The Horror of Microsoft Teams • Hacker News Board

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#261

Post by krageon » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 9:43 AM UTC

timoth3y wrote: post #160

I 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…

> I end up setting up Slack channels

If you can do this without getting fired, what is the problem for you?

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#262

Post by martijn_himself » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 9:43 AM UTC

In my experience Teams is often used alongside other 'channels of communication and collaboration' which makes it a burden more than anything else.

Ever since it was introduced it seems more like an unfinished tech experiment (but Slack felt the same to me). It seems to be designed with the aim of increasing productivity rather than making it easier to communicate with people.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#263

Post by casparz » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 9:51 AM UTC

broth wrote: post #195

mysterydip wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the NET SEND command in windows 2000-xp. Allowed sending a popup text message to specific (or all with a wildcard!) machines on a network. Sure there were times where such a feature would be convenient ("server going down for maintenance, please save your work", etc), but overall ripe for abuse. They disabled it in a service pack and took it out altogether in subsequent versions.

Back in my senior year of high school during Spanish class I naively used NET SEND to send a message to one of my classmates. The only problem was that I failed to specify the user in the command and instead used *. This ended up sending a message to all computers in the school district. I remember the computer administrator coming into the class saying “Are you aware one of your students is sending messages to the e…

A classmate did the same, although the outcome was far worse.

We studied at university in the medical faculty, which happened to be housed in the academic hospital. We found out the hard way that the network was not segregated, his netsend command crashed all the ICU terminals...

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#264

Post by mattlutze » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 9:52 AM UTC

mullingitover wrote: post #7

> "This means that if someone does @${channel_name} you will get an alert. MS have not implemented muting as a feature. Secondly, for all those automatic/admin channels, you can’t unsubscribe yourself (or at least not with the default policies). Brilliant, isn’t it? Unavoidable alerts that any idiot on any channel can annoy people with." At my last job we figured out the fastest way to get your company off Teams: add…

There's a notifications setting in my version of Teams that allows you to turn on / off a notification when a new thread is started, per channel.

There is also the "Channel mentions" setting, allowing you to turn off @${channel_name} messages.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#265

Post by youdontknowtho » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 9:53 AM UTC

arsenico wrote: post #225

moksly wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Teams is exactly excellent because it allows you to secure your collaboration tool. Especially valuable post GDPR where you really don’t want your non-tech savy employers putting privacy data into some online Trello board, or slack/discord for that matter. The fact that teams is just part of your 365 platform is soooo awesome in non-tech enterprise that it’s hard to describe just how useful it is. But basical…

How is putting privacy data in Teams different from putting it in Slack?

Teams benefits from the cross-product and service GDPR and eDiscovery tools that MS has built. It's hard to explain the scale of some of that stuff, but it cuts across O365.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#266

Post by donmb » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 9:53 AM UTC

> I realise that WhatsApp doesn’t have a proper desktop client

That's just not true. The Desktop app of Whatsapp is imo excellent.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#267

Post by Multicomp » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 9:56 AM UTC

selimthegrim wrote: post #93

dbg31415 wrote: post #61

Teams does suck, but man... it's marginally better than Skype for Business. Skype for Business was so bad, you could send a message on your phone and you'd never see it on your desktop, and vise versa. Or you'd get bombarded with notifications on your phone while you were typing on your desktop. Microsoft would point to your local IT team's setup causing caching issues or what have you... and notifications were never…

What happened to Yammer?

Still around, just on the back burner

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#268

Post by C1sc0cat » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 9:57 AM UTC

grezql wrote: post #14

Neil44 wrote: post #10

I can believe they’re overtaking slack because they make Teams an aggressive default install with the Office 365 client, and it’s replacing Skype for Business.

We use teams at work. Most people i know cant stand it. Its chatoix UI. 10 tabs on each «teams». Ive deleted the app. Whenever someone tags me i just open their browser app, reply and close. Even having the tab open sometimes causes cpu and memory spike and my laptop fans starts wirring. If they kill skype/lync for teams, MS is making a huge mistake. Lync and Outlook are the most distraction free softwares we use.

That is a bit odd I have never seen teams spike my laptop and I have outlook and excel and an ubuntu vm plus a load of other stuff running

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#269

Post by youdontknowtho » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 9:57 AM UTC

realusername wrote: post #254

moksly wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m the wrong person to ask, all I know is that Microsoft, Azure and Offfice365 is on the government list of places we can put our data (which doesn’t go above NSIS level 3) safely and legally. Slack isn’t on that list.

Apart from some abstract legal paperwork requirements like those, I honestly don't see much difference between both privacy wise. If the company really requires privacy and owning their data, they should setup some hosted slack clone themselves.

It's not that a company owns their data, or needs privacy, its that they need tools to discover customer or even non-customer data from across the entire suite of systems that they use. It's a tremendous amount of data and MS built tooling that helps do that across all of their services.

Setting up some kind of hosted solution in a country to comply with data sovereignty laws might be a solution, but it becomes a data island that makes compliance with other regulatory regimes that much harder.

Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams

#270

Post by mattlutze » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 9:57 AM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #79

We currently use Teams and everyone on the team absolutely hates it. I am actively looking at alternatives such as mattermost or slack to get us onto something that doesn't run like complete garbage. Also, why did this have to be developed using electron? If Teams were a native application, or even written using something on the .NET-side, we would probably have about 20% the complaints we do today. Watching an appli…

I've found every instance of Mattermost that I've encountered to be poorly executed, notifications to be hit-or-miss, loading slow, access unstable and recent conversations to fall off my list unpredictably.

What do your coworkers hate about Teams? I've honestly found it to be an acceptable chat platform and I've gotta say I appreciate the cross-coordination with Outlook.