131–140 of 160 posts
The other day I found Boxcryptor for Teams[1] which seemed like a useful tool, if the company can be convinced to use it. At least it feels like an option for a privacy concerned organisation, which somehow ended up in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. [1] https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/microsoft-teams/
In my experience, Teams, even with the official Linux app (Electron-based) simply doesn't work on Linux, just like Skype for Enterprise didn't work before. Had an appointment the other week with a customer, and had to resort to dial-in with audio-only. I guess you need a corporate account or something, but Teams wouldn't say. When I wanted to start a video call, an error message would flash up briefly, like 100ms, so…
On Mint 20.1, both Teams app and webapp works. Might be dependent on distro/versions. It's still slow and bloated, so I quit it at EOD.
pkill teamsIMHO Teams isn't as good as they make out. Firstly, you have the constant stream of 'Are you there?' popups which kick you out of calls, alongside the blocking modals which stop you from editing documents. Moreover, the UI is a slow mess. I guess the most attractive point for employers is that this is free for 0365 consumers, but O365 isn't that good either IMHO.
What are those? I have never seen or heard about those.
Teams has a really weird kind of lock-in - it’s impossible to print or export a chat session, and really really hard to even Ctrl-C copy text from across multiple pages of chat. The total radio silence from Microsoft on this issue, even after it being up on UserVoice for years with thousands of votes, is making me think it is less a technical issue and more an ulterior motive to trap data.
To think that I can't have the logs of what I said is pretty incredible.
So much regression since the days Pidgin was a thing.
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> Same for the MITM ssl proxy stuff. If I logon to my personal banking website while at work, and my employer MITM's that connection to snoop, have they genuinely not broken any law?
If you're doing it on a company machine, haven't you implicitly given you permission to see that data? You don't have privacy on company equipment.
In general, in Europe you can't contract away most of your privacy rights, so it's not even worth looking at your job contract because you signing "I allow the company to do X" does not necessarily mean that the company is allowed to do X.
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> Teams is Skype Teams uses (or at least used) Skype for business' core under the hood
And Skype for Business is actually their old Lync product and not related to Skype, the once famous VoIP startup.
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Teams is Skype, but worse. Seriously, it's just reskinned Skype with bolt-ons. You can see "skype" present in the address bar sometimes when you load Teams in a browser. The Teams desktop application (at least on Linux) has references to Skype as well. Teams routinely uses between 200 and 500 MB of memory to run, which makes it the 2nd most memory-intensive program on my computer. On top of that, it doesn't even work…
As someone who has worked on thirdparty clients for IM since the days of MSN Messenger (MSNP), the degradation is sad to see and extremely obvious. The backend protocol that Teams uses is essentially MS-Skype (as opposed to the "OG Skype" binary P2P one), with some Teams-specific additions. Even the authentication token is called the "skypetoken". The only good thing about that is it should make a thirdparty Teams cl…
Who can I throw money at to help make this happen? (Even one that only supported plain text chats and presence would be worth a lot, just so I don't have to have the whole beast running unless I'm actually in a video meeting)
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Slack has it's benefits, but many of the complaints about Teams are because of its flexibility. For example the clutter of teams channels and chats can be simplified to Slack level if used with discipline (or maybe it's even configurable). The way to IM individuals is cumbersome but consistent with other cumbersome Office products.
My biggest complaint is that the “teams” section is in a completely separate tab from the “chat” section. I find that companies tend to gravitate toward one of the two, because it’s impossible to keep switching.
I don't like how Slack keeps only a limited list of recent chats there, the hit-miss ratio for me is terrible and I usually need to re-search for the person I want to chat with.
If I enter the relationship voluntary and I acknowledge that there's no expectation of privacy on my employer's systems, and I understand that this is considered needed by the company on one hand and I am being paid on the other, I just don't see where there's room for me to complain.
It comes down more to how I feel about my employer to begin with. If I feel like I am in a good place, I don't worry that my boss will use my IM response ratio against me. If I am in a bad place then probably this ratio isn't going to make or break my career either - there are other bigger issues.
I can't believe how aggressive Teams is at inserting itself in my login items (on a Mac). At first, I thought it just happened when I installed the application. But nope — any time I open Teams, it will re-insert itself in my list of login items. This happens no matter how many times I have manually removed it. I think it even happens more than once per launch because I recently launched it to join a call and then im…
I like the idea of running apps in their own sandbox, eg using docker container to run an instance.
For macOS, maybe second desktop login just for Teams and then use quick user switching.
Kludge, not a fix.
Working remotely, my SO has to agitate the mouse, like a dead person's switch, to prevent screensaver / lock screen, and to signal to micromanaging PHB continuous attention. Separate user login wouldn't help with that.