likely you don't use a conference software bad enough.
That being said, having useful search, a quick UI and actual availability shown is massively helpful. A great comms tool also makes inter-department chats easy and fun (for example via #random). Lastly, the amount of time wasted with "can you see my screen?"/"can you hear me?"/"Doesn't work for me, I'll restart <software>" varies vastly between tools. Having communication, including discovery and screen sharing, just work makes things so much easier.
Fair; I could definitely believe that.
But among Zoom, Teams, Discord, and Slack (there's probably another one thrown in there,) I haven't had issues that really stand out to me. I've seen social workplace issues that made comms suck, but they transferred between chat apps.
For a more detailed take:
Slack is far from perfect but Slack is generally clean, quick, simple and compact. Slack feels like a purpose built tool for chat. Even when they add stuff like huddles it never feels like the priority is anything but the chat. When they roll out updates that make typing or formatting jankier I find they often get a fix out quickly.
Teams feels like it is doing a little bit of everything and is slower, wastes screen real estate, has poor UX all over and does a lot of things so-so to decent vs. one thing really well. Why is chat so different in a Teams/Chat vs a Teams/Teams/Channel? You can't even do the same markdown formatting in those places. And speaking of markdown, you can type a backtick around a string to monospace it like in slack but if it's at the end of your message it won't format it. You need a trailing space for it to kick in the formatter. Little details matter and a lack of attention to them as an organization makes bad UX and weird behavior leak into your software.
If your company is large enough that a flat, open channel namespace is overwhelming, then you might think this is a feature, but I was at Walmart with tens of thousands of people in Slack and I didn’t feel that way.
* You expect to enter nickname and connect as a guest (my company doesn't use teams)
* F.. u. Today we're going to log into Microsoft account. No option to abort.
* Personal account doesn't work (bonus points if you already have private office 365 logged in and it defaults to this account, then takes you straight to the error or tells you after 2FA).
* Kill app/reopen? 50% success rate.
After a few times I figured out that best way is to nuke the app data the moment it shows you login screen. And got PTSD.
Actually I found a solution for this (on android). Open the settings, apps, find teams app and force stop it. Then try to open the link again. You should get the guest prompt. Sometimes this needs to be repeated few times, but so far this approach works for me reliably.
*except I can't copy paste images from slack into office documents, this is a major hassle
I'm old enough to remember when Skype was really neat, and it's just another in a long, long line of grievances I'll hold against Microsoft till I die.
Seems much more likely to be due to legal reasons than for security. If the chats are not retained, they can't be found in discovery. (And given chat is even more informal than email, people probably say a lot of things they shouldn't in chat).
Back to the "code smell" of the IT department... For instance, I opened a ticket for my new laptop for something that is not common, but it can be self-selected from the menu of requests to make, so it's not like it's a one-off. After THREE WEEKS of emails and chats and calls with NINE DIFFERENT PEOPLE, I found that we... STARTED COMPLETELY OVER. It would have been nice to be able to look back over the history to name and shame, and point people back to what had already been done, since, apparently whatever ticketing system they use is completely useless.
So when even simple things take a month to do in your company, having, say, 30 days of history is not unreasonable. In fact, it's almost necessary.
It does change one's usage model.
It was the first major spreadsheet to be GUI-based from the ground up. It didn’t need Office bundling (which came much later) to dominate, it was by far the superior spreadsheet in the Windows 3.0/3.1 era.
Quattro Pro is waiting outside the door. He says he'd like to have a word. ;-)
https://www.lambdadays.org/static/upload/media/1616736415929...
Excel is so successful that competitors need to copy its bad parts.
Yeah, I don't think they really appreciate the Excel pro scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY
Screen sharing, reminders about meetings are also better in Teams.
Ability to add people to "direct message channels" is definitely lacking in Slack. No I don't want to convert this chat with 3 people into a channel, FO. I want to add 3rd person.
Yeah, having a feature doesn't mean people use the feature.
(For what it’s worth, I much prefer Slack for communicating, but when I have to find something, I wish I were looking for it in Teams.)
I prefer how they are handled in zulip.
in my company, we moved from slack to teams, and EVERYTHING just moved to giant private chats.
Slack has threads: https://slack.com/help/articles/115000769927-Use-threads-to-...
Its the equivalent between a pot noodle and a steak dinner.
Zulip has a lot of other issues though, the app and on-boarding… but I really struggle to enjoy slack now.
teams, however, is a total dumpster fire for serious communication outside of video meetings and some minor ad-hoc 1:1 interactions.
That and DMs being visible to whoever pays.
Discord is by far the best of the bunch combined with Jitsi.
We've taken it next level here - whenever there is an incident - not only don't you respond as a message in the channel, you get a new channel (created by a Bot when IMOC declares an incident) per incident, so all of the activity for that incident is self-contained (can be many, many thousands of messages) - and, of course, even in that split out channel (which is only talking about a single incident) - even there you need to respond on threads, never as a new message.
The result looks normal. But once the recipient tries to actually use the code, it breaks horribly, because Teams has a habit of sprinkling it with non-breaking spaces.
This issue has been going on for years. I feel it makes Teams utterly unusable in software development teams.
Teams is the perfect middleground: it's not particularly good at anything but it's not bad at anything either, and it can do everything.
Slack is as good for text-based communication as it is bad at video communications (we've never gotten Huddle working properly). Google Meet is adequate at video calls, but has suffered serious degradation in terms of functionality over the past year that makes us question Google's commitment to it going forward. Zoom is great for video meetings, doesn't do anything else. Blue Jeans is like Zoom, but expensive and it requires its own special hardware, but its buttery smooth and stable as a rock.
One tip: Avoid the Linux version and use the chrome browser version instead. Wrt. most aspects the Linux version is the browser version but less updated and more buggy (no idea why tho, it's an electron app, it could be automatically always up to date/auto release a update every day/week).
Still even then there are funny bugs like we pretty much every week someone who has problem with a random teams bug, not specific or more often on any version/OS.
Like the chat icon randomly missing or screen sharing/video hanging for one person until they leave and re-enter the call.
And thats with the most minimal usage of Teams only for video calls, i.e. not chat and no fancy setting.
Oh and the Office365/Teams SSO is so inconsistent that it looks like a MITM attack from time to time, well except that a MITM attack probably would work more friction-less.
Really should have seen that when Atom fell to the sidelines in favor of VS Code.
Admittedly though, I don't see myself using Gitlab anytime soon, if not indefinitely. What makes Github special, arguably, is that it looks less "businessy" and more fun and social.
Another reason why I think the ruination of Github will happen over a longer timescale. Any competitors will likely try to focus on trying to be different (i.e. Gitlab's focus on open source and dev ops) rather than try to focus on on what made Github special and do it better than Microsoft could ever hope to do.
EDIT: just to clarify, this comment relates because forcing teams to use products developed in-house erodes team culture. It's an attempt at assimilation.
I'm not really sure how much more space for innovation there is when it comes to git web services. What kind of killer feature would trump GitHub?
"We will be moving to Microsoft Teams for the sole purpose of video conferencing"