[tomc1985]

They seem to be parallel services, like Lync and Skype. I still cannot figure out where our documents are stored... is it on the windows share? OneDrive? SharePoint? My personal Dropbox??

Outlook for Android is the biggest piece of shit to hit mobile and O365 on the web takes a huge smelly dump on linux users. I am still angry at my employer for foisting this garbage upon us, just so the nontechnical exec team can have their precious Outlook

[douche]

Outlook for Android is better than any of the alternative mail clients I can get on my phone. Although that is not saying much...

OWA works just fine on Chrome on Linux, I use it every day.

Sharepoint sucks, but then again the whole wiki/CMS/whatever category of things that Sharepoint is a representative of is almost without exception a huge festering cesspool of villainy and suck.

[tomc1985]

I just uninstalled Outlook for Android and my phone went from unusably-laggy to performing just like new. I had a full charge this morning and it is early afternoon and my battery was at 30%. Android's battery usage analyzer blamed 60% of that on Outlook. Opening Outlook and trying to use it meant 30+ seconds waits while I do simple things like "view the first page of my inbox" or "enter an email address into the To:" field.

You're saying that all the other options are worse??

(As for OWA, I regularly encounter full-page reloads for simple actions, am frequently logged out after my first click on anything, and it is almost obnoxiously slow for the speed of internet that we have. And this is Office365... previous versions of OWA were pretty good though)

[ZenoArrow]

> "like Lync and Skype"

Lync has been renamed to Skype For Business, and is very similar in terms of user experience to the standard Skype app.

> "I still cannot figure out where our documents are stored... is it on the windows share? OneDrive? SharePoint? My personal Dropbox??"

You can hardly blame Microsoft for the slack IT policies at your workplace.

[tomc1985]

Uh, the Mac client still says Lync, and it looks way different than Skype.

"Don't blame Microsoft for slack IT policies" What? Like hell I'm not blaming them. It's not my fault they offer a bunch of shitty, complicated, barely-working, overlapping, should-be-simple services that nontechnicals can barely wrap their mind around. It's not my fault my employer hired me to work on Linux code and then has a sudden Windows come-to-Jesus moment. (I'm sure theres some stupid sales rep to thank for that...) It's not my fault that Microsoft can't write decent AJAX!

If they would simply follow standards we wouldn't have this problem. But then of course Micro$oft wouldn't make as much ca$h, and we certainly cant have that now can we....

[larrywright]

Then you haven't upgraded: https://products.office.com/en-us/skype-for-business/downloa...

[KirinDave]

Not unusual. Many orgs are still lagging on Win10 as well. They have contracts with things like cough anti-virus providers of ill repute cough and they cannot upgrade because these tools don't work.

[tomc1985]

We're rather fond of Windows 7, because it pretty much just works. (And nobody wants to deal with upgrading) A few of the handful of Win10 laptops have been headaches.

"Lagging" is an interesting choice of words...

[KirinDave]

Funny you say that. Know what I'm doing right now?

Re-encoding MP4s to a slight variant of MP4 so that my demos are visible to Win7 installs. Because they flip out. Known issue, I'm told, but not fixable. Win7 is frozen!

You may not like Win10, but I think Win7 is a ghastly experience that is about as fun as bamboo shoots under one's nails (for developers). It has 0 affordances for modern software development EXCEPT misapplications of the Windows UI. Oh, also before I forget: old Win7 font rendering is substantially uglier than new Win10 font rendering! Critical stuff!

If "just works for email" is your criterion, it's a mistake not to use Chromebooks in the first place.

[mjrpes]

I feel your pain. As a tiny business we are still using old and obsolete WSS 2.0 on a Windows 2003 server. We looked into hosted sharepoint last year but the thing is so slow and cumbersome, it drained all happiness from my life. You can smell all the cludgy enterprise features that have been baked it over the years. Not at all fun for a small business that wants something simple that just works. We are dead set to migrate away to another system, something like GlassCube or Asana. The one feature we like in WSS that haven't had luck finding elsewhere, is online datasheet reporting where you can define columns, views, and sorting.

[ZenoArrow]

>"The one feature we like in WSS that haven't had luck finding elsewhere, is online datasheet reporting where you can define columns, views, and sorting."

Do you mean something like Tableau/QlikView/Pentaho/PowerBI?

http://www.tableau.com/

http://www.qlik.com/us/products/qlikview

http://community.pentaho.com/

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/

[mjrpes]

Those looks much more in-depth than we are looking for. Sharepoint datasheets lets you create, manage, and view datasets completely inside sharepoint. An end user, for instance, could create dataset of (for instance) company inventory. They can add custom columns with datatype, like inventory count, cost, status, condition, date purchased, etc. They can then create views to filter/sort/group data and display this in different places in a workspace. Data is entered and manage in sharepoint. Has lots of handy uses and you could train non-technical users with it. Replaced lots of excel spreadsheets.

[ZenoArrow]

Does a tool like Power BI Desktop not meet your needs? This video gives a quick overview of putting together a report and publishing it to a PowerBI reporting portal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgam9M8I0xA

[ZenoArrow]

> "Like hell I'm not blaming them."

So Microsoft tell the employees at your company which places to store their documents do they? Why does your company not standardise on how documents are stored?

>"It's not my fault that Microsoft can't write decent AJAX"

Examples?

[douche]

Skype for Business and Skype are two completely different, just barely compatible things. They run completely different networking protocols, and the S4B client is still, barring some cosmetic skinning, the same as the Lync client from nearly four years ago. The About page in the S4B client may still be calling itself the Microsoft Lync Client - it was still doing so in the 2016 version of the client this spring...

What a colossal marketing cockup

[ZenoArrow]

Very few people care about networking protocols, and SFB is explicitly a business communication tool, meaning that most of your contact will be with people who also have SFB. As for the About page of SFB, I can't comment on what it was before, but I've just checked, it now says Skype For Business 2016.

[douche]

I only know the details because I write software on top of some of the Lync/S4B APIs, and have to deal with customers that are completely confused why one Skype client they have for making calls works with our software, and their other Skype client with a nearly identical icon that they also use for making calls doesn't...

[ZenoArrow]

Which app do these users have? If they have SFB, does this not work?

https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Let-users-add-exter...

[wilde]

Do they have IMAP or ActiveSync disabled? You should be able to find compatible replacement clients.