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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

#41

Post by Lariscus »

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…

For video conferences I agree, Teams works pretty well for that. I also don't find the client any slower than any other Electron Apps, they are all equally bad. Its the group chats that I find severely lacking compared to Slack. So much wasted whitespace and incredibly inconvenient UX.

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

#42

Post by merolish »

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…

Are there other popular tools you'd recommend/not recommend given cost/compliance concerns?

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

#43

Post by bsuvc »

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.

> MS Teams, makes me wanna stop working all together

I think this is what some people just don't understand, especially executives or managers who are too far removed from individual contributors' day-to-day activities.

The wrong choice of IT tools can suck the life out of your organization.

Sure, on paper two tools can seem equivalent, but in reality, they are not the same.

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

#44

Post by EdwardDiego »

submeta wrote: post #23

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 ke…

I've always been an advocate of people using the tools that work best for them.

But sometimes, there's better tools out there than $EDITOR, especially when working in large codebases.

Like a recent PR where 4 out of 5 usages of a renamed variable also got renamed, but the last one didn't, and was in an area not covered by tests and it made it to main. (And yep, how it made it past review is a question I'll be asking...)

The dev had switched from VS Code to Neovim recently and I'm reasonably certain that's related.

I'm very comfortable riding motorcycles, but for taking my kids to school, I tend to use a car.

Horses for courses.

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

#45

Post by tobr »

OJFord wrote: post #24
tobr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

“You must use this tool for this specific collaborative process” is not the same thing as “You must not use this tool at all”.

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

#46

Post by regularfry »

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 is designed for a world where the problem that Slack solves is viewed as a feature. Looking at them as comparable instant messaging tools is to completely miss the point.

The underlying philosophy with Teams is top-down control: the assumption is that the organisation structure can adequately predict what communication patterns between its members should be allowed.

The underlying assumption with Slack is that the organisation members should be able to set up productive communication patterns without needing top-down control, and that having to impose that control is a bug.

The Slack approach requires discovery and working in the open, to a certain degree, so that what the research calls "weak links" can form between individuals in disconnected parts of the organisation. Teams (at least, wherever I've seen it) is actively hostile to this: you have to invite, to be invited, to already know who to speak to. Slack - when done right - radically changes how the organisation integrates with itself.

I have, of course, seen it done very wrong: if you come from a Teams world you'll likely want to lock Slack down so that it can't provide its main benefits; the instance I'm on right now blocks public channel creation, which is bonkers if you understand the problem area.

If your org is small enough and has enough of a mixing function outside the digital tooling that it doesn't need a helping hand, then there's not much in it, but past a certain size and it's not even close.

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

#47

Post by regularfry »

paleotrope wrote: post #39
probably_wrong wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be fair, Slack also suffers from the "write-only medium" problem.

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

#48

Post by navane »

If anything this shows clueless people allowed to make decisions. Let teams flock around their tools. What's 10 bucks a month on an employees salary. Oh its not the cost, you think the difference in tools is what creates friction in your organisation? Maybe sit in on a couple of meetings, watch your people work, talk to them.

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

#49

Post by esperent »

regularfry wrote: post #46
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…

Teams is designed for a world where the problem that Slack solves is viewed as a feature. Looking at them as comparable instant messaging tools is to completely miss the point. The underlying philosophy with Teams is top-down control: the assumption is that the organisation structure can adequately predict what communication patterns between its members should be allowed. The underlying assumption with Slack is that…

> the instance I'm on right now blocks public channel creation, which is bonkers if you understand the problem area.

If I was working with a team of tech savvy developers, I'd completely agree with you, and we'd probably be using Slack, or maybe Zulip. I'm not - I work at a bakery and I'm the only technical person at our company. Most people don't even own a laptop. Every day is a surprise to me as I get a tech support call about something so basic like not checking if something is plugged in. If you've ever watched The IT Crowd, and thought the tech support calls were satire - they are not.

Everything has to be locked down and simplified to the extreme, otherwise I will be called to fix or explain it over and over again. The thought of allowing everyone to create a channel whenever they want is giving me nightmares, honestly. It's already a daily frustration to get idea of channels across at all. Actually scratch that, even getting people to stop using Zalo (local version of Whatsapp) was a struggle and I'm pretty sure it's still happening behind our backs.

Thinking about allowing everyone to create channels ad-hoc. It wouldn't work, it would turn our communications into a mess. We have total of about six channels and already get complaints that it's too confusing.

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

#50

Post by probably_wrong »

zokier wrote: post #37
probably_wrong wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Obviously I don't speak for everyone, but the Fortune 500 company I worked for at the time was presented with two options: either migrate your Skype infrastructure to Teams, or... actually, no, you don't get to choose. Migrate or else.

I don't doubt that the plan is to keep people in the MS ecosystem and I don't dispute that it's working. But let's not claim that Teams' popularity has anything to do with its technology when it's clear that MS used it's dominant position to push it down everyone's throat.

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