This sounds like ad administrative issue with how Teams are built and organized within Teams. It can be clean, simple, and effective when managed properly but user training is important.
The Horror of Microsoft Teams
321–330 of 344 posts
Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams
#322I 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…
Alternatively, I can create a new team or channel myself without oversight, standards, or any sort of best practice. That functionality is not locked down allowing freedom but the possibility of a wild west chat system.
Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams
#323The 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.…
I have a Karaoke project that runs in electron on a raspberry pi. Electron is not inherently slow. It runs on the Chrome V8 engine, which is blazingly fast.
Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
This misses the point. The parent isn’t talking about just building a few chat apps. They are talking about building a chat app which can have basically any ms office thing embedded inside it.
Not real office, web-based office. Why not make a native chat app that opens Office files in the real full-featured Office ?
Office is going the other direction and moving more of the "full-featured" Office components to React Native and sharing them with the web. Teams was built as a quick spike by the SharePoint team to prove they could slackingly build a chat client. It might not be a surprise if it moves to React Native in the future.
Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams
#325At 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…
So essentially Microsoft's chat app is not good at chat, but you use it for file-sharing instead because Microsoft's file-sharing app is not good at file-sharing?
It's okay at chat, but the big deal is that it's Microsoft's best client for SharePoint. It finally makes a lot of SharePoint features make sense and puts them in a way that is easy to use without paying a consultant design firm an arm and a leg on customizing the widgets on team SharePoint portals in such a way that mere mortals can find the important stuff like the team's document libraries, Wiki, or OneNote Notebook.
(It really is amazing how much Teams has lit up "we have the ability to do that now" for SharePoint features that have existed almost forever. I was particularly amused when someone asked me why so many Teams features have SharePoint URLs when SharePoint didn't support them and then showing them the three or four step process to do it on SharePoint that has been there all along.)
Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams
#326At 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…
Doesn’t it just create SharePoint sites for each team on the backend and store the files in SharePoint? Even on 1:1 chat sharing a file just uploads it to OneDrive and uses OneDrive links.
Yes, Teams is a SharePoint client from the SharePoint team. Arguably the best SharePoint client ever from the SharePoint team. (The chat storage even gets stored in the SharePoint backend and you can add Teams chat as widgets on a SharePoint frontend.)
Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams
#327I could add so much to this, and in fact, recently closed a text file enumerating issues I had with Teams because I felt it wasn't a good use of my time, since I felt like I was the only one having problems with it. A few more points, in case anybody in the Teams team is reading: 1. Implement filters. Filters for teams, filters for channels, filters for search results. I can't filter my Files by file type, so it's a…
#3 Skype is discontinued and Teams is the replacement. That's likely why.
Also, #4 is because of #3. The weird Meetings tab in Teams is a better version of a Skype for Business tab that almost no one used directly (also called Meetings and using the exact same icon), and having that tab in Teams now is directly a part of the Skype for Business migration.
Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams
#328I could add so much to this, and in fact, recently closed a text file enumerating issues I had with Teams because I felt it wasn't a good use of my time, since I felt like I was the only one having problems with it. A few more points, in case anybody in the Teams team is reading: 1. Implement filters. Filters for teams, filters for channels, filters for search results. I can't filter my Files by file type, so it's a…
#5: That's an organization decision to disable the T-Bot. Though why they disabled chatting with it and also disabled removing it from your Chat list (which is also something that orgs have power over) is a fascinating question of organization settings micromanagement.
#7: Teams support incoming and outgoing webhooks, very similarly to Slack, but as with so many other things, access to them can be enabled/disabled by organization settings.
Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams
#329My main frustration with Teams are:
- Caching + searching : Their caching and searching is just terrible. It's surprising how hard it is to search older messages especially in a private group chat. scrolling up takes a long time. Images don't show up in the desktop app, so I have to open web app all the time.
- Centralized control: I agree that Teams is designed for centralized control. some of it might be good, but its a communation software, and telling people how to communicate seems like it'd defeat the purpose.
- Not being able to add External people: Agree with the OP, this is a pain. People in my org did this well with slack, but once we were asked to move to teams, we weren't collaborating with external folks the same way.
- Chat and Teams are two different windows. WHen I am in private chat area, I never see new messages in Teams area. Notifications for chat work fine when I am in teams area.
- Threading: I think threading is poorly implemented, since it collapses the thread when you reopen the app.
I feel like it would be an excellent improvement over email if this came out before slack. But slack has shown what a good chat software can do, and teams falls short in many ways.
Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams
#330Microsoft 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…
> Edge are (were?) both a joke
Edge is one of the best E-pub readers ever, in any platform.
That's the only thing I use it for, but it beats Internet Explorer, that just wastes disk space, never being used.