Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our CEO gave up on slack long ago. Email is the best way to get their attention.
Slack and Teams are different. Slack has muting. Teams does not.
Teams has mute on channels
The Horror of Microsoft Teams
91–100 of 344 posts
Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams
#92My team were using HipChat and had to find an alternative when they sold off to Slack. They actually offered a really good discount to move over. But as the company already recently moved to O365 and Teams is free within that, I thought I'd give it a try. My team hated it, I tolerated it. Until one day I'd just had enough of the UX that Teams brings. The biggest issue was the threading; it truly beggars belief. We en…
> That being said, the Teams UX will slowly and steadily improve. That's not the Microsoft way. It'll accumulate features without ever deprecating bad features, not fundamentally improve. Look at Outlook. That terrible threading has its roots there. There'll be _someone_ out there who loves it, so it'll never go away.
They've changed. Now they routinely redesign stuff. Add stuff that no one wants and cripple or remove those they want. And then make it slower.
Outlook web is a perfect example. It's 10x slower since the last redesign and their exclusive killer feature - SWEEP no longer works for me.
Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams
#93Teams 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?
Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams
#94At my work, we use Teams a fair bit, and I'll go out on the limb to defend it (a limb I'm quite familiar with at this point ;) ). Thinking of it as a Slack alternative is, IMO, the wrong starting point. We barely use it for chat (as we have Slack as well). Instead, we use it as a file share and central information home. Each group within a team has a channel and we use the tabs to track meeting notes, embed external…
So essentially Microsoft's chat app is not good at chat, but you use it for file-sharing instead because Microsoft's file-sharing app is not good at file-sharing?
Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams
#95[deleted]
Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams
#96Disclosure: Microsoft employee. Using a throwaway. Satya, please don't track me down and fire me.
I've never agreed so heavily with a headline and disagreed so vehemently with the actual content. Some of this is right, but a big chunk is wrong and I think misses some of the most egregious horrors of Teams.
I used Slack professionally before in a fairly large org (>200).
Two things the author got wrong:
First - things the author got wrong. Notifications are absolutely configurable by Channel - at least with the bits I'm on and how the internal Microsoft tenant is configured.
Second, a huge portion of the things mentioned by the author are config switches that apparently his tenant admins decided to muck with (auto-adding to Teams, no outsiders, etc).
The biggest complaint I have about this piece is it doesn't actually talk about some of the real, most egregious parts about Teams: Teams has atrocious search, performance (functionally and by footprint, and UI - which the author covered. On top of that, it seems clear that the Teams team didn't have a coherent vision for the user/grouping model, so channels are kinda treated like groups but so are channels? For instance, you can mention a channel from another channel. Wtf. This drives me insane on a daily basis.
The development story is a mess. Not going into details here but if folks in the comments care to peruse the docs, I'd love to hear other folks' perspective.
Other random complaints:
- The emoji story is hilarious. There's a taskbar thing called "emoji" which are animated stickers (some of which are actually fantastic) but definitely aren't emoji. You used to be able to shortcode emoji (ie :smile:) and get a thing that looked like an emoji but still wasn't unicode emoji. AND you could use the actually emoji keyboard on your device to actually type unicode. So, 3 ways to get 3 separate sets of glyphs, all referred to as "emoji". Yes, I know this complaint is dumb but it shows a weird lack of attention to detail.
- The formatting story is the union of every formatting concept ever. Quasi-markdown is supported inline, but its essentially an editor trick that triggers (what I assume is) richtext formatting.
- This is ANOTHER thing trying to be the* dashboard in Microsoft's product suite. There are like... 7. PowerBI, Azure Devops, SharePoint... Teams... I'm sure I'm forgetting some. Which leads me to...
- It was clear from early development that leadership wasn't fixated on "do one thing well" and were trying to be the sum of all productivity goals. The result is chat sucks, feels halfassed and there's a lot of stapled on shit that makes the experience gross.
There are a lot of smart people on this team but the folks at the helm set things on a terrible course that misses the fundamentals, which is super depressing.
As an aside, one thing I'm genuinely curious about from folks that use Slack in very large orgs (>500), how does Slack's usability scale?
Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams
#97Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams
#98For extra fun, block access to the telemetry endpoint and watch Teams' memory footprint bloat to crazy levels as the data accumulates and re-attempts the sending. There's some fun inspecting this data, too..
I've been wondering why Teams has become completely unreliable when I use it at home. If what you're saying is true it could be my recent pi-hole installation. I'm gonna test this.
Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams
#99Main issue killing me with Teams is that the desktop client can't be joined to two servers (at least, last time I checked). As a contractor, I have a Teams at my company and a Teams at my client, and I had to pick one, which is terrible.
i think i'm joined to two now - had to be invited to second one
Re: The Horror of Microsoft Teams
#100Disclosure: Microsoft employee. Using a throwaway. Satya, please don't track me down and fire me. I've never agreed so heavily with a headline and disagreed so vehemently with the actual content. Some of this is right, but a big chunk is wrong and I think misses some of the most egregious horrors of Teams. I used Slack professionally before in a fairly large org (>200). Two things the author got wrong: First - things…
My organization is replacing Zoom with Teams and keeping Slack.
I have two problems so far:
1. I'm an engineer that uses Linux. Zoom has a native Linux client that works really well. Teams doesn't work on Firefox and doesn't ship a Linux client - despite being an Electron application. I can use Google Chrome to call in but if I need to share my screen then I have to switch off all my monitors because Chrome's screen sharing functionality is a little bit broken. There is a PR against Chromium to fix that.
2. The UX of Teams is garbage. Nobody can figure out how to use it because it has so many features. With Zoom, there are like four buttons. I can join a call or I can host a call and figuring out how to do either is incredibly easy.
I would never want to use it as a chat application because that would be awful. Our IT department wants everyone in the company to use Teams because they all like Windows/Microsoft and it comes for free with our Microsoft suite contract.