The Horror of Microsoft Teams • Hacker News Board

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#31

Post by levythe » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 10:20 PM UTC

late2part wrote: post #27

DubiousPusher wrote: post #21

It's interesting that Teams is often compared to email or chat. It's much more akin to a forum or bulletin board system. I've found this to be a pretty powerful thing to have at work. However, it does happen to fit my work groups use case very well. We work on lots of short term projects. Each of these we spin up a "team" for. These are 3D projects that require a lot of media sharing from a cross disciplinary which w…

Do folks on your team understand how poor your product is for users?

They said they work at MS, not that they work on Teams.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#32

Post by rsynnott » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 10:21 PM UTC

It’s astonishing how bad Microsoft seems to be at things like this. I don’t really understand what’s going on in there.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#33

Post by Wistar » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 10:23 PM UTC

I just wish I could stop Teams from starting up every time I log in and without creating a Teams account. I looked up various solutions others have come up with and it is seemingly very convoluted.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#34

Post by vbordo » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 10:23 PM UTC

> "[caching/searching] is awful on any platform. It’s not clear what the bounds are for any search and only a very brief history is cached locally. Everything else has to be fetched remotely so scrolling is painful and searching glacial."

I've felt this frustration with Teams and Slack. Effective search in any real-time messaging platform seems difficult to deliver. Has anyone else had this problem and found a good solution to it?

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#35

Post by inetknght » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 10:24 PM UTC

stuart78 wrote: post #20

At my work, we use Teams a fair bit, and I'll go out on the limb to defend it (a limb I'm quite familiar with at this point ;) ). Thinking of it as a Slack alternative is, IMO, the wrong starting point. We barely use it for chat (as we have Slack as well). Instead, we use it as a file share and central information home. Each group within a team has a channel and we use the tabs to track meeting notes, embed external…

> we use it for file sharing

File sharing: apparently still a problem almost four _decades_ after the Internet was invented.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#36

Post by jimbobimbo » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 10:24 PM UTC

My biggest grief with Teams is that it's impossible to shut off notifications. With pretty much everything turned off in its settings and being in Do-Not-Disturb mode it still blinks the icon and shows number of unread notifications in the taskbar. Just. No.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#37

Post by shermozle » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 10:24 PM UTC

m4tthumphrey wrote: post #22

My team were using HipChat and had to find an alternative when they sold off to Slack. They actually offered a really good discount to move over. But as the company already recently moved to O365 and Teams is free within that, I thought I'd give it a try. My team hated it, I tolerated it. Until one day I'd just had enough of the UX that Teams brings. The biggest issue was the threading; it truly beggars belief. We en…

> That being said, the Teams UX will slowly and steadily improve.

That's not the Microsoft way. It'll accumulate features without ever deprecating bad features, not fundamentally improve. Look at Outlook. That terrible threading has its roots there. There'll be _someone_ out there who loves it, so it'll never go away.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#38

Post by walshemj » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 10:28 PM UTC

jimbobimbo wrote: post #36

My biggest grief with Teams is that it's impossible to shut off notifications. With pretty much everything turned off in its settings and being in Do-Not-Disturb mode it still blinks the icon and shows number of unread notifications in the taskbar. Just. No.

I use focus assist on and I don't get to bothered by teams at work (it is a small And teams works better for a/v conference that whatever Microsoft has done to poor skype.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#39

Post by rsynnott » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

DubiousPusher wrote: post #21

It's interesting that Teams is often compared to email or chat. It's much more akin to a forum or bulletin board system. I've found this to be a pretty powerful thing to have at work. However, it does happen to fit my work groups use case very well. We work on lots of short term projects. Each of these we spin up a "team" for. These are 3D projects that require a lot of media sharing from a cross disciplinary which w…

> It's been a pretty happy addition over Outlook (barf) and Skype for Business aka Lync.

Damning with incredibly faint praise, there.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#40

Post by wcoenen » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 10:31 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #4

I think Teams is pretty good, but then again my company had been using Cisco Jabber prior to it.

I like Teams for a similar reason: it is replacing Skype for Business. Properly persisted group chat is a must have for remote teams, and SfB didn't really have that. Or actually it did ("chat rooms"), but it's one of those bolt-on features that requires cooperation of an administrator to set up. Impossible to get done in a big corporation.

(Now if only if I could convince my colleagues to use Teams properly with N people in a channel instead of continuing to have N^2 one-to-one chats about the latest crisis...)