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The Horror of Microsoft Teams

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Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#191

Post by chronomex »

userbinator wrote: post #133
bob1029 wrote: post #79

We currently use Teams and everyone on the team absolutely hates it. I am actively looking at alternatives such as mattermost or slack to get us onto something that doesn't run like complete garbage. Also, why did this have to be developed using electron? If Teams were a native application, or even written using something on the .NET-side, we would probably have about 20% the complaints we do today. Watching an appli…

It makes me want to spend an entire month's worth of weekends writing a native clone that no one will ever use. If you ever do, I'd suggest doing the same with Slack might get far more attention, given that it has a publicly documented API as well as a few thirdparty clients already. Also, why did this have to be developed using electron? Probably because Web/JS developers are far more common and cheaper than native…

ripcord is exactly that

https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#192

Post by timoth3y »

choppaface wrote: post #180
timoth3y wrote: post #160

I use both daily. I think the biggest problem with Teams can't be discovered by feature comparisons and performance metrics. Teams enables a company to "secure" the application in the same way other MS products can be. That makes the product easy to sell, but in practice, it prevents Teams from being an effective collaboration tool. If I want to create a new channel, I need to get approval from IT. If I want to invit…

In my experience with Slack, vendors are always locked down. A good practice is to create a totally separate Slack instance where vendors and contractors can talk freely with employees. If non-emoloyees are on company Slack, they can pick up IP, be witnesses to harassment, be exposed to PII leaks, etc. Locking down channels is tough. As a company grows, there can be immense confusion when channels pop up all over (es…

That's effectively what I do as well, but we don't have a corporate Slack account.

Teams is great for internal communications on long-running projects. It's well suited to that and I wouldn't substitute Slack. When used well, it cuts down on a ton of internal emails and status updates.

I don't really blame IT for locking down Teams. It makes a lot of sense for all the reasons you mention and many more. It's just that by locking it down they prevent Teams from really being a challenger to Slack.

It's not that Teams can't be configured to be just as useful as Slack, but enterprise IT best practices pretty much guarantees that it never will be.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#193

Post by atq2119 »

dinofacedude wrote: post #162

I am going to have to use Microsoft Teams next semester at my college for project management class. Not looking forward to it. Especially since there is no Linux version, and Linux is the only OS I enjoy using.

Then be glad that it's at least not Skype for Business: Teams has a decent web client, SfB doesn't.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#194

Post by atq2119 »

alkonaut wrote: post #44

We use it with some success on a medium team and it’s been pretty well received. That said: what we came from was Skype. No not the business kind, the regular one with blinking ads. Compared to that, Teams isn’t that bad. Nothing is. We evaluated Slack and a few others but the cost difference to slack when you already have a huge tab at Microsoft for their tools is pretty substantial if I remember correctly.

Frankly, the regular Skype is better than SfB: it has a fully featured Linux client.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#195

Post by broth »

mysterydip wrote: post #120
mullingitover wrote: post #7

> "This means that if someone does @${channel_name} you will get an alert. MS have not implemented muting as a feature. Secondly, for all those automatic/admin channels, you can’t unsubscribe yourself (or at least not with the default policies). Brilliant, isn’t it? Unavoidable alerts that any idiot on any channel can annoy people with." At my last job we figured out the fastest way to get your company off Teams: add…

Reminds me of the NET SEND command in windows 2000-xp. Allowed sending a popup text message to specific (or all with a wildcard!) machines on a network. Sure there were times where such a feature would be convenient ("server going down for maintenance, please save your work", etc), but overall ripe for abuse. They disabled it in a service pack and took it out altogether in subsequent versions.

Back in my senior year of high school during Spanish class I naively used NET SEND to send a message to one of my classmates. The only problem was that I failed to specify the user in the command and instead used *. This ended up sending a message to all computers in the school district.

I remember the computer administrator coming into the class saying “Are you aware one of your students is sending messages to the entire school district?” My heart sank.

I ended up getting in-school suspension. Considering this was my first ever “offense” in school, I felt like a badass going out with a bang.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#196

Post by moksly »

timoth3y wrote: post #160

I use both daily. I think the biggest problem with Teams can't be discovered by feature comparisons and performance metrics. Teams enables a company to "secure" the application in the same way other MS products can be. That makes the product easy to sell, but in practice, it prevents Teams from being an effective collaboration tool. If I want to create a new channel, I need to get approval from IT. If I want to invit…

I think Teams is exactly excellent because it allows you to secure your collaboration tool. Especially valuable post GDPR where you really don’t want your non-tech savy employers putting privacy data into some online Trello board, or slack/discord for that matter. The fact that teams is just part of your 365 platform is soooo awesome in non-tech enterprise that it’s hard to describe just how useful it is. But basically we have 7000 employees in my shop, 20% of them them can’t name the operating system iOS/Android/windows when they call support. You want your IT to protect them from themselves, even if that’s obviously not how you would word it in your strategy.

Too much control is bad though, like you say, creating channels/teams/task-boards shouldn’t be too bureaucratic. We were a little too liberal when we first opened up, allowing people to name their own, which resulted in mail-list mayhem. Because Microsoft created an e-mail address with the name people chose. This resulted in the “specialised child care department” creating a “specialised childcare” e-mail address, that would show up in outlook. Which in term led to some rather important e-mails getting lost, because people sent them to the one of the now two “specialised child care” email addresses that wasn’t getting read.

We fixed this by moving creation into our own tool and using the 365 API, so people still get to name their own collaboration projects, but they get a “Teams - “ in front of the name, and that’s filtered out of the e-mail listing so they don’t show up in the outlook address book.

I don’t personally like Teams or Tasks all that much functionally wise compared to other tools, but the fact that they are part of our 365 security setup and the fact that we’ve already paid for them, means I’ll use them.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#197

Post by VvR-Ox »

girvo wrote: post #166
mysterydip wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the NET SEND command in windows 2000-xp. Allowed sending a popup text message to specific (or all with a wildcard!) machines on a network. Sure there were times where such a feature would be convenient ("server going down for maintenance, please save your work", etc), but overall ripe for abuse. They disabled it in a service pack and took it out altogether in subsequent versions.

I caused havoc in high-school with that. And finding a way of executing binaries inside Novell's Netware thing, via the "Open" dialog within any Office application's Visual Basic macro editor haha

Haha, me too :D

Wrote a batch script that used a wildcard - it took them a while to find it and I was very lucky the only 3 persons who knew who it was wouldn't tell anyone. One was a teacher and I am thankful until today that he didn't screw up my life with telling this.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#198

Post by nudpiedo »

To me that sounds like a “agile” failure. They were to agile for a design, to collect user feedback or any variable input, to fix the known problems, and to try a realistic set up as the client does.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#199

Post by cwyers »

sebcat wrote: post #184
thethirdone wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What information are you expecting that wouldn't be easier to find by googling Hipchat? I can't understand why anyone would ask this.

No one is asking ”What’s Microsoft?” though.

Yeah, Hipchat is EOL and Teams has a market. Now, I _hate_ Teams, but it is nonobvious that Hipchat has a better notion of what features are necessary to be successful.
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