If you think you don't like Slack, just wait until your company forces you to use Microsoft Teams ... Slack is really focused, performant, and an absolute joy to use in comparison.
If you think you don't like X, just wait until your company forces you to use Microsoft Y.
- _emacsomancer_'s law
I've used slack for school, and it was pretty useful. I'm using Teams at work, and it seems remarkably less so. I'm not sure if it's because nobody's comfortable using it for anything other than skype meetings, or because it somehow seems less intuitive or well thought out as slack. Probably a bit of both.
One thing that kind of kills me - we use visualstudio.com too for git (incidentally, it's interesting to see a strong tfs team struggling with git - vs/git integration is useful only if you're relative comfortable with git in the first place), and there doesn't seem to be any kind of strong integration between vs.com and ms teams. That's weird. I see my team on teams, I converse with them on teams, I have access to my backlog items on teams (with an azure plugin), but why can't I see my team's board? vs.com's UI takes some getting used to, but at the very least it seems like it should be accessible, with very little additional work, within teams.
Teams feels a lot like a half-baked (maybe 3/4 baked) response to Slack that could really be so much more.
"and there doesn't seem to be any kind of strong integration between vs.com and ms teams"
Is Teams the bastard stepchild of Microsoft? I haven't used Teams, but I recall reading a personal account probably 6 years ago about what working on Google+ was like. Every time something integrated to it, it was a mess and dragged the other products down. Word got around and groups actively avoided the Google+ team and were scrambling for justification as to why they shouldn't get integrated.
0 chance I could find the comment now, but it stuck with me all these years.
You can add a tab with an arbitrary URL to your 'team' - it's the "Website" Tab type. Presumably you could put the vs.com link for your team's board in using that?
> just wait until your company forces you to use Microsoft Teams
Teams isn't that terrible.
On my current gig, we use Teams (free for us because of some Action Pack or Office package - and that's fine because it's one less spend for us) and used to use Slack. I've used Slack and HipChat in previous employments as well.
I'll be honest, I don't see much difference between any of them, they all have their UIX minor annoyances and good points.
Ultimately with all these things it's all about good team etiquette and not interrupting your colleague workflow expecting responses within two minutes of pinging someone (we treat it like email, asynchronous, and for non-urgent communication). To be honest, I dislike the immediacy of these tools and usually mute every channel. If something's really that bloody urgent then just pick up the sodding phone :)
The underpinnings are a step in the right direction, but the UX is a dumpster fire, which makes me pine for the usability of the lesser dumpster fire of Lync/Skype for Business.
God forbid you ever need to be doing two IM conversations at a time, or attend a meeting and carry on a backchannel conversation concurrently.
It's apparently too difficult to do a MDI interface in Electron.
To be honest there's just four of us all working remotely so I've not bumped into this. But I take your points onboard. I will admit I thought the screen sharing capability in Teams was fairly poor, but it's not something we do often and can resort to TeamViewer or something like that if need be. But I do realise that's not an option for folks working in a regimented and heavily controlled environment such as a bank.
Also we're in our mid 40's to 50's so perhaps there's a generational discipline we have with these toys that the young guns may not have :) Don't get me wrong, I was a complete asshole on the college VAX messaging thing back in my teens :)
To be honest it doesn't seem any worse than Slack (I only use the desktop client). But as I mentioned earlier, we're a fairly small team and use it sparingly.
It’s Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can’t stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time. - Joel Spolsky, 2008