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The Horror of Microsoft Teams

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Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#221
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Renaming executables to explorer.exe worked with the application whitelisting solution my school implemented. That's how we ended up with 8-player age of empires 2 deathmatches after hours ;)

That brings me back. All .exe were blocked.

However it turned out that you could rename them .bat or .cmd and they would execute just fine.

I think Doom 2 multiplayer was extra fun because of the added need to be aware not just of in-game enemies but also the need to be aware of the teacher and be ready to instantly quit at any moment.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#222
post #5

Teams is horribly unintuitive to use. The UI is much worse than Slack. Took me long to realise I was looking at the chat window and to follow along the threads..

> The UI is much worse than Slack. In what way, have you found? I ask because I use both daily, and I like Slack better in some ways and Teams better in others.

The chat feels so hard to follow

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#223

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…

Why not create seperate private channels and make vendors single channel users?

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#224

The Teams client is built on Electron? Why? Developers need to stop building slow applications. This is ridiculous. It's 2019 and software is slower than it was in the 90s. It must take an enormous number of CPU cycles to execute simple tasks in an Election-based app. It's just incredibly inefficient. I heard similar things about Slack – that it was built on Node, maybe Electron, and was dog slow, especially to open.…

For one, nobody wants to use C++

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#225
post #196

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 basical…

How is putting privacy data in Teams different from putting it in Slack?

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Our Teams is basically completely open and not locked down at all.

I still hate it.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#227

How is it that businesses get sold on these poor groupware solutions when they can: a. self-host open-source Zulip (or Matrix/Riot, which is not that good compared to plain old The Lounge IRC) totally free b. pay for hosted software that’s open-source so their information isn’t hostaged when they decide their solution is crap? I see these kinds of poor choices made all the time. People usually don’t want to do the re…

On the one hand, sales people dazzle managers, and the lowly tech workers are not asked for their input (or it's not valued).

On the other hand, software/service contracts allow you to dodge various responsibilities and blame other people.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#228

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…

"If I want to create a new channel, I need to get approval from IT."

That depends how it is configured - where I work you can create channels in Teams even if you're not an owner of that Team.

Anyone can create a Team as well - but it is accepted that this is only done for a good reason.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#229
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares if an application's UI elements look the same across platforms? I want it to work on the platform I am using. I simply do not care what it looks like on someone else's platform, and I especially do not want to pay a performance penalty so some designer can have a virtual feather in their cap over it.

My opinion is that the OS should not be responsible for providing native elements to the application. If this is true then the application is tightly coupled to the OS implementing these components. In a perfect world, every application would have minimal dependencies required by the OS, and completely encapsulate their runtime and UI components, making them very portable... which is basically web apps, hence Electro…

This sounds like Java Swing.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#230
post #196

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 basical…

"I love how integrated it is but I had to write code to remove the integration that was counterproductive"

I get it, but it seems contradictory, and your workaround is probably beyond reach for many smaller businesses.

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