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The Horror of Microsoft Teams

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Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#292

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.…

It's built on Electron and still no native Linux client. There's a web version, but you can't join meetings or screenshare. There are 3rd party wrappers for the web version that enable meetings, but you still can't screenshare. At the very least their web version needs to have parity with the desktop application. It's 2019, browsers can handle voice chat and screensharing!

Can Slack do screenshare via Chrome? I know you can see others screen, but can't share mine.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Not QuiTe --- that's a step up from a web app in a browser, but not "true" native (i.e. pure Win32 on Windows.)

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#294

Microsoft ruins Skype, then tries making their own communication tool. Ugh. What is it again that Microsoft is getting such accolades for? Visual Studio Code is fantastic. Github is great, but they bought that. Office 365? OneDrive? I'll give you those. Hosted Exchange is a thorn in my side. Internet Explorer and Edge are (were?) both a joke. I don't have any experience with Azure. Xbox is great. Their server product…

> Internet Explorer and Edge are (were?) both a joke.

Chromium-based Edge (not pre-installed on Windows) is great.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#295
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I get your point, but I’m not sure you can apply enterprise problems to small businesses. Take my specific example, my department has a mailing list called something along the lines of Digitalisation, we have this because we’re 7000 employees at 200+ locations and you can be pretty sure a teacher at one of our schools don’t know who I am or what my position is called. They would know that they need to contact Digital…

You can use a group naming policy to enforce your “Teams-“ prefix requirements [1]. Or you can use a custom domain policy so the email addresses are at “@teams.company.com” [2]

1.https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/admin/create-grou...

2. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/admin/create-grou...

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#296
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m the wrong person to ask, all I know is that Microsoft, Azure and Offfice365 is on the government list of places we can put our data (which doesn’t go above NSIS level 3) safely and legally. Slack isn’t on that list.

Apart from some abstract legal paperwork requirements like those, I honestly don't see much difference between both privacy wise. If the company really requires privacy and owning their data, they should setup some hosted slack clone themselves.

AFAIK, Slack will store user data on servers in the US. For most European countries (if not all), Microsoft can guarantee that data won't leave that country. Especially for privacy sensitive sectors (e.g. finance), that can be a hard requirement.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#297

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.

Same here. We're a small company (6-7 employees plus a handful of freelancers) and we previously heavily relied on regular Skype. We mostly chat one-on-one and use team chats mostly for general status updates.

I'm working as a contractor so I also use Slack a lot but Slack was a terrible fit for our company and its GDPR compliance is extremely sketchy at best. Also the calling features are practically useless -- I haven't once managed to get anywhere near acceptable quality from that. And don't get me started on using Slack on dodgy wifi (which Slack seems to be either incapable or uninterested in fixing, if my conversations with Slack devs are anything to go by).

If you're already on Office 365 and mostly Windows, Teams is a no-brainer.

Slack is a replacement for IRC. Teams is a replacement for Skype for Business. There is a lot of overlap, especially in how Teams is covered in the press, but ultimately I feel there are more differences than commonalities, especially if you account for software like Mattermost and RocketChat.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we use it for file sharing File sharing: apparently still a problem almost four _decades_ after the Internet was invented.

Well, the Internet everyone uses isn't really designed for it. HTTP is a request/response model. But the model of filesharing is that I have a bunch of data and I want to send it to you, not that I have a bunch of data and I want you to ask me for it. File sharing over the internet means setting up a webserver, after which it works beautifully. But nobody wants to do that. They want to use browsers. TCP isn't asymmet…

It's a shame Torrenting gets such a bad rap. If I want to share a large file with somebody who knows what they are doing, I encrypt it, create a torrent, send them the magnet URL and then they can download it and decrypt it. No web server needed.

Unfortunately, a lot of the time, people have no idea what you are on about, or even if they do, they are behind a corporate firewall with torrenting blocked/on a work machine and can't install a client.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#299
post #10

I can believe they’re overtaking slack because they make Teams an aggressive default install with the Office 365 client, and it’s replacing Skype for Business.

It is not in fact installed with every Office 365 install. I just had Teams pushed with a separate group policy because of this. They will overtake Slack easily since it is a free addition to most 365 plans

If you take a blank W10 machine and do a 365 fat client install on it you get the ‘Teams machine wide installer’ installed on it, which then hooks the teams installer in on a per login basis. Your workplace must have endpoint management in place that somehow prevents this.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#300
post #29
post #24

And Microsoft thinks it's a good idea to add an advert to use Teams into Windows (added to the autostarted program list, so you see the popup every time you restart Windows). Just shows that the OS is for Microsoft's benefit, not for your productivity.

Not to mention this thing kept installing itself even when I uninstalled it for the 5th time! I gave up!

There's a solution for that: create a file called "Teams." in %APPDATA%\Microsoft. The installer will absolutely try to install itself to %appdata% (instead of, say, %programfiles% or any admin-configurable path), and having a file there will prevent the installer from creating its installation directory.
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