I can't believe how aggressive Teams is at inserting itself in my login items (on a Mac). At first, I thought it just happened when I installed the application. But nope — any time I open Teams, it will re-insert itself in my list of login items. This happens no matter how many times I have manually removed it. I think it even happens more than once per launch because I recently launched it to join a call and then im…
At least it is relatively easy to close it, Skype was almost impossible to close in a normal way
I personally find Teams to be an abomination. I asked my wife the other day, who isn't familiar with Slack or Teams, to look at the interfaces and tell me how to IM an individual. She glanced at Slack and pointed to the list of users. She looked at Teams and said "I have no idea". Slack practically invites me to reach out to people. Teams OTOH makes me want to send an email. Now you can add this tracking to the list…
Teams is Skype, but worse. Seriously, it's just reskinned Skype with bolt-ons. You can see "skype" present in the address bar sometimes when you load Teams in a browser. The Teams desktop application (at least on Linux) has references to Skype as well. Teams routinely uses between 200 and 500 MB of memory to run, which makes it the 2nd most memory-intensive program on my computer. On top of that, it doesn't even work…
> Teams is Skype
Teams uses (or at least used) Skype for business' core under the hood
Same setup, except three laptops: personal, company-provided, client/project-provided. You would think it would be unmanageable and you'd be right we're it not for Synergy ( https://symless.com/synergy ). I've got two laptops docked and connected to external monitors. Synergy lets me use just one keyboard and mouse for all three at the same time. Makes it feel like they're just three adjacent screens on one PC. But b…
I’ve thought about this but I assumed it would be too hard to get Synergy installed on employer or client-provided computers. It sounds like you’ve used this setup with multiple clients – is it normal in your field of work to get local admin rights on corporate devices?
I personally find Teams to be an abomination. I asked my wife the other day, who isn't familiar with Slack or Teams, to look at the interfaces and tell me how to IM an individual. She glanced at Slack and pointed to the list of users. She looked at Teams and said "I have no idea". Slack practically invites me to reach out to people. Teams OTOH makes me want to send an email. Now you can add this tracking to the list…
Slack has it's benefits, but many of the complaints about Teams are because of its flexibility. For example the clutter of teams channels and chats can be simplified to Slack level if used with discipline (or maybe it's even configurable).
The way to IM individuals is cumbersome but consistent with other cumbersome Office products.
> That’s why I have personal property that the company isn’t able to access so I can conduct personal activities with some level of privacy. The problem right now is: due to Work from home, you basically have blurred the lines between the digital company and private assets. Either you have a company device; or even a personal device running this software in your private networks doing and telemetering you don’t know…
Second laptop. I know it's expensive, but if your working from home, don't do it from your own computer. do it from a computer work provides. Or at least, create a second account called work and do everything from that. Also make the theme, colors and everything you can different so there's a context shift between the two activities.
This won't work at most companies of any size, because you need to use a VPN, and the VPN client enforces policies - checking you are using a company machine, that you have their AV installed and updated, that you have their DLP (Data Loss Prevention) installed, that you have their endpoint protection system installed...
> That’s why I have personal property that the company isn’t able to access so I can conduct personal activities with some level of privacy. The problem right now is: due to Work from home, you basically have blurred the lines between the digital company and private assets. Either you have a company device; or even a personal device running this software in your private networks doing and telemetering you don’t know…
Second laptop. I know it's expensive, but if your working from home, don't do it from your own computer. do it from a computer work provides. Or at least, create a second account called work and do everything from that. Also make the theme, colors and everything you can different so there's a context shift between the two activities.
But that's a good strategy regardless of Corona, you don't want you kid to download stuff into your work environment or watch NSFW stuff on a work related computer.
That's odd: I've recently switched macs, and nor on the old, nor on the new one was Teams added to the Login items; only OneDrive did that. So I had a vague memory: go to your account icon > Settings > Auto-start application, and uncheck it.
Unfortunately this ability is only afforded to people who have accounts (I only use Teams when invited to someone else's meeting). How silly that people who don't have accounts — because they use Teams infrequently — are subjected to the spammiest behavior.
Why, they don’t need to advertise to the people who already have the product!
> Same for the MITM ssl proxy stuff. If I logon to my personal banking website while at work, and my employer MITM's that connection to snoop, have they genuinely not broken any law?
I'm sure somewhere in the many legal documents you signed to start the job (given to you after you've already resigned from your previous job, of course) you give them the right to do so.
The law is the law: You cannot contract with another party to "allow" either one of you to break the law.
I remember when I first started working and was surprised to learn that email admins could and would read email. When I asked HR for their policy on this they said they had none and the company can do anything they want with employee activity. This was the 90s and was true then as it is now. Same for the MITM ssl proxy stuff. This has always been legal and recorded, Microsoft just makes it easier. And I think maybe e…
> That’s why I have personal property that the company isn’t able to access so I can conduct personal activities with some level of privacy. The problem right now is: due to Work from home, you basically have blurred the lines between the digital company and private assets. Either you have a company device; or even a personal device running this software in your private networks doing and telemetering you don’t know…
> separate subnet
Why ? theoretically you have a point, but practically which company would spy on your network ? I totally understand, and agree to some degree, a company protecting its assets and tracking what their employees are doing but it's not the same as putting a general spyware.
In my experience, Teams, even with the official Linux app (Electron-based) simply doesn't work on Linux, just like Skype for Enterprise didn't work before. Had an appointment the other week with a customer, and had to resort to dial-in with audio-only. I guess you need a corporate account or something, but Teams wouldn't say. When I wanted to start a video call, an error message would flash up briefly, like 100ms, so…
IME Teams on Linux will occasionally completely freeze the entire OS on startup. Sometimes it recovers after 15 mins or so, sometimes it needs the machine to be physically powered off / on to recover.