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Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#731
post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atlassian is an asshole company for their stance against selfhosting it.

What stance? You simply purchase a license and selfhost it. See https://www.atlassian.com/migration/assess/compare-cloud-dat...

Maybe for insane prices. But that too will go away.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#732
Never had any of these issues but.

* The volume is STILL too low after all these years.

* You can't be in more than one meeting at the same time. Even working with Teams is difficult while being in a meeting even though this has been improved. If you stay within same account that is, otherwise, you still lose.

* You are much more limited as logged-in than as guest meaning half of the attendees are guests even if they have accounts.

* Multiple Teams accounts simple does not work.

* Creating a guest account in a third-party (Teams) tenant is among the biggest mistake one can do. MS seems randomly force you to login to any or all the associated tenants for your account. You downloaded that document from a customer once and VS like, now before you deploy something to your private tenant in Azure, let me force you to login to that customer that you once got a doc from.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're referring to with two non-interoperable message apps named Messenger? There was MSN Messenger/.NET Messenger/Windows Messenger/Windows Live Messenger, but those were interoperable (they were the same thing, just updates). They also managed to wrangle compatibility with Yahoo Messenger (although by then no one I knew still used Yahoo), and apparently Facebook Messenger, and then did a crappy m…

NT had a built in messenger service that operated on named pipes. It was one of those services you disabled as soon as you could.

net send *

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#734

On linux, Microsoft teams will change your system sound settings to match its preference. This includes Bluetooth headphones no longer being available to the system. Then, it decides the system settings are beneath it and will only use its own device settings. And it will decide now that your fancy Bluetooth headset is gone, there is also no need for that crappy internal microphone either, so enjoy not having any mic…

Install Microsoft Edge for Linux and use the web version through that. Really, it's a great solution. I've done it for a while. I don't use edge for anything else but it runs teams.microsoft.com great

it does not display calls notification tough.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you just write sensible commit messages. Commits together with the messages should require as little out of band information as possible.

Bullshit. "Fix performance issue in listing page for customer support". Which customer? Is it the same issue as the one this other customer is reporting? How does the support person know the fix has been released? Unless you are expecting devs to copy paste a tonne of info into commit messages, it's way easier to just put the god damn ticket number in the commit title. If you really need to commit something with no t…

> Unless you are expecting devs to copy paste a tonne of info into commit messages, it's way easier to just put the god damn ticket number in the commit title.

Yes, that's what devs should do. Or link to an issue from the git provider. Commit messages shouldn't contain customer information, they should contain fine grained information why the change fixes a particular issue and other technical minutae.

What you doing here is conflating business information and technical information. Business knowledge has no reason to be in commit messages. The code base should be 100% understandable without specific knowledge about what customer wanted what. It would be a huge red flag for me to see those things talked about in the context of the commit messages as a regular thing.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that is changing "soon" (with an ever-changing definition of "soon")

What is the “new” version’s tech stack? I always thought that with the Office and Windows team slowly adopting React Native for some features that they would redo Teams with that. Realistically they could start out with a React Native shell and just use web views for most functionality at first to replace Electron (and eventually, hopefully, rewrite some core functionality in RN and/or actually native bits).

.net native application per platform, with WebView2 views but logic moved to some .net language, probably C#.

I believe all application logic is moving to .net with the visible elements being HTML & CSS, but do not remember where I read it, so take it with a grain of salt.

if there was mention of react native, I do not remember it, but I gloss right over mentions of most web frameworks, so it may play a role.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#737

My 2 cents of venting on this sorry excuse of software - Backtick formatting in a chat post only works after typing the closing backtick, deleting it, re-typing it - Text copied from a conversation is polluted with names and time stamps. "I really want this feature" said nobody ever - The mute/unmute button is hard to find, I don't think I've ever attended a Teams meeting without someone struggling with this. Teams s…

the markdown like editing is horrible, why is it so hard to implement a few basic formatting options? especially using `backticks` which unless written in one go doesn't work. There was a good few months where lists (-/*) or quote blocks (>) didn't work at all unless selected with mouse, and it would drive me crazy. I used to try to contact support about it but they were always useless. search sometimes finds the message I was looking for but clicking on it never works. wiki isn't editable on mobile. and on computer it's buggy.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#738
post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's some more: - eats your battery like nothing else. Got charge? Not if teams has anything to do about it. Discord does more, at better quality and doesn't eat that much power. - has some bizarre interaction with the volume slider: clicking it mutes just the teams call, but sliding the volume controls alters the volume level of the whole computer. Why? - cuts off the sides of video, because it defaults to "fit vi…

- sends you a notification about a meeting starting, with a join button. when you hover your mouse over the join button, the notification disappears. the meeting is nowhere to be found. you have to got to outlook calendar and join the meeting from there - sometimes the same meeting ends up existing twice with the same name, with half the participants in here, the other half back there - when your internet is bad, you…

- Difficult to permanently delete entire chat history

- Odd behavior when using smartphone and desktop app at the same time - sometimes calls accepted on desktop are still ringing on mobile.

- Slow scroll back to history in chat.

- Message-Image size (height) limit is small

- Message length maximum is far too small

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interestingly teams usage seems to be still rising post-pandemic We don't use Teams, but IME, every meeting I setup in Outlook defaults to including a Teams link. I have to actively turn it off. This type of thing will eventually get people stumbling into using Teams.

Outlook Options > Calendar > Add online meeting to all meetings

Yeah, and I have it set for Zoom and it still turns on a Teams meeting every single time. I'm using the Outlook web UI.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Microsoft Teams still so bad?

#740
post #402

Teams doesn't have to be good to succeed. It just has to exist. It's not even very important how good it is. Given it exists, IT will make everyone use it on Microsoft's behalf regardless of how bad it is. Or another way to look at it is that the real customers for Teams are IT departments. It makes their lives easier because they don't have to do anything and it meets all the compliance requirements they are suppose…

Along the same lines, Googles Chat and Spaces are really close to becoming “good enough” that you don’t need Slack. Their threading setup is awful and they desperately need to let admins set sane defaults for notification sounds, do not disturb hours, etc. But aside from that it’s really close to being a good enough chat option that Slack doesn’t feel necessary. Google Meet is already good. Gmail is excellent and the…

I don't trust Google to not kill features and products on which I would come to depend.
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