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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

#31

Post by dathinab »

verytrivial wrote: post #25

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.

do you think it's an issue of gitlab or of the transition?

As far I know Jira and GitLab issues initially can look kinda similar (depending on how Jira is used) but are very different in what works well with them so Jira to GitLab transition seems rather risky.

And while I haven't used GitLab issues a lot, GitHub issues are kinda terrible and Jira isn't better either (but bad in different ways; with github actions you can try to "fix" GitHub but in practice this doesn't work that well my experience and can't fix the most important issues)

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

#32

Post by PeterStuer »

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.

Yet those same people happily use Office 365 without a second thought.

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

#33

Post by zokier »

lbriner wrote: post #17
kqr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Personally, I don't mind if a tool is rubbish as long as I can use the bits I need to use and the rest doesn't get in my way. I don't like Teams but mostly keep to chat and video calls and that works fine. Sure, there is other stuff that might be junk like files, tasks and apps but I just don't use that. That is the old adage about keeping the main thing the main thing. It depresses me how many major apps doesn't eve…

> It depresses me how many major apps doesn't even do the basics well, either performance is terrible or the UX is over-complicated

Teams definitely falls in this category. It is dog-slow, but even worse for a chat application it randomly just drops messages(!) quietly(!!) which makes for very confusing discussion threads when different people have different sets of messages. That is arguably the very most basic feature that one can expect from chat, and Teams fumbles even it.

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

#34

Post by imron »

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…

> I think MS Teams gets a bad rap that is doesn't deserve.

No, it entirely deserves it.

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

#35

Post by zokier »

Lacerda69 wrote: post #26
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.

Telia is Sweden-originated multi-national.

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

#36

Post by bigDinosaur »

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…

I find bugs or annoyances with Teams every single day. At minimum it has horrible latency for basic UI actions, but also awful file management experiences and an abysmal search feature (seriously, Discord manages to have a dramatically better search feature and that was never targeted at serious business users). Not to mention countless random bugs. Have they made having multiple organisations actually work properly yet with real time message notifications or does it still silo them and you get an email 8 hours after a message if you're lucky? Does the desktop app still destroy battery doing god knows what?

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

#37

Post by zokier »

probably_wrong wrote: post #29
esperent wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Teams wants to be Slack killer and making sure people stay in MS ecosystem, and it is succeeding in it. You can call the concept flawed, but it is a response to strong demand in the market.

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

#38

Post by verytrivial »

dathinab wrote: post #31
verytrivial wrote: post #25

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.

do you think it's an issue of gitlab or of the transition? As far I know Jira and GitLab issues initially can look kinda similar (depending on how Jira is used) but are very different in what works well with them so Jira to GitLab transition seems rather risky. And while I haven't used GitLab issues a lot, GitHub issues are kinda terrible and Jira isn't better either (but bad in different ways; with github actions yo…

GitLab Issues, especially as exposed by the UI is just ludicrisouly primitive vs Jira. They're trying to cover the GitHub use case regarding basically 'context for merge requests'. There's no planning, reporting, sane linking, reports, no query language, no batch updates, and visibility model means Issues edits are also basically committers, so good-bye segregation. It's just chalk and cheese.

Someone invariably says 'with the REST API you can do ...' which now means we have hundreds of teams reimplementing the out-of-the-box Jira features in mutually incompatible ways for their own consumption. All of that dev time is gone. I honestly hope the shareholders don't find out.

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

#39

Post by paleotrope »

probably_wrong wrote: post #29
esperent wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are absolutely right about the documentation aspect. We are about four years into Teams and no one can find anything. Massive numbers of dead channels. Files and things all over the place. Notification hell.

One particular bad aspect is people started recording meetings. No one has any idea where these things get put. There are links that are shared but where are the actual files.

I use a OneNote to keep track of links. It's craziness.

Miro has its own management issues as well once you start getting projects and things in the mix.

It's like every new app now is designed to work with maybe a handful of objects but beyond that it's a huge mess.

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

#40

Post by zokier »

kqr wrote: post #19
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…

For the first problem, I would argue the tools people work with and the formats they publish should be two completely different decisions. Work however you want, but sure as hell publish in a standardised format supported across the organisation. For the second problem, I guess I don't have much to say because I haven't tried running a large company. I just have never heard any good reason to be stingy with licences.…

> I would argue the tools people work with and the formats they publish should be two completely different decisions

That is a position that has been lost ages ago; the desktop model has given way to the app model. Instead of having files and then programs that work with those, we these days have data enclosed inside apps.

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