German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

even though currently just one state is implementing that in Germany, that decision shines out. France has recently imposed a similar ban.

I don't understand, why this service cannot be provided from an EU data center. Every hyperscaler has these, MS also.

I note that this was published in September, has there been any follow up? I did search but didn't find anything.

> Why the teams hate.

This comes up all the time, to the point where I think people are running different versions of Teams. I would be interested in exploring that angle tbh-

For me:

* The client is "heavy" when compared to contemporaries.

It isn't uncommon for me to need to choose which "essential" apps to turn off to get something done on a maxed-out MBP. So Teams gets turned off, and maybe someone gets annoyed that I don't respond to something, while I run a few VMs in Teams' former memory space.

That aside: why should I severely impede my battery life, cause my fans to spin (audible discomfort) or create discomfort due to heat on my lap: for an app where there are better alternatives that don't do that?

* Web version only works with Chrome.

Firefox, Qutebrowser, Safari have severe limitations. Safari needs to have some security controls disabled globally otherwise it won't even open.

* Notifications are absent or overly-verbose

I miss notifications that are timely and important on the App (like calls which get forwarded to my phone) but an unrelated message on a topic somewhere else will get "promoted" to me.

* UI design leaves a lot to be desired, things are all over the place, finding things is hard.

* New UI refresh for meetings is "top heavy"

Most Video Conferencing programs are trying to make it so that you get close to eye contact with other participants (behind screen cameras in phones for example!); But for Teams: lots of elements are loaded in the top bar which makes people appear to be looking down at something, because the subject they're looking at is lower down on the screen. This is the only video conferencing program to do this.

* Video quality is very low compared to contemporaries.

* Screen Sharing is extremely low quality too

You have to really bump the font point, they've recently added the idea of "content awareness" too, as in sharing Powerpoint slides directly from OneDrive, but it's janky as hell.

* Whiteboards are some kind of extra application which has to be enabled - acts like an external website, not at all integrated and does not live at all with the meeting.

* Having external people invited still requires you to manually allow them into the room (unlike Google Meet, which treats externals that you allow as part of the meeting)

* "Teams" are linked to Sharepoint and will cause Chaos with Onedrive and Sharepoint if you don't remember certain things: like uploading something to a channel will drop it in a weird folder with open permissions, or that "private teams" make brand new sharepoint sites: your org probably has hundreds of these.

* The Client randomly hangs on my machine during meetings (freeze, blocking all incoming and outgoing audio/video) My machine is a Threadripper 3970x with 256GiB of ram: there is no fucking way it's due to resource exhaustion.

* the latency in audio is at least 3-5x higher than contemporaries

* when attempting to launch a meeting in a hurry, it's almost as if teams knows and spends 30s loading. I suspect there is some "Join now" function for a meeting in progress that is actually causing an adverse affect here as I've been able to repeatedly measure this problem.

I suspect that some of these issues are because I'm in Europe and the servers are hosted in the US. It could also be because I use Linux and MacOS.

I often also find that _people who like Teams_, have only really used other Microsoft collaboration tools in a professional setting. (Or worse ones that are known to be worse like AT&T Connect.)

I am also not a huge fan of how they push Teams on people by embedding it in everything else, you could argue that this is vertical integration: but a lot of things do not integrate well with Teams, even outlook (for an example of better integration just look at recorded meetings and presented content in google calendar! it backfills the meeting with the recorded content so you can easily see it! outlook doesn't do that!): https://blog.dijit.sh/teams-microsoft-monopoly

> I personally find it the best conferencing tool for recurring cadence

"Best" is so insanely subjective that it's difficult to answer this.

Audio/Video Quality and ergonomics are better with Google Meet: but Jitsi works absolutely fine on recurring meetings: you just put the link in the meeting request.

To the extent that I'm forced to run Teams by my coworkers' choices, it sure would be nice if it were less of a bucket of ass.

The Microsoft 365 office package cannot be used by companies, public authorities and schools in a legally compliant manner, at least not without additional technical measures. This is the conclusion of a current data protection assessment adopted by the independent federal and state data protection supervisory authorities at their 104th data protection conference. Users must take additional protective measures in any case, warns Federal Data Protection Commissioner Ulrich Kelber. (…)

The corrections are not enough for the data protection authorities. Microsoft has made "progress on individual points," Kelber acknowledges. However, the revised documents do not provide the necessary transparency as to which data can be used by the company "for its own purposes". The controllers are still unable to assess "in some places" what information and diagnostic values are still being collected and transferred to Microsoft. This also makes it impossible to check "whether all steps are lawful".

https://www.heise.de/news/Datenschutzkonferenz-Microsoft-365...