We use Teams, Slack, and Zoom.

Zoom is much easier to use than Teams for conference calls. When I use Teams for conference calls, I find the default never works for establishing a connection (I have found that connecting through the browser works fine -- but this is not the default way to connect -- it still takes some effort to pick the path that works).

I have also found the user interface is non-intuitive. I had little trouble getting up to speed on zoom (from webex). I might have less problems with Team once I get used to its interface. At present, if anyone accidentally schedules a meeting with Team (which sometimes is the default conference call setting in our Outlook), they usually create a zoom conference call link which is used instead (usually, the notification for the zoom link goes out through slack -- for some reason, folks don't even chat over team to let folks know that the meeting has been changed to zoom).

As far as the application itself, I find that Slack is much easier to use and has capabilities that have been very helpful. The Slack user interface was intuitive and I quickly got up to speed. For Teams, I use it when I need to (not all times at our company have slack) but everyone I know prefers slack. The slack ui is more intuitive and has features such as slacking to yourself which is useful for notetaking. Again, my opinion of Teams might change as I better learn the user interface.

I've been using it on Windows for well over a year. I can't speak to how well it works on Mac or Linux, could be a terrible experience, I dunno.

In my opinion, its not the most ergonomic tool out there but its by far the most fully realized tool out there. There's lots of tools that are good for this or good for that, but mixing them in together gets to be a bit kludgy. Having calendars, live editing of documents, meetings, chat, and other tools all integrated into a single tool is extremely handy when done right, and Teams to me gets like 85% of the way there. There's some things it just doesn't do well (like the threaded messaging, kind of a mess, maybe we just don't do it right), there's things where its inconsistent (different features for meeting chats versus individual versus group chats), and overall it could stand to be a lot faster and responsive. But in the end, when someone shares a document in a call I've got it in chat history and in my OneDrive and can recall it straight from Excel or Word or whatever. When someone emails me a calendar invite, its in my Teams automatically. The first-party integrations are hard to beat.

Do I prefer things like Mattermost for pure chat? Sure, but then its separated from the tools I use for document management and separated from what we'd use for video calls and separated from my calendar for meetings and separated from our actual org structure integrated into it and all kinds of stuff. In the end, I personally like all these things being well integrated, and can deal with not having all the custom emojis and a slightly more responsive chat client.

> like the threaded messaging, kind of a mess, maybe we just don't do it right

I haven't found any chat style application that does threaded messaging "right" with how I think it should work (I want real time USNET with thread level ACLs).

That said, they're all ok IF (and that's a big if) everyone working with the accepts the "this is how they work" and use it as such with the appropriate level of technical literacy (and that's a big part of the big if).

Slack is ok. Its one deep and for active channels it can solve the "get a thread you two" so that a conversation doesn't spill over into the main channel. However, that hurts discoverability of messages... and for less active channels is likely overkill.

Zulip's is better than Slack with its topics... but is way overkill for a bunch of friends.

Teams has two styles with the team "here's a post, followups go on that" and "here's a group chat" which has no threading at all and tend to have new group chats forked for each new topic.

Discord has threads which allow for the slack style "get a thread" and a bit more ACL on the thread (different permissioning model for the base application).

All that said, I believe that the real thing that is lacking isn't threaded conversations but a strong chained reply-to feature. The best example of this I can find is Stack Overflow chat. For example, https://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/message/55971002#5... which is a reply (you can see that arrow thing) that you can click on and then follow to the message that it was a reply of, which itself is a reply to another comment.

And so, for me, it's not the thread that is important as that is discoverable - but rather the "what is this replying to?" along with the ability to fork a new room/channel that handles a given topic (because everything in one room is a complete mess).

Returning back to teams... it's ok. It serves the simplest interface acceptably. Every chat app would work better if everyone used it to its fullest... but as long as there's someone who doesn't use it "right" I'm going to suggest that Teams or Discord are probably the easiest to not use wrong (or set up to limit the 'how it can be used wrong is difficult').

I do agree, threaded chat seems challenging. I feel like I most liked Mattermost's setup where everything that was a reply to can be opened up side by side with the existing chat. Nothing is hidden by being in a separate thread, its obvious when something is a reply to, you can also just jump to the last reply to in order to get more context, etc. Obviously, tradeoffs with every style. Speech is messy no matter the medium it seems and everyone has their own yum.

Have you used the Google workspace tools? They also have tight integration of docs/meetings/chat/etc.

I have, I used and admin'd Workspace for about a decade before changing to O365. There's some good integrations there and I was a big fan of the simplicity of Meet, but chat is where Google definitely falls apart. We never really got into the new Hangouts as we were already pretty integrated into our Mattermost instance and then we migrated to O365, so maybe its better today, but as far as organizational chat kind of things Google was very very behind and way more fragmented. Things like having chats for Meets and sharing documents in a chat then get integrated into Drive are things that Teams does well and last I saw Google still kind of didn't have a fully-baked solution, at least at the time.

The other side of Workspace is dealing with users who really want Office tooling for various reasons. Workspace and O365 still don't seem to play nice together. Workspace document management is great for Workplace-formatted documents, O365 is great for Office-formatted documents, and things often get messy when trying to combine the two.

I really liked Workspace and its really slick how integrated some of their document tools can be into Google Cloud so its easy to help team members who only really know spreadsheets get data in and out of cloud compute and UI builders and what not. But from last I saw of Hangouts they're still not as complete of a chat platform compared to Teams.

> Things like having chats for Meets and sharing documents in a chat then get integrated into Drive are things that Teams does well and last I saw Google still kind of didn't have a fully-baked solution, at least at the time.

I'm not sure what quality of integration Teams has - but Chat has had this integration for several months now.

Here's an example in Teams. I'm in a call and someone shares a document in the chat. That chat is (somewhat) exactly like any other group chat in Teams, it appears in the same list as other chats I've had in my recents and is searchable in the same way. There's a couple of odd features that are or are not available from chats from meetings, but those are at the fringes of usages usually so for the most part its the same as any other group chat and can be continued well after the call or persist through recurring meetings.

Now, that document isn't just in that chat, its also in the OneDrive/Sharepoint and in the history of recently opened documents in something like Excel or Word or Powerpoint.

Like I said, it may have improved in the last year or so (about when I had to change), but last I used Workspace the chat in Meet was practically ephemeral. If someone shared a link to a document in Meet, at the end of the Meet that link was practically gone. No additional permissions was granted, I wouldn't be able to quickly find it in a recent documents list, no chat history in my recent chats, the next time for the meeting there was no chat history, etc.

The fact that Meet and Chat are still two separate "products" really points to that bifurcation of the two things. There's the video chat platform: Meet, and then there's the collaboration and chat tool: Chat. In the Google world if you want to talk by text you use one product, and if you want to talk by voice/video you use a different product, if you're wanting to schedule a meeting you use yet another product. But in the end a meeting is a meeting. Meetings can involve voice, video, text, documents, and more and usually benefit from scheduling. Needing multiple "products" means kludging things together or having things more un-linked. And in the Microsoft world there's a single tool that can do all of those things: Teams.

> Now, that document isn't just in that chat, its also in the OneDrive/Sharepoint and in the history of recently opened documents in something like Excel or Word or Powerpoint.

That for me is a huge drawback because it's constantly cluttering up a huge mess of different document versions in SharePoint and teams itself.

Try to search for the right one a few weeks later. Good luck :)

I don't experience this at all. Maybe our SharePoint/OneDrive is better managed, maybe something else is going on, but I have not yet encountered a single time of multiple versions unless someone was explicitly copy and pasting the file to make versioning in their own dumb system. Which, the same dumb thing could be done in Google Workspace.

Don't have people copy and pasting the file all over the place and you won't have a thousand versions of important_numbers_v3_final_V2_DRAFT.xls.xlsx. Thats a people problem not a technical problem.

Our SharePoint was not really managed when we moved to Teams - we didn't use it (mostly because it's such a horrible product that has no clear vision behind it). But Teams started filling up stuff there all over the place.

In the end we did need to use it because we moved from another storage service to OneDrive (another "quick win") for a manager and OneDrive is really bad at team-owned storage, it's really for personally owned files only.

Because it's by far the worst UX-wise. If you know better tools, it's just shit. To add insult to injury, it kind of sort of works, sometimes, but there are tons of small problems here and there all the time in many cases. I had to use it only for video calls for 3 years, and probably weekly there was something wrong like restart needed because it screwed up my audio.

> Because it's by far the worst

laughs in WebEx

I will take a meeting in WebEx any day over a meeting in Teams.

Teams has the worst layouts for the videos, moves UI elements to inconvenient places, often has more stuttering…

WebEx is clunky but far superior at what it’s meant to do.

Moreover WebEx actually works ok for external consultants or service providers. Yes it's ugly, but it actually works. I've never had as many people involved as long with WebEx to finally allow joining a call after Enterprise IT just decided to implement a half baked DLP solution.

Welcome to Microsoft, where data loss prevention somehow means that your service provider isn't allowed to share his services with you in Teams.

I for some time had way worse experience with GMeet.

Me too. My outbound video always looks like crap, even with hardware acceleration on and nothing else open.

It's a "productivity tool" that actively wastes my time. If it _just_ did messaging and conferencing and had reasonable tools and _configuration_ around those options, I might not mind.. it's all the other useless cruft they insist on forcing into the product that never really works properly.

Notifications. Someone put a thumbs up on my message. I get notified twice. Once in the cat and once in "Activity." You can hide "Activity" but that doesn't stop the notification. You can't configure this.

One day teams decided that the window with the view of myself should be mirrored. There's no option to change this. If you're using your camera to show documents or other items, this is an absolute nightmare.

The background video filters work once. If you join a second meeting, they never work again until you restart the browser. You can text chat but you can't video chat with yourself, so there's no good way to test your camera setup until you're going live.

For several months my calendar lost the time column on the left side. I had to open each meeting to see what time it was actually set for. That randomly came back in December.

Twice I've been trying to present something on a call when a dumb "hey check out this new feature" dialog popped up right into the middle of what I was doing. Once it captured the click, and then promptly crashed when it tried to open whatever thing it was hyping. Even if you're just chatting, the pop ups steal focus and interrupt what you are doing.

Once a day teams will start using all the CPU and will stop showing chats or notifications. I have to actively watch the CPU on that machine to see if this is happening and I need a restart. Most often I find out when I get an email that shows me an unread teams message or someone asks why I didn't answer their call.

The UI is garbage and there are zero keyboard shortcuts. It constantly asks me if I want to "replace the attachment" simply because I once uploaded a file with the same name to an entirely different chat.

You can't forward a chat. You literally just have to copy and paste it to a different user. If you join them to an existing personal chat, it just creates a new specific chat for whatever ad hoc group you tried to create.

The whole thing is a poorly thought out also ran set of extensions designed to stave off competition and it's all built on ancient Microsoft Exchange technology. I sincerely hate it.

Ram usage for one, then there's the general slowness. Sometimes it just dies. It took the longest time to get an apple silicon native version. Compared to VSCode which is one of the best electron apps, Teams shows why you might want to go native instead.

What it comes down to is that Teams is fine at best... but just that.

Teams is a bit of a resource (but Slack is no better) but there’s nothing really wrong with it as a tool. In fact it works pretty well for group communications and is constantly adding new helpful features.

I haven’t used it much, but as an outsider it’s pretty hard to judge how much the criticism is exaggerated. People also hate Slack with a burning hatred passion, while I’ve used it for many years with very few issues.

Teams works relatively fine for me now that I upgraded to an M1 macbook pro. (Still occasionally crashes for no reason, but no apparent performance problems).

A year ago I was still on a 2015 Macbook, and it was still doing just fine for me on everything but Teams, Teams was a disaster, it would freeze and drop video all the time, or have perceptible delay between click and effect.

You haven't used it on Linux perhaps, or perhaps you aren't aware that it was spying on Android users?

For people who are not solely at one company - contractors/freelancers who perhaps need to support connectivity with multiple organizations - MS Teams is a huge hostile pita.

I had 2 clients each using Teams, and I was working with each. But... I can't just be 'logged in' to two different Teams organizations. If I was in company A, I couldn't see anything from company B. Apparently you can do this in the phone app, but not the desktop version. I could keep one company on desktop, and another on phone, and just monitor two, but... you can't scale that.

With slack, I'm just connected to 3-4-5 client orgs at a time, and can react/respond as needed within the same tool without needing to log in/out constantly.

The last time I had to deal with this was last autumn - perhaps it's "fixed" now? Except... I don't think it's seen as a "bug" in the first place, so may never be "fixed".

Also... just connecting to Teams would often just hang... wait... no indication anything is happening. If I got impatient, I'd have folks saying "oh... just calm down..." but then also wonder why I was "not in the meeting"... well... because... Teams can never tell me if it's going to take 90 seconds to join, or 39 seconds or... if it just will never resolve. Opening a secondary link in a web browser became my default, though I'd have to read a banner every time saying "you won't get the best experience - some features may not work!" except... it at least loaded.

also the way it collapses long unread threads so you can only see the last couple messages, then marks the whole thread as read when you view those

I missed messages and conversations all the time when I had to use it

> For people who are not solely at one company - contractors/freelancers who perhaps need to support connectivity with multiple organizations - MS Teams is a huge hostile pita.

Bingo, that right there. Need to work with one team, but also quickly jump onto a meeting with another client... So bad. If you need to be available to two clients at the same time? No, that's not going to work.

The UI is horrible, finding people is difficult at best. Chatting with someone and want to jump on a video call... well, that will take a few minutes to locate the right button. At least Google Chat just put a big old button right in your face so you can do a quick meeting. Google suite of product (Meet, Calendar and Chat) have their own issues, but it's so easy to do meetings, and it just works every time. For six months a number of us at the office were unable to make audio work on the desktop Mac app, and Firefox wasn't supported, so you needed Chrome to join a Teams meeting.

You can't really complain about the audio or video quality in Teams, they got that mostly figured out. It's just that the desktop app has a horrible UI. I mean so does Slack, given the option I'd use neither.

The best solution I've found to connecting to multiple client orgs in Teams at a time is to use it exclusively in the browser, and use a new Chrome profile for each client to keep things separated and working.

I don't use the local Teams client.

I use the local Team for my employer organization and log in browser Teams for clients organization. Still, notifications are unreliable across organizations

If you use it for a single company (ie one login) it is OK, but IMO a worse experience than Slack; MS get away with it because it is free.

Where the true nightmare begins is when you need to login to multiple tenants/workspaces. You simply can't use multiple at the same time, and switching from one to the other is super slow and unreliable. I tried to do so today and Teams crashed 4 times, at which point I uninstalled it and decided to just use the web app instead.

It has not been decent for me.

Here is a specific complaint about messaging. If you want a tool for programmers to collaborate, don't have it automatically insert smart quotes when trying to quote code in messages.

You have to search to figure out how to turn it off. And if you do, it will still turn that back on sometimes for no particularly good reason. And my being able to send them correctly doesn't help when someone else posts code and it gets converted on THEIR end.

Yes, yes. You can just attach a file. But it is a collaboration speed bump telling people that they have to save snippets to a file, then share the file, rather than simply using cut and paste in the obvious way. Doubly so if you're interacting asynchronously and you're reading their message some time after they mangled it.

I find Teams to be just fine for instant messaging and conference calls. It's everything else that is awful. I hate the way it has files stored in a "Team" almost as much as SharePoint. I can never find what I'm looking for and ultimately have to ask and then create a browser favorite to every doc for $current_project.

When I first started using teams, I saw the Files capability and thought it would be a pretty useful feature. In practice, the UX completely ruins any benefit of having files integrated into it.