[noneeeed]

This is one of the small number of takeovers (along with Sparrow and Dark Sky) that actually make me angry, because they deprived everyone of something really great, for little apparent benefit.

The fact that so many people use Slack, but then do all their voice, video and screensharing in Zoom or some other tool says a lot about Slack as a tool and company.

My wife uses Teams for work. It's rubbish in many ways, but when she's using it they do everything in it. Somehow slack has failed at this despite having many of the same features built in.

[irrational]

Why do you say Teams is rubbish? We used it for the better part of a year before moving to Slack (corporation wide mandate). So far my opinion of Slack is that it is rubbish. I never had any issues with Teams, but Slack has been a nightmare for me. I don’t get updates and notifications about channels I’m following like I should. It doesn’t work anywhere near as well on my phone as Teams did. I’m not a MS lover (I was a web developer during the first two browser wars and the standards war and still have bad feelings towards MS), but Teams seems to be really well put together. I’m interested to hear why you disagree.

[wokwokwok]

Do you use teams a lot?

I’m literally astonished to read this.

Teams is the king of “press a key and wait for the screen to unfreeze”, or the “launched but all you get is a white box until you restart”.

It also features what I politely refer to as “no search”, which is where you search your chat history, and conversations just aren’t there... until you go back through your history and find them, and then wow! Suddenly you can search for it.

Screen sharing can cause a meeting to drop out for no reason.

Want to upload a video? Or an image? Well, you can get an empty white box and when you click on it, you’ll get an empty white pop up. Great job.

Now, all of that said... that’s on windows.

Now try using it on a Mac. Ha! Haaaaaa!

Usable? Yes.

Good?? Not in my books.

It’s one of the poorest chat applications I’ve used, personally. /shrug

To be fair, I haven’t had much trouble with the mobile app on iOS, but I don’t use it much, and it’s seems on-par to the slack one to me.

...but I certainly wouldn’t call it a marvel of engineering; it’s just deeply integrated with outlook and it’s mandatory; so people who don’t do “chat” also use it.

[irrational]

Yes, I used it constantly day in and day out on a mac for years. I honestly never experienced the things you mention. But I do have a high end mac, so maybe that has something to do with it?

[wokwokwok]

Everyone who uses it in our office on all platforms experiences these issues to a greater or lesser extent, depending how much they use it.

I guess you’re just lucky? Or we’re unlucky?

...but we have about 900 staff using it, so it seems like a strange outlier to me.

I’m absolutely astonished to hear that you don’t get the “missing image” bug; that one happens all the time with larger images you share. It literally happened to me yesterday morning.

Maybe it a regional thing, and the Australian infrastructure is just rubbish behind the scenes and we’re seeing latency issues?

No idea; also don’t really care that much; teams gets my thumbs down. It’s rubbish as far as I’m concerned; hopefully others have better experiences with it.

[achow]

Use Teams for Video conference. It is a life saver.

Never faced issues on the things that you mention - screen sharing, uploading of a video or image etc.

Perf no issues, conduct internal as well as external conferences with college hires and interns (session attendance can go up to 70-80 people).

Yes there are some usability issues - the most notorious among my colleagues being the very clumsy meeting link share.

[magicalhippo]

Used it for a few years, and heavily this year with several daily screen sharing sessions, calls, meetings, ad-hoc group calls, both internally and with external contacts since Covid-19 hit the streets in March, and I've never experienced any of what you mention.

Never heard any issues from my colleagues either, including the less technically minded at sales which usually come running if something doesn't work.

While I think it has room for improvement, for basic stuff it just works for us.

[BlargMcLarg]

Just like parent stating "usable? yes", I too find it usable at best. Coming from a history of using Discord and Slack, where Discord was mostly "less formal Slack without all the utilities, but with voice chat", I find Teams to fall into an uncanny valley.

The focus on video conferences might be the most annoying part. Most of the time, I just want to see the shared screen at best. There's an option to stop incoming video, though this one isn't on by default. There also flat-out isn't a way to stop looking at your own face when sharing video.

Meetings with Teams links tend to inflate the history, dozens of chats that could've been one thing now cause dumb questions like "should we stay here or go into the other call?". This was already solved by apps like Teamspeak more than a decade ago. It feels immensely clunky, but the culture also doesn't provide an intuitive way to avoid this problem.

The last bit highlights my biggest problem. It's mostly culture. It feels as restrictive as your average enterprise program, yet it also feels chaotic in all the wrong ways. Many problems have already been solved and plenty of cultures, like global social gaming, have already experienced ways to handle this. Had I not had any experience with other apps, I likely wouldn't feel this way.

I also realize part of the problem is how Teams is configured, which I have no experience with. But then it once again boils down to "here you have this tool that can do a lot, but it's not intuitive and we don't give you a lot of guidelines" despite the fact most companies have zero experience with remote.

[lenkite]

This is strange. Our company uses Teams and I have never experienced any of those problems in 2 years.

The only problems I have had with Teams is the robotic-voice quality and the strange fascination that Microsoft has in changing their UI's from update to update leading me to keep hunting for that button which was there previously but can't be found now since its moved to some other place.

[Jochim]

Not the parent, but it's far too easy for your IT department to totally fuck teams up.

Our Teams instance has the calendar disables making it a pain to join meetings if you don't have easy access to your outlook calendar. They've also disabled any sort of api access which really limits what can be done in terms of integrating it into our other workflows.

In terms of general usability the app is lacking in information density. I routinely miss messages in team channels I've collapsed.

[irrational]

Huh, I have the opposite problem with Slack. I’m constantly missing messages on Slack, but I never did on Teams.

[IamZeroBalance]

Same thing happened to me. Missing a LOT of messages. No notifications at all and it's really frustrating.

[audiometry]

Teams doesn’t even have the ability to reply-quote to a message in chat. Moreover it’s very wasteful with screen real estate.

I’d also add that since my company moved to 365, about once every two weeks I get some email from it dept talking about service level disruptions.

And in the meantime it emails it’s creepy “we were watching your productivity” messages weekly.

Not a fan.

[vehementi]

> I don’t get updates and notifications about channels I’m following like I should

This sounds weird, like a configuration or permissions issue. Those basic features work flawlessly.

[ptrklly]

What happened with Dark Sky? I have used it for years and it seems just as good as ever. And it’s one of the few iPhone apps I give full location information to so I like that it’s owned by Apple since they have that info anyway.

[pcr0]

The fact that they shut down the API and Android app.

[ptrklly]

Ah, of course.