[andyjohnson0]

I use Teams every day (for work, the company basically runs on it) for chat and meetings, and I'm one of those strange people who never really have much problem with it. I can think of one occasion in perhaps the last six months when it crashed and I had to kill and restart it. Otherwise it just sits there on my laptop and does its thing. Same with Outlook etc.

So, what am I doing wrong? How do I get the authentic Teams user experience that everyone else here seemingly has?

[dgan]

Techincally it works, but the UX is terrible. So many times I couldnt copy a message because of the stupid emojis popping up right below my mouse, so that you have opportunity to look dumb after sending a "heart" in a professional meeting about serious matter.

Also, it HAS to rename my files.

Also sending code barely works, and not for long messages

This is just on top of my head

[jon-wood]

In the strictest form Teams "works". You can chat with people, you can do video calls, you can share files. Outside of the core "calling a person" experience though it's a mess, starting with the way the word Team is so overloaded, it has several different meanings within the Teams application. There's very few other places where its so apparent that a piece of software is bunch of other products all mashed together and shipped as fast as possible - you've got Sharepoint in there, Office, Skype for Business, and very little consideration seems to have gone into how to make all of those work together seamlessly.

[StopDisinfo910]

You are not alone. I also personally find Teams more than ok even if I wish it was more snappy.

Meetings work great. Compatible equipment in room makes everything feel seem less. Collaborative editing and file sharing are both awesome.

Every time it’s brought up on HN I get the feeling that people here use collaborative tools in a very different way I do. They mostly want something to chat via text which I and most of the people in my area of work use very little. I think that’s where the disconnect comes from.

Teams is not primarily a text chat software. It’s not built for this purpose as that’s not how most office workers collaborate. That’s quite obvious.

[gausswho]

> Teams is not primarily a text chat software. It’s not built for this purpose as that’s not how most office workers collaborate. That’s quite obvious.

That's insightful. I gather your workday is a blend of collaborative document writing or video calls?

At work, I'm at my best when I'm not in meetings nor documents. I'm writing text all day, some for computers, some for humans. But I can see how I'm in the minority across the spectrum of knowledge work.

[SoftTalker]

Text chat is the only thing I do with Teams. Video calls and meetings we use Zoom.

[mtalantikite]

> Teams is not primarily a text chat software. It’s not built for this purpose as that’s not how most office workers collaborate. That’s quite obvious.

The problem is that it’s a perfectly fine video meeting application (although what sociopath decided entering a meeting unmuted was a proper default), but many orgs try to push it as their chat application too. The UX for that is awful. And for some of us that is the primary way we communicate. I started working from home in 2008, collaborating on code over Freenode long before that. Most eng teams I’ve been on these past 20 years coordinate on chat. It’s hard when the business people think Teams is fine and then the rest of us have to use busted software.

[ryanjshaw]

I’m also puzzled by the hate for Teams. I used Teams for years and developed on Power Platform. The integration between all the pieces of the MS stack is unrivaled.

I now use Slack, Zoom, Google Workspace etc. and don’t enjoy the experience at all. It feels low quality and messy compared to Teams.

[dijit]

Wow.

I don't believe you.

Making App integrations for Slack to basically anything is pretty close to a joyful experience, the rest of it is comparable to other chat systems perhaps, but are you really telling me with a straight face that developing applications atop Teams (that do more than just plug other Microsoft things together) is actually a superior experience?

I get that opinions are subjective and all that, but so you understand: I'm having the same reaction as if someone said to you that contracting gangrene is preferable to a walk in the park.

[ryanjshaw]

Yes. I’ve built apps on Power Platform and I’ve built a Slack App; the Teams experience is superior, for me. Could it take some lessons from Slack - yes, a python or typescript code block in Power Automate would be awesome.

As for your reaction: if your experience is so different, a useful attitude might be to ask why you have such an absurdly negative viewpoint.

[dijit]

Thanks for altering your comment to remove the “grow up” remark, it wasn’t helpful.

To tell you the truth I always assumed it was because Microsoft didn’t really care about chatops or any integration that was not within their ecosystem (or a website). The experience is consistent with that viewpoint.

[cmrdporcupine]

The biggest problems with Teams -- which I had to use daily for over a year and a half at my previous job -- is with its UX, not its implementation. I found bugs in the Linux client here and there, but they weren't showstoppers. But using it was just frustrating because it got in the way of communication and didn't work how I expected.

It's just not good. When you compare it to Slack, etc. it's just constantly awkward and getting in the way. And it tries to do too much, on top of that.

Slack is rapidly getting shittier though, so.

[petepete]

Same for me, it works and allows me to do what I need to do. It does it neither gracefully or efficiently, but I think that's down to it trying to be everything at once, and the UI suffers as a result.

The main thing that trips me up is that I often confuse my Outlook calendar for me Teams calendar - because they look almost the same but work completely differently.

[wilsonnb3]

I think it might still be a toggleable option but the “new calendar” experience in teams is exactly the same as the outlook web calendar.

[malnourish]

I don't think you can "follow" meetings in Outlook yet

[gausswho]

> The main thing that trips me up is that I often confuse my Outlook calendar for me Teams calendar - because they look almost the same but work completely differently.

Makes you wonder how many teams does Microsoft have working on calendars.

[marcosdumay]

Outlook, Teams, Exchange Web Access, and the electron-based email client all have different calendars with completely different capabilities.

[globular-toast]

mIRC and many other clients just sat there and did their thing. 30 years ago. Countless projects have been coordinated via IRC. This isn't a high bar for chat software.

Teams fails every day at its basic purpose. Chats are confusing, the threaded ones being utterly useless. Constantly have to use the mouse to do basic stuff like address people or change channel. Stuff randomly breaks all the time, syntax highlighting seems to break in some new way every other week. It's complete garbage software and a massive regression for those of us who remember proper, simple chat software from decades ago.

[p_ing]

mIRC fails at video conferencing, though.

You're comparing apples to oranges.

[hpcjoe]

Teams regularly fails at video conferencing. It complains of low network bandwidth at random times, and I check my firewall (OpnSense with fq_codel enabled and reasonable bandwidth limits) to note that it under very light load.

I am not sure if this is a server side thing at Microsoft, or a problem with the application itself. True under Windows, Linux, via local app, and via the web app.

For larger meetings (> 50 people), we use zoom. Unlike teams, zoom generally just works. Quite well in fact.

Teams is simply crap software, forced upon us. If we could jettison that and Outlook, I would be grateful. Though our IT looks at us in an unblinking stare, if we ask them to allow us to use any of the better clients on mobile, laptop, desktop, windows or linux. Its almost as if our third eye in the middle of our forehead opened up.

[p_ing]

We host tens of thousands of people on Teams video conferencing calls without issue.

[FredrikSE]

I used Teams since released, never have those problems unless on a bad network. Use it several hours a day.

[dijit]

You're not doing it wrong, if anything I'm genuinely happy for you.

This isn't sarcasm or anything, I really mean it. If you're somehow on Teams' happy path and it does what you expect then I'm envious, I wish I was you and I am grateful that it's helpful to you at least.

For me, though, the frustration stems from being forced to use it at work, which amplifies every quirk tenfold. Minor annoyances like duplicated groups of the same people (splitting chat histories across sessions), the "every team is a SharePoint site" bloat, and the massive resource drain (though that's easing as hardware improves) add up fast.

That is to say that they also relay all of their calls through datacenters half a continent away, so if you're close to one of those then it's fine but the further you are the more likely you are to accidentally talk over people and so on, there's no peer-to-peer, even 1:1 calls are relayed with Teams; making Google Meet and Jitsi perform "better" (though people can't explain why).

Then there's the dev-side slop: mangled code snippets in chats, meeting controls jammed at the top (pulling your eyes away from the camera), and—God help you: if you've ever tried building chatops integrations on it, you'd break down and cry. Like, real, actual office-bathroom breakdown tears.