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Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

engineering.telia.no

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Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#21

Post by user_named »

kqr wrote: post #8
fjodir wrote: post #4

Just wait for the migration from Slack to MS Teams, makes me wanna stop working all together. Also, MS recently launched their Notion clone, so all Notion users in MS shops better prepare to migrate to a much worse alternative.

I briefly led an underground incentive to use something other than Teams among the engineers at a previous employer. It gathered quite a bit of steam even though none of the alternatives proposed were great. Tells you what people think of Teams! (It petered out when my priorities shifted, though, so I guess that tells you how much bandwidth people actually have for caring about their instant messaging. (There had alr…

You didn't just propose Slack?

Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#23

Post by submeta »

At a former company, our newly appointed CTO staunchly advocated for the use of IntelliJ, including Webstorm and Pycharm. Coming from a predominantly Java environment, this preference was understandable. However, our team was largely composed of Emacs or Vim users. This sparked a passionate debate, culminating in a disheartened CTO and an aggrieved development team that stubbornly stuck to their favored tools. Two key takeaways from this experience are: a) Avoid trying to impose your preferences onto your team, and b) don't attempt to strip away someone's preferred editor, especially if they are productive with it. A bit of humor added, these lessons highlight the importance of respecting individual tool choices in a team environment. :)

Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#24

Post by OJFord »

tobr wrote: post #16
gumby wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Either way, I don't see why the people doing the work should not be allowed to (collectively) choose their tools. Because in a big company you’ll find some things are documented in a combination of jira and confluence while another are in big figma boards and nobody knows where to look (my gf’s company has exactly this problem). Also in a big company you want to have two teams collaborate but one uses one tool set…

I don’t understand. Would it be sensible to require people using Figma to instead use Jira? Two tools with completely orthogonal use cases. It sounds like you’re describing a different problem.

GP said 'things are documented in' - while neither's an ideal tool for long-term product-oriented 'how its supposed to work' docs, both are definitely used like that.

(You probably wouldn't choose either for that from the beginning, but you start using Jira for issue tracking/feature planning, of Figma for feature design, and end up with them holding a lasting record of how the feature is intended to be.)

Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#25

Post by verytrivial »

I'm in a Very Large Company that just yoinked Jira and replaced it with GitLab Issues. I can't even tell how badly it's going because no-one knows what going on with any project now. People are literally copying and pasting hand-edited Excel summaries of sub-projects in emails and asking people to edit in place and reply. It's hilarious.

It's super standardised, though.

Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#26

Post by Lacerda69 »

user_named wrote: post #22

A bit of a strange post. How can you write so much about a decision to stop using a tool? And on the company blog? And threaten to quit at the end of the blog?

It's a Norwegian company. Vast difference in terms of culture to the US.

Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#27

Post by Lacerda69 »

GavinAnderegg wrote: post #14

It seems odd that a post on the official company blog is showcasing disliked IT policy. This reads like an airing of dirty laundry, and I’m kinda surprised it was allowed to be published. I understand the “we have food at home” IT policy of using software you’re already paying for. On the other hand, it’s clear that the author isn’t sure who made the call to ditch Miro and wants Miro reinstated. I wonder if this blog…

Read up a bit on Norwegian culture and it will make more sense. Very different from what you are used to in US culture.

Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#28

Post by pid-1 »

esperent wrote: post #11
fjodir wrote: post #4

Just wait for the migration from Slack to MS Teams, makes me wanna stop working all together. Also, MS recently launched their Notion clone, so all Notion users in MS shops better prepare to migrate to a much worse alternative.

I think MS Teams gets a bad rap that is doesn't deserve. I don't know if the experience has improved or something - maybe Teams used to be worse and people are reacting to how it used to be? I've also been using MS Loop a lot and it's pretty great actually. It's clearly still under development and missing a lot of features but leaving that aside, I don't think it's fair to dismiss it as a Notion clone. It's far simpl…

Teams - Quite sluggish even on high end machines, annoying bugs such as notifications not showing consistently, messages not being sent, pictures not loading...

Loop - Super beta product with very few features compared to Notion. In particular, I've enabled it in our tenant and it has a showstopping bug for many users in which none of their work is saved. This bug exists from day 1 and still not fixed.

> MS 365 wins by being "just good enough" at _loads_ of things, and way cheaper than the competition.

Agreed!

Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#29

Post by probably_wrong »

esperent wrote: post #11
fjodir wrote: post #4

Just wait for the migration from Slack to MS Teams, makes me wanna stop working all together. Also, MS recently launched their Notion clone, so all Notion users in MS shops better prepare to migrate to a much worse alternative.

I think MS Teams gets a bad rap that is doesn't deserve. I don't know if the experience has improved or something - maybe Teams used to be worse and people are reacting to how it used to be? I've also been using MS Loop a lot and it's pretty great actually. It's clearly still under development and missing a lot of features but leaving that aside, I don't think it's fair to dismiss it as a Notion clone. It's far simpl…

MS Teams is... bad. Even if they were to solve the bugs and performance issues, and even if they actually implemented any of the features that the community has been asking for (push to talk comes to mind), the entire concept is flawed.

Two problems with information are duplication (too many copies around, all of them slightly different) and finding where it is. MS Teams makes it easy to store duplicate data and hard to find it later: did you upload the data as a file in the "development" channel, or as a link in the "updates" wiki? Nobody knows, not even the search function. And with each new project manager creating five channels per project, two of which will actually see any activity...

I think MS Teams wants to be everything for everyone and succeeds at neither.

Re: Should you standardise tools in your company? Case of Miro vs. MS Whiteboard

#30

Post by roenxi »

diarrhea wrote: post #20
ianpenney wrote: post #13

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. If you want to pass an IT audit, good fucking luck to you. I have about 20 years of experience dealing with this ranging from mostly harmonious all the way to civil war. 100 employees and 130 different SaaS tools. Got buy in from senior management to reduce footprint to lower cost and increase security and compliance only to get pushback from every…

> Try convincing everyone that grammarly is a keystroke logger. Funny how it's not the opposite viewpoint that is scrutinized. Prove how it's not a keystroke logger, then Grammarly can be deployed. Until then, it's assumed to be malicious. That's how people treat for example ChatGPT as well.

I'm not sure if there is official research on this, but the 'opposite viewpoint' sounds expensive and more prone to failing in practice. Software companies generally struggle to get results even with a willingness to use any tool or practice that might improve productivity. It will only get worse if they add paperwork.

And it isn't very risk-based. In most cases, the keylogger can be assumed to be entering via the OS, probably based on some NSA/GRU/Chinese MSS exploit being used for industrial espionage. Grammarly is a bit more niche.

It is a threat. One day it will be an acute one, perhaps. But the risks and opportunities favour recklessness.

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