Also, Teams integrates with the other MS stuff. If I share files in a channel, in the background it is "just" a SharePoint which in turn I can add to my OneDrive. Meaning I can save a file in Word to that SharePoint and everyone in the channel can access it.

Teams is a security nightmare, and Sharepoint as well. Access permissions are nearly impossible to grasp for normal users. The feature that all files dropped are shared instantly by everyone through sharepoint is a huge security risk. People in general have no understanding that they are sharing files with everyone that can join a Teams channel, meaning that confidential and sensitive information frequently gets added to Teams chats in "public" channels. Managing the correct permissions on thousands of Teams channels is hard to impossible, even with extra tools. Channel owners often adopt a "allow anyone who knocks" policy when they get permissions requests, because they are busy and do not really understand what they are doing. Sharing files needs to be more cordoned off for security reasons. Not harder or more difficult, just less integrated and not inheriting permissions.

What if there was a free, open source alternative for Teams? I don’t mean Matrix or Mastodon. I mean something you could run on-prem and it would have chats, meetings, attach files etc. Do you know anything like this?

Why don't you mean Matrix? This is precisely what Element is, built on Matrix: https://element.io

Is it a good replacement for Teams?

Well, I think so, but i'm probably biased given it's my company. Empirically we dogfood it successfully as a Teams/Slack replacement (and a WhatsApp/Signal replacement) while building it, and lots of others use it for that use case too: https://element.io/customers.

The biggest problems have been that the 'classic' mobile apps are stale, and are currently being replaced with Element X: https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-e... - which far surpasses the Teams mobile clients in terms of UX & performance. Also, the E2EE reliability and UX on the old apps was also not great, but that's also fixed (at last) by Element X.

Will it allow my calendar to automatically attach Matrix/Element video calls to every appointment invite? Will it chime when such appointment is about to start?

This is the kind of stuff that corporate customers care about. They want systems that integrate well.

There seems to be addon for Matrix to do that. https://github.com/nordeck/matrix-meetings

> This is the kind of stuff that corporate customers care about. They want systems that integrate well.

Great. I just want a system that allows me to view a PDF file that my teacher sent me without having to click through a dozen menus and wait several minutes.

Yes. That's what you get from a well-integrated system. At work, I can open PDFs and Excel sheets and Powerpoints directly within Teams with a single click (and, one or two extra clicks to download an off-line copy).

Well if you are not looking for Matrix (although it perfectly fits your description), XMPP is probably the closest.

zulip

https://www.freie-messenger.de/en/systemvergleich -> e.g. XMPP

like Matrix: https://www.freie-messenger.de/en/systemvergleich/team/

Teams made me realize no one cares about security until it's too late.

> Teams made me realize no one cares about security until it's too late.

Crisis driven decision making is one of the most popular management methods in history.

too late being https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-st... ?

Apparently not. Is Solar Winds still a thing?

Why would anyone not think that putting a document in a public channel would result in people who can join that channel having access to it? Isn't that the whole point?

Because the correct minimum set of people is those who are in the channel when it was shared to the channel… and most people aren’t thinking of possible future information leaks when sharing documents directly into a channel with specific people the document is intended for…

The mismatch makes sense to programmers and IT types who have internalised the “computers are stupider than we make them look” way of thinking… but most normal non computer professionals are probably just thinking “I am sharing this with these people right now.

That’s a setting your IT teams chose to hide from you, our teams channels allow you to set what files are shared with someone who joins.

I’m still not at all sold. If someone put a file in the Ops Team folder of a shared drive then they’re sharing it with all current and future members of that team. The same is true if you post to #ops-team.

To be brutally honest people need to just stop and apply some basic critical thinking to their actions instead of expecting magic.

How is that any different from sharing a google doc link?

This is 95% of why we use it.

We have <20 employees and managing an extra vendor for a chat application is a non-negligible % of our time.

Our new hires can log with their work account using a shrink-wrapped machine from Best Buy and will have all of their needed applications ready to go & signed-in without going to random vendor sites or file shares.

I'm managed GSuite and Slack in a small company for years. What is taking so much of your time?

Slack dropped the ball earlier than that on audio/video. They acquired Screenhero in 2015 and did nothing of substance with it. Also, the lack of any real meeting features means that Zoom or Teams always has to be in the picture.

This still makes me mad.

Screenhero was the best screensharing software I've used to this day.

If anyone here knows the inside story of what went down with that acquisition, please share because I was expecting such great things when I heard Slack got them and then ... just nothing.

Was it a tech integration problem? A key team member leaving? Like what happened?

I have no inside knowledge, but that sounds like your regular acquihire to me.

I think part of it was because around the same time that Chromium (which Electron is based on, thusly inherited by Slack) added baked-in support for capturing the user's screen and individual application windows - so Slack had no incentive to spend money to build their own native screen-capture and sharing code when they could simply wait and do nothing and then get it for free.

...but that still doesn't explain why Slack otherwise seems frozen-in-time: none of the significant end-user usability and quality-of-life issues I've had with Slack since I started using it in 2016 have been addressed (e.g. we can't right-click a message to get its context-menu: you still have to hunt for that awkwardly-placed "..." menu button).

See https://slack.com/release-notes/windows - this is their changelist for their Windows release and most of the releases since 2020 are described as "tweaks", was "tinkered with", or is "tuned-up" which, or "minor security updates" - which, as any npm user will tell you just means they ran `npm update` and not much else (well, besides the bare minimum of automated testing).

If you liked Screenhero you might like Pop

https://pop.com/home

> In 2013, I co-founded Screenhero, an app that enabled remote pair programming and made developer collaboration over the internet “better than being in the same room” (to quote our old slogan).

https://pop.com/screenhero

Oh very cool, will try it out.

I used Pop for a while but they haven't updated in years. Anyone know what's going on there?

> By mid-April was in a usable state.

Do you mean April 2024 or 2025? Because the Teams I use on a regular daily basis is still unusable garbage. Granted it's better than February 2020, but it's still a train wreck of chats that don't work, calls dropped often, and files that won't attach to messages. Not that I am all that fond of Slack either.

I must be an unique snowflake, because I switched jobs around March 2020, and the new place used Teams exclusively, and... it was good. Not stellar, but good for the standards of software in this decade. Better than Slack, anyway. There were some weird glitches happening couple times a year, but nothing major.

So either I'm incredibly lucky, or - my going hypothesis - Teams actually does work quite well, if you deploy it along with SharePoint, Exchange, and other Microsoft products it integrates with.

"Incredibly lucky" this time around I'm thinking. :)

Oh, are you using it on an Apple Silicon mac?

Not the OP but I do run Teams on Apple Silicon and it is still a bug-ridden mess. Crashes, rendering bugs, file attachment bugs. At least once a week, usually more. Searches fail to find results that I can manually locate by scrolling through the chat history. I have reinstalled the app more than once.

I have shared these observations in their feedback pop ups and I know Microsoft loves collecting telemetry. Why should they dedicate more money/resources to fix defects when it clearly hasn’t stopped them from growing their market share?

Teams is the first example I use to begrudgingly explain to someone that quality doesn’t matter.

As per the hypothesis I stated, I think your problem is running Teams on an Apple system. I'm not defending Microsoft releasing a shitty product here, but I think it's most likely they didn't bother to properly test/debug it for other OSes and configurations than "embracing Windows and the Office ecosystem".

Nah. Just a random Thinkpad.

I think Apple Silicon is going to one's experience worse here, not better - because of the "Apple" part.

No worries. Was just wondering, as other dev's I know that run Teams on macOS (intel and arm64) say it's a pretty shitty experience.

Was thinking maybe something had changed, but sounds like no. ;)

Same experience here, at most I might've run into file attachment issues a handful of times, but otherwise Teams has been flawless for video conferences. Zoom has given me way more trouble than Teams on Windows, Linux and Android devices.

Other than it using more CPU than it has any right to, Teams generally has worked well for me as well. The workplace has pretty fully embraced onedrive and SharePoint. Running on Windows.

sharepoint / onedrive integration with teams is one of those "just works" things. its really great for collaboration. teams has a lot of issues, especially regarding performance but its very feature-packed.

You should try the Teams preview. Much better in terms of resource usage. https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/new-microsoft-teams/

I do use it, and yes, its a lot better than the old. Thanks!

My experience aligns with yours. Calls almost never drop, it's easy to do ad-hoc calls/meetings of arbitrary groups of people, it's easy to attach a teams call for an outlook event, having persistent chats associated with recurring meetings is great. I really just don't have any complaints whatsoever.

I have experienced the same as well. I've been using team (on Linux for Christs sake) for past 3 years. Never had any major issues. Everything continues to be working as expexted. I'm using the web app on Chrome as a pinned tab since they are going to kill the Linux teams client.

I've never used this but apparently this wrapper is useful for linux people: https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux

Nope, this is no good. PWA works really well with Chrome though

looking at my teams interface right now. there are three separate "..." menus. Behind one of them is the settings, one is the installed apps, the third is to install more apps. Everyone involved in the decision making process that resulted in this UX should be banned from computers.

In my anecdotal experience, the less technical users have a much easier time with Teams than they do with Zoom.

I suspect it depends on what you're used to. Zoom fits in better with the Apple design system.

My experience is the same. It was OK but flaky in 2020 and I un-fairly blamed the React native and JS for the subpar experience. Improved considerably by mid-2023 though I still wish it took lesser system resources. Probably will never happen.

I don’t like Teams either but in my corporate environment it’s mostly without bugs at the moment. They dropped support for disabling incoming video for some unknown reason but that’s my only complaint right now.

At least internally, they moved that option fairly recently. Try checking all the submenus; IIRC it's available under View now.

So, I had this exact same experience, until IT turned on whatever group policy allows you to see the New Teams toggle switch. [1] You might still be on the “old teams”. In classic Microsoft fashion, it’s 1000x more complex than it has to be.

Guess what? It still sucks. I still hate using it. I still do less work because of it. Can you scroll back thru messages without seeing a 10am one loading spinner every 15 mess ages? No. But it’s faster… in the general sense!

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/new-teams-d...

I think Microsoft managed to get it to "functional garbage" in April 2020, as did Zoom. Both sucked, but the UI made enough sense that even your most antiquated & computer-illiterate colleagues, friends, & family could join a videocall from the isolation of their own home.

That was the real MVP for video conferencing software in the early pandemic, and Slack missed it by years.

The UX for teams is terrible compared with slack, but it pains me to say it, I find the video conference part better than zoom. I use the linux clients.

Scrolling the teams channels is also far from smooth. when you scroll up the message threads load slowly. You see they tried to improve it using virtualized lists but it did not work out.

Several coworkers and me also had the problem that we were unmuted but it said we were muted. Just today the teams screen blacked out when someone presented something.

Notifications are a mess too. And when you have multiple teams with the same channel names (project with microservices) it only shows the channel name, but not the team name in the notifications and in the UI.

Huddles... I never understood what they are for. Slack already had video calls with screen sharing. They were easy to start and they worked well. Then they added these huddles, more difficult to see (sometimes people do not realize they are invited to one) and they seem like the old video calls with a worst onboarding. There are only huddles now. So nothing changed except the setup of the call.

By the way, I'm not a native speaker. I know what a call is, I eventually checked what's a huddle now. "a close grouping of people or things."

> I think Slack really dropped the ball

IMO, Slacked drop it again. The old slack video worked much better than the new one. I use the zoom plugin now for quick chats.

Teams is a dumpster fire every time I'm forced to use it. Not much to say about that.

Quick contrary datapoint: I'm a heavy Windows user but the only interaction I've ever had with Teams is to figure out how to delete its icon from the task bar.

Slacks video calls and Huddles don't even work on Firefox. They are a joke.