I could add so much to this, and in fact, recently closed a text file enumerating issues I had with Teams because I felt it wasn't a good use of my time, since I felt like I was the only one having problems with it.
A few more points, in case anybody in the Teams team is reading:
1. Implement filters. Filters for teams, filters for channels, filters for search results. I can't filter my Files by file type, so it's a mishmash of Word documents, OneNotes, Excel, Microsoft Project files, and PDFs. I can't even filter by channel, or search within a specific channel.
2. Search results: Implement filters, as above, but add the ability to sort by anything other than Date Modified. Unless I know a good portion of the document name or it's been modified recently, I'm forced to scroll through the list.
3. Skype integration: We already use Skype for Business. Why is Teams also reporting my missed Skype calls in addition to Outlook and Skype telling me the same?
4. Meetings: Is Outlook transitioning to an email-only client, or are we just going to have all functionality replicated across Teams/Skype/Outlook?
5. T-Bot: I've got this entity in my Chat sidebar; I guess it's the Teams version of Slackbot? Anyway, it sits there saying "What can I help you with today?" Slackbot gives me an example question to begin interacting with it, but T-Bot has the entry window greyed out with the text "Sending new messages to this bot has been disabled." It's not clear whether that's a Teams thing, or something my org did, but why is it even there if I can't interact with it?
While we're on Chat, there's a bunch of people listed in here that I sent a couple one-off emails to. I talk to more people than this; where are those? Why aren't they pulled from my Skype calls?
6. Calls: I see some contacts from one of my Skype groups, but it's also got contacts who a) I've already removed from that list, and b) don't even work at this company anymore. They're still crowding out the people I actually interact with regularly.
7. API integrations: I'm not even sure where to begin. Teams uses the Microsoft Graph API, which requires use of the Azure portal, and if you're already familiar with all that it might work for you. For the rest of us just trying to write a simple Python script integration (a la Slack webhook), it's a bit much.
I'm sure I could think of more, but this non-blog-post is already long enough.
Also, #4 is because of #3. The weird Meetings tab in Teams is a better version of a Skype for Business tab that almost no one used directly (also called Meetings and using the exact same icon), and having that tab in Teams now is directly a part of the Skype for Business migration.
#5: That's an organization decision to disable the T-Bot. Though why they disabled chatting with it and also disabled removing it from your Chat list (which is also something that orgs have power over) is a fascinating question of organization settings micromanagement.
#7: Teams support incoming and outgoing webhooks, very similarly to Slack, but as with so many other things, access to them can be enabled/disabled by organization settings.
An old employer of mine used Teams and my biggest problem was just sending messages to other people. For example, when typing in a chat message you can accentuate (bold, italic, etc.) certain pieces of text. However, if you go back and edit that text it removes the style and you have to really work to get it back. I can't remember exactly, but most of the time I would delete all the text and re-type it.
For 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.
I don't use the windows partition on my laptop for this reason. Once Unity and my steam has Linux support, I never looked back. Only issue is Matlab sometimes.
Out of curiousity, what issue do you have with matlab under linux? I have found its linux version to be one of the most stable commercial/nonfree programs I have used under linux (ubuntu/centos).
Not OP but if I wouldn't rm ~/matlab_crash_dump* regularly it would be hundreds of them. Can't really pinpoint the problems, but most of the time it's graphics related. Possibly because it gets used remotely over VNC or X2Go, not sure. In comparison the windows version over RDP has like 0 problems, running pretty much the same code.
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.
I don't use Teams but would assume so. My Pi hole captures a lot of other Microsoft telemetry, including VS Code related (though that seems to handle it fine).
I like Teams for a similar reason: it is replacing Skype for Business. Properly persisted group chat is a must have for remote teams, and SfB didn't really have that. Or actually it did ("chat rooms"), but it's one of those bolt-on features that requires cooperation of an administrator to set up. Impossible to get done in a big corporation.
(Now if only if I could convince my colleagues to use Teams properly with N people in a channel instead of continuing to have N^2 one-to-one chats about the latest crisis...)
I had the fun experience recently of having to rename a bunch of files that happened to have a # in the filename, since that character is forbidden in filenames that are uploaded into teams.
Additionally, you can't seem to attach a .json file... though renaming it to .json.txt works. It's frustrating for sure.
Thankfully they finally fixed some issues recently so I can copy chats out of Teams without running into too many problems.
The most frustrating and immediate drawback is the low information density. It's gotten slightly better, but I can still see only about 20% of the information in a chat that I can with Slack.
Also the automatic conversion of things like ;) to animated emoji... please give me an option to turn this off. You have to ctrl+z afterwards to just use the text.
Additionally, you can't seem to attach a .json file... though renaming it to .json.txt works. It's frustrating for sure.
Ran into something very similar during my (very) short stint doing Sharepoint development. I'm guessing it's some sort of limitation burried deep in some default MS code somewhere.
> "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 the CEO to a chatty channel.
I'll note that we never actually acted on this plan. The idea came up when we were comparing the two. The designated Microsoft Guy at the office was pushing Teams, because it's free as in beer. However, the inability to mute or leave a channel was a big 'wtf' and I'm honestly shocked that two years later they still haven't fixed it. It was a show-stopper for us back then and still would be now.
On individual channels it does, on an entire team it doesn't. You can mention a team itself (rather than a channel in that team) and there's no way to mute that afaik.
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.
I caused havoc in high-school with that. And finding a way of executing binaries inside Novell's Netware thing, via the "Open" dialog within any Office application's Visual Basic macro editor haha
Wrote a batch script that used a wildcard - it took them a while to find it and I was very lucky the only 3 persons who knew who it was wouldn't tell anyone.
One was a teacher and I am thankful until today that he didn't screw up my life with telling this.
I created a directory with alt+255. It was an unprintable character and showed up last in any dir listing. At most it added an extra new line. That’s how I was one of the only students whose apps didn’t get caught during auditing.
However it turned out that you could rename them .bat or .cmd and they would execute just fine.
I think Doom 2 multiplayer was extra fun because of the added need to be aware not just of in-game enemies but also the need to be aware of the teacher and be ready to instantly quit at any moment.
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 entire school district?” My heart sank.
I ended up getting in-school suspension. Considering this was my first ever “offense” in school, I felt like a badass going out with a bang.
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...
I did the same in 8th or 9th grade, but on purpose and I sent a crap ton. The admin stormed in and yanked the laptop out of my hands and revoked my PC privileges for ~3 months. Fun.
I had so much fun with that back in school. Our machines were running Win NT 4.0 and and the computers were labelled with a the network name. So I would check the names of the machines my friends were on, or the whole class if I was feeling bold and then create a batch file to send them hundreds of messages.
I think it's pretty, but it's also very, very, very notification-happy. My icon in my taskbar is almost constantly flashing with stuff I don't need to read, from teams I'm only remotely involved with. I just figured out I could turn the banners off last week, but still overall it's a very....loud application. Wish I could write some kind of filtering rules.
The cynic in me says that’s how they got those “more than 13 million daily active users”, and there may be some truth in that. If your KPI is “daily active users”, and that’s measured by keys pressed and mouse clicks, getting everybody to click a few times is a win (for you)
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.
Hold up, what? I was using it until last week (I'm no longer with that company), and it was the semi-de-facto IM solution, because the entire team isn't on Slack, and worked well enough to serve our needs- the person we want to talk to is at another location right then (we moved around a lot) and we needed to talk to them.
yeah thats not quite right:
Microsoft announced that Skype for Business online will retire on July 31, 2021.
They still sell the product, and the hybrid/on premises solution is going to be around for a while.
MS Teams will replace the "Online" only. There is no "on Premises" solution for Teams so S4B will be around a while I think.
Lync itself is decent from a UX standpoint.
But holy fucking batman, the backend for Lync is an absolute nightmare to setup and maintain. I wouldn't blame Microsoft for wanting to get rid of Lync just to be rid of it.
That's correct. The company where I am currently working at was using Slack but recently decided to stop paying for Slack and instead use Teams since they were already paying for a subscription to Office 365 for each employee.
I hate it. My colleagues hate it. The UI is terrible. Most of the time navigating between the channels is a pain and the UI is just horrendous.
I think the funniest thing that was released lately was the 6 emojis that you can use on a message(thumbs up, love heart ...).
The emojis are of bad quality and look like crap.
Anyway, you can't pay me enough to use this stuff and as the author said in this article, if and when I change jobs I will be making sure that the team I start on will not use this sorry excuse of bloatware.
If “the emojis are of bad quality” is what constitutes an ugly and unpleasant working environment in 2019, I’d say the future is looking bright indeed.
Newer Office 365 client builds are installing it by default. Worse, they didn't move away from the per-user installation. Instead they just took the brain-damaged route of force-installing it inside each user's profile when they logon. I think that's a real dick move, but, then again, I sometimes think I'm the last admin in the world who gives a damn about efficiency.
Again it depends. I downloaded an installer only yesterday that did not have it, even when it was part of the subscription. It is also not being pushed as an office update to my users yet. But then again I haven't checked if that is because WSUS is holding it back
If you take a blank W10 machine and do a 365 fat client install on it you get the ‘Teams machine wide installer’ installed on it, which then hooks the teams installer in on a per login basis. Your workplace must have endpoint management in place that somehow prevents this.
I don't know. A lot of these issues (and I must admit I totally lost interest at the point I got to the complaints about message threading, although I did skim to the end[1]) are really personal preference. Take message threading as an example: we use it all the time and it works well. I actually prefer it to Slack threads.
My main beefs with Teams are:
- Performance: it's just far too damn slow to switch views.
- Awkward to switch back to a channel or another chat whilst on a Teams call.
- Connectivity: it's better than it was at handling disconnection and reconnection but, overall, it's still a ####ing moron and a timesink - you're still forced to restart on occasion (which takes too damn long).
One thing I do like: when our company switched from Slack to Teams[2] what I very quickly noticed, and what has persisted over the last year(ish) that we've been using it, is the much higher SNR. Maybe it's that Teams isn't so fun to use but, whatever the reason, there's just way less distracting guff being posted and, perhaps to my surprise, it turns out I'm quite happy with that.
Slack gives the appearance of productivity and collaboration without any of its substance. Teams, well, it's still an IM system and therefore always going to be subject to some level of wrath from me, but for the most part it feels like it does what it does well enough and doesn't try to be the centre of attention quite as much.
[1] Where I was mildly irked to read, "Microsoft Teams is the solution that nobody asked for the problem that nobody had," in the conclusion. I mean, really, if you're going to say that you ought to be honest enough to acknowledge that you could say the same about any current gen IM app. I certainly never asked for software that would make it even easier for people to keep disturbing me when I'm in the middle of something else, and I know more than a few people who feel similarly.
[2] Teams came with O365 and losing history with Slack was becoming a problem, but not one that felt like it was worth paying what Slack charge to solve: we felt like there were better ways to use that money, and overall - and after initial reticence - I'm happy with that decision.
Yeah I weirdly agree with this comment the most i started facing a customer has been on teams since it came out I have been using for about 8 weeks after years of slack and I would say switching performance is my biggest beef. I don’t know why general performance wasn’t more of a discussion in this post since most of the big complaints are really tied to how your space is setup.
That's a good point about switching between different companies "teams". That takes forever.
And why does it have that crazy "you're offline sorry" thing. That's the whole point of having a local client installation.
All in all, I've never worked anywhere that used Slack or Teams "well"...so I'm not sure why either of them engender so much rage or love.
I just wonder why I have to have Teams and Outlook? Why not meld the two and get rid of Outlook finally. For that matter, why not have a tab in Teams with the web version of Outlook?
I prefer Teams to slack. I haven't used slack in a couple of years, so it may have improved since. For Teams, I like the built in screen sharing and the fact that you can share a window rather than a screen. I use 43" monitors so sharing full screen is impractical for someone viewing on a laptop. The voice / video "Teams meetings" are also pretty handy; we would do remote standup using that. I am also able to turn off audible notifications. I'm probably biased because I've been in Microsoft shops for years.
At 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 calendars, and more.
And importantly, we use it for file sharing. Each channel is a root point for a team-specific folder. This is helpful because storing common docs there means they are perpetually available to collaborators, as opposed to OneDrive storage, which in my experience has been very hit or miss (sahre links expiring, etc. ). People can trust that team content is there.
There are downsides. It took me a few months to find my 'optimal' usage pattern, I can't have channel-specific sharing, and it takes me a while to explain the above to people on the team. It is far from perfect, but it is better than sharing a bunch of files in email threads or maintaining unofficial google docs in a Microsoft world.
sharing information while controlling who gets to see it, who does not, making sure it is timely, making sure it is gone when it is no longer timely, and making sure all of these things continue to be the case is still a problem more than six _centuries_ after the invention of the printing press.
Heck, it's still a problem with direct connections. Take the average Windows PC. Take the average Android phone. Take a USB cable. Plug them in together. Now copy a few thousand MP3s from the PC to the phone using nothing but stock Explorer and watch the transfer rate drop to about 1/1000th of what the wired connection should be capable of, because Microsoft made sure to assign their most inept, incapable, dumbest employees when they designed MTP.
Well, the Internet everyone uses isn't really designed for it. HTTP is a request/response model. But the model of filesharing is that I have a bunch of data and I want to send it to you, not that I have a bunch of data and I want you to ask me for it.
File sharing over the internet means setting up a webserver, after which it works beautifully. But nobody wants to do that. They want to use browsers.
TCP isn't asymmetric in the same way, but who's out there thinking of raw TCP as "the Internet"?
It's a shame Torrenting gets such a bad rap. If I want to share a large file with somebody who knows what they are doing, I encrypt it, create a torrent, send them the magnet URL and then they can download it and decrypt it. No web server needed.
Unfortunately, a lot of the time, people have no idea what you are on about, or even if they do, they are behind a corporate firewall with torrenting blocked/on a work machine and can't install a client.
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?
It's good at chat. It's not good at persistent chat rooms.
It's great for ad hoc groups of people to chat or for direct chat. It's also great for meetings. Where it gets cumbersome is in the persistent chat room management.
And as someone who is not a fan of chat rooms as a replacement for emails (I can't even filter or categorize information) I'm glad about that part.
Email is great and all, but not for regular topical discussions that may interest dynamic groups of people. A persistent, shared and searchable history and threading enables more effective discussion on a larger scale than practical with email.
Fair enough. Teams sucks for the case where you have a limited topic that you want adynamically changing user list to be able to access for an extended period of time.
I’ll take that in return for it not trying to replace email, which, at the very least has folders, and rules, and starring (nearly every implementation has some version of this), multiple clients, the ability to access from non GUI clients, etc.
I really don’t understand at what point we decided that email sucked and really what we needed was a proprietary solution that are up a ton of RAM and hardly had any ability to customise or optimize in ways thateven non technical people have successfully managed wth email.
For all the non email like features, I.e. instant chatting with an individual, or a group of people, Teams works great.
It's okay at chat, but the big deal is that it's Microsoft's best client for SharePoint. It finally makes a lot of SharePoint features make sense and puts them in a way that is easy to use without paying a consultant design firm an arm and a leg on customizing the widgets on team SharePoint portals in such a way that mere mortals can find the important stuff like the team's document libraries, Wiki, or OneNote Notebook.
(It really is amazing how much Teams has lit up "we have the ability to do that now" for SharePoint features that have existed almost forever. I was particularly amused when someone asked me why so many Teams features have SharePoint URLs when SharePoint didn't support them and then showing them the three or four step process to do it on SharePoint that has been there all along.)
That’s why it’s a big electron app, it stitches together all of these disparate O365 components. It exists to empower the bureaucracy in a company to stop any migration away from their platform.
Users are pretty meh about it, but legal and compliance are big fans, because their process stays the same.
Yes, Teams is a SharePoint client from the SharePoint team. Arguably the best SharePoint client ever from the SharePoint team. (The chat storage even gets stored in the SharePoint backend and you can add Teams chat as widgets on a SharePoint frontend.)
That is what everyone I know uses it for too. It is almost like git, in how every sub team has their own private branch.
Honestly, any important discussion that gets too chatty for teams, should be a meeting.
That being said, everyone in my team generally sits on the same floor, so collaborating physically isn't an issue. I am sure a few of teams's shortcomings will become more evident once we start collaborating with remote teams.
It's interesting that Teams is often compared to email or chat. It's much more akin to a forum or bulletin board system. I've found this to be a pretty powerful thing to have at work. However, it does happen to fit my work groups use case very well. We work on lots of short term projects. Each of these we spin up a "team" for. These are 3D projects that require a lot of media sharing from a cross disciplinary which works fairly well in Teams. It's been a pretty happy addition over Outlook (barf) and Skype for Business aka Lync.
Full disclosure, I work at MS. And I have never used Slack though would be glad to try it.
My 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 ended up using multi user IM messages instead of channels. Moving (and paying) for Slack was the best decision I made.
That being said, the Teams UX will slowly and steadily improve. It will be interesting to see where we are in a few years. I hope to see both Teams and Slack support SIP, they surely must already be working on it.
> 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.
Having lived through Windows phone's saga, Windows 8, 8.1, 10 and the first set of outlook.com redesigns, I know one this - their feedback tool is a placebo button, a self therapy session to get stuff off one's chest.
Microsoft doesn't listen to feedback through their official channels. They might step back temporarily when there's overwhelming negative outcry from the news but they'll definitely attempt it again after a while.
> That being said, the Teams UX will slowly and steadily improve
You think that they people who brought us "The Word Ribbon" and Metro UI are going to make things better?
That's not how M$FT rolls. Their customer base is deathly allergic to change. They lose their minds if things change perceptibly from what they looked like when they bought the system.
I don't know. The word ribbon was miserable to begin with but it has reached a point, thanks to a bunch of UI improvements, where it's far preferable to the classic menu for many people (at least the majority of people I've met).
The word ribbon is definitely an example to follow.
Metro isn't, because , wtf. They can't make up their mind.
The Office Ribbon is ESPECIALLY useful on OS X where there's a menu system as well with the builtin Help -> search in menus box. With that, one doesn't ever need to even look at that abomination of a ribbon.
And Microsoft thinks it's a good idea to add an advert to use Teams into Windows (added to the autostarted program list, so you see the popup every time you restart Windows).
Just shows that the OS is for Microsoft's benefit, not for your productivity.
There's a solution for that: create a file called "Teams." in %APPDATA%\Microsoft. The installer will absolutely try to install itself to %appdata% (instead of, say, %programfiles% or any admin-configurable path), and having a file there will prevent the installer from creating its installation directory.
We recently switched from being a small team piloting Mattermost to using Teams as it rolls out to the whole company. We sorely miss Mattermost. It'll be nice to be able to reach more people in the company via chat than we could before, but everything about the UI is lacking, except maybe how replying works.
It groups the replies together with the original message even if other messages are coming into the channel. Maybe that's an option in Mattermost I never noticed. I think the biggest thing we miss is reacting with custom emojis. My team had a little internal culture forming around that.
BTW, what happened to Outlook on iOS recently? Three months ago it was snappy, started immediately and notifications were cleared the moment messages were read; these days it takes ~5s to start, unread notifications stay for another ~5s after the message is read, confusing me about having new mail, and if the same mailbox is set up on two iOS devices, only one gets notifications. Is old Microsoft back?
Microsoft used to be fairly decent at making software that was usable by ordinary people. Then they took over the Fortune 500 world after IBM crumbled, and promptly caught Enterprise Disease.
I just wish I could stop Teams from starting up every time I log in and without creating a Teams account. I looked up various solutions others have come up with and it is seemingly very convoluted.
This is an issue with SAML pass through and should be fixed soon.
Not a Microsoft developer or even read the road map before posting this comment. Ouook, Zoom, etc already do this and it would be foolish of M$ not to fix this soon.
> "[caching/searching] is awful on any platform. It’s not clear what the bounds are for any search and only a very brief history is cached locally. Everything else has to be fetched remotely so scrolling is painful and searching glacial."
I've felt this frustration with Teams and Slack. Effective search in any real-time messaging platform seems difficult to deliver. Has anyone else had this problem and found a good solution to it?
> Effective search in any real-time messaging platform seems difficult to deliver. Has anyone else had this problem and found a good solution to it?
Log chats to text files and learn `grep`. Keep chat logs organized in a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly directory hierarchy.
I think many people would be amazed at just how fast their disk can read tens or hundreds of MBs of chat logs; how fast `grep` can find what you're looking for.
My biggest grief with Teams is that it's impossible to shut off notifications. With pretty much everything turned off in its settings and being in Do-Not-Disturb mode it still blinks the icon and shows number of unread notifications in the taskbar. Just. No.
Interestingly we do not have issues like this within our company. Recently switched from emails to Ms team and have never used slack. We are pretty happy with ms team with for few reasons: screen share, seems video or audio call, great support on desktop and mobile app, connection with everything Microsoft like word, excel, onenote etc. we are greatly enjoying it.
I’d say about 200 people IT team. Our company culture is not very tightly interested with each other so may be there is less chatter around the company channels. At this point its email tool in chat format. I personally love it.
I just want to know who thought it was a good idea to return results with zero context around them and no way to jump to that point in a conversation. Right now the best you can do is search to find a date, then scroll up until you hit that date (which takes forever, since it lazy loads the convo one "screen" at a time)
Oh yes, so much agree - almost completely pointless to search for something in a chat and only see the one line that contains the search terms, none of the context chat around it - dumb dumb dumb.
We use it with some success on a medium team and it’s been pretty well received.
That said: what we came from was Skype. No not the business kind, the regular one with blinking ads.
Compared to that, Teams isn’t that bad. Nothing is.
We evaluated Slack and a few others but the cost difference to slack when you already have a huge tab at Microsoft for their tools is pretty substantial if I remember correctly.
Same here. We're a small company (6-7 employees plus a handful of freelancers) and we previously heavily relied on regular Skype. We mostly chat one-on-one and use team chats mostly for general status updates.
I'm working as a contractor so I also use Slack a lot but Slack was a terrible fit for our company and its GDPR compliance is extremely sketchy at best. Also the calling features are practically useless -- I haven't once managed to get anywhere near acceptable quality from that. And don't get me started on using Slack on dodgy wifi (which Slack seems to be either incapable or uninterested in fixing, if my conversations with Slack devs are anything to go by).
If you're already on Office 365 and mostly Windows, Teams is a no-brainer.
Slack is a replacement for IRC. Teams is a replacement for Skype for Business. There is a lot of overlap, especially in how Teams is covered in the press, but ultimately I feel there are more differences than commonalities, especially if you account for software like Mattermost and RocketChat.
Slack is better than Teams in my opinion, but Slack still suffers from things even IRC has advantages over. Teams UI is atrocious.
IRC is free, has channel administration & granular permissions, a working & functional tab complete, many different clients with extremely low memory & cpu usage. The biggest problem with IRC though is not being able to read back without the use of a bouncer or something like paid IRCcloud.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadA few more points, in case anybody in the Teams team is reading:
1. Implement filters. Filters for teams, filters for channels, filters for search results. I can't filter my Files by file type, so it's a mishmash of Word documents, OneNotes, Excel, Microsoft Project files, and PDFs. I can't even filter by channel, or search within a specific channel.
2. Search results: Implement filters, as above, but add the ability to sort by anything other than Date Modified. Unless I know a good portion of the document name or it's been modified recently, I'm forced to scroll through the list.
3. Skype integration: We already use Skype for Business. Why is Teams also reporting my missed Skype calls in addition to Outlook and Skype telling me the same?
4. Meetings: Is Outlook transitioning to an email-only client, or are we just going to have all functionality replicated across Teams/Skype/Outlook?
5. T-Bot: I've got this entity in my Chat sidebar; I guess it's the Teams version of Slackbot? Anyway, it sits there saying "What can I help you with today?" Slackbot gives me an example question to begin interacting with it, but T-Bot has the entry window greyed out with the text "Sending new messages to this bot has been disabled." It's not clear whether that's a Teams thing, or something my org did, but why is it even there if I can't interact with it?
While we're on Chat, there's a bunch of people listed in here that I sent a couple one-off emails to. I talk to more people than this; where are those? Why aren't they pulled from my Skype calls?
6. Calls: I see some contacts from one of my Skype groups, but it's also got contacts who a) I've already removed from that list, and b) don't even work at this company anymore. They're still crowding out the people I actually interact with regularly.
7. API integrations: I'm not even sure where to begin. Teams uses the Microsoft Graph API, which requires use of the Azure portal, and if you're already familiar with all that it might work for you. For the rest of us just trying to write a simple Python script integration (a la Slack webhook), it's a bit much.
I'm sure I could think of more, but this non-blog-post is already long enough.
#7: Teams support incoming and outgoing webhooks, very similarly to Slack, but as with so many other things, access to them can be enabled/disabled by organization settings.
There's some fun inspecting this data, too..
Relative to that experience Microsoft Teams would be a significant improvement in user experience.
(Now if only if I could convince my colleagues to use Teams properly with N people in a channel instead of continuing to have N^2 one-to-one chats about the latest crisis...)
Took me long to realise I was looking at the chat window and to follow along the threads..
In what way, have you found?
I ask because I use both daily, and I like Slack better in some ways and Teams better in others.
Additionally, you can't seem to attach a .json file... though renaming it to .json.txt works. It's frustrating for sure.
Thankfully they finally fixed some issues recently so I can copy chats out of Teams without running into too many problems.
The most frustrating and immediate drawback is the low information density. It's gotten slightly better, but I can still see only about 20% of the information in a chat that I can with Slack.
Also the automatic conversion of things like ;) to animated emoji... please give me an option to turn this off. You have to ctrl+z afterwards to just use the text.
Ran into something very similar during my (very) short stint doing Sharepoint development. I'm guessing it's some sort of limitation burried deep in some default MS code somewhere.
At my last job we figured out the fastest way to get your company off Teams: add the CEO to a chatty channel.
You write it, think about it send it.
In a chat you just type and send as you think and decoding that stuff in hindsight is more work.
I’d rather get one focused and well thought out mail than 20.messages of which a quarter shouldn’t even bother me.
There is no real reason why you couldn’t write Slack messages as well composed as an email. But nearly nobody does.
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.
I was wrong. I did something like "NET SEND lol" and it sent out a popup to every workstation on the network. Hundreds of them.
Good times.
Wrote a batch script that used a wildcard - it took them a while to find it and I was very lucky the only 3 persons who knew who it was wouldn't tell anyone. One was a teacher and I am thankful until today that he didn't screw up my life with telling this.
That's how we ended up with 8-player age of empires 2 deathmatches after hours ;)
However it turned out that you could rename them .bat or .cmd and they would execute just fine.
I think Doom 2 multiplayer was extra fun because of the added need to be aware not just of in-game enemies but also the need to be aware of the teacher and be ready to instantly quit at any moment.
I remember the computer administrator coming into the class saying “Are you aware one of your students is sending messages to the entire school district?” My heart sank.
I ended up getting in-school suspension. Considering this was my first ever “offense” in school, I felt like a badass going out with a bang.
The professor classified me as the annoying kid, until I surpassed his expectations with the first programming excercises :P
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...
https://tweaks.com/windows/37362/stop-net-send-spammers/
There is also the "Channel mentions" setting, allowing you to turn off @${channel_name} messages.
Discontinuation is news to me.
They still sell the product, and the hybrid/on premises solution is going to be around for a while. MS Teams will replace the "Online" only. There is no "on Premises" solution for Teams so S4B will be around a while I think.
Lync and Skype for Business UX is an abomination. I rage every day any time I have to use it, and I've been using it for about 10 years.
Its the worse UX in any app I've ever had, I find GIMP easier to navigate than S4B.
I hate it. My colleagues hate it. The UI is terrible. Most of the time navigating between the channels is a pain and the UI is just horrendous.
I think the funniest thing that was released lately was the 6 emojis that you can use on a message(thumbs up, love heart ...).
The emojis are of bad quality and look like crap.
Anyway, you can't pay me enough to use this stuff and as the author said in this article, if and when I change jobs I will be making sure that the team I start on will not use this sorry excuse of bloatware.
Maybe an oversite on my part, but I didn't even consider this as I was evaluating an enterprise productivity app...
They will overtake Slack easily since it is a free addition to most 365 plans
My main beefs with Teams are:
- Performance: it's just far too damn slow to switch views.
- Awkward to switch back to a channel or another chat whilst on a Teams call.
- Connectivity: it's better than it was at handling disconnection and reconnection but, overall, it's still a ####ing moron and a timesink - you're still forced to restart on occasion (which takes too damn long).
One thing I do like: when our company switched from Slack to Teams[2] what I very quickly noticed, and what has persisted over the last year(ish) that we've been using it, is the much higher SNR. Maybe it's that Teams isn't so fun to use but, whatever the reason, there's just way less distracting guff being posted and, perhaps to my surprise, it turns out I'm quite happy with that.
Slack gives the appearance of productivity and collaboration without any of its substance. Teams, well, it's still an IM system and therefore always going to be subject to some level of wrath from me, but for the most part it feels like it does what it does well enough and doesn't try to be the centre of attention quite as much.
[1] Where I was mildly irked to read, "Microsoft Teams is the solution that nobody asked for the problem that nobody had," in the conclusion. I mean, really, if you're going to say that you ought to be honest enough to acknowledge that you could say the same about any current gen IM app. I certainly never asked for software that would make it even easier for people to keep disturbing me when I'm in the middle of something else, and I know more than a few people who feel similarly.
[2] Teams came with O365 and losing history with Slack was becoming a problem, but not one that felt like it was worth paying what Slack charge to solve: we felt like there were better ways to use that money, and overall - and after initial reticence - I'm happy with that decision.
And why does it have that crazy "you're offline sorry" thing. That's the whole point of having a local client installation.
All in all, I've never worked anywhere that used Slack or Teams "well"...so I'm not sure why either of them engender so much rage or love.
I just wonder why I have to have Teams and Outlook? Why not meld the two and get rid of Outlook finally. For that matter, why not have a tab in Teams with the web version of Outlook?
And importantly, we use it for file sharing. Each channel is a root point for a team-specific folder. This is helpful because storing common docs there means they are perpetually available to collaborators, as opposed to OneDrive storage, which in my experience has been very hit or miss (sahre links expiring, etc. ). People can trust that team content is there.
There are downsides. It took me a few months to find my 'optimal' usage pattern, I can't have channel-specific sharing, and it takes me a while to explain the above to people on the team. It is far from perfect, but it is better than sharing a bunch of files in email threads or maintaining unofficial google docs in a Microsoft world.
File sharing: apparently still a problem almost four _decades_ after the Internet was invented.
File sharing over the internet means setting up a webserver, after which it works beautifully. But nobody wants to do that. They want to use browsers.
TCP isn't asymmetric in the same way, but who's out there thinking of raw TCP as "the Internet"?
Unfortunately, a lot of the time, people have no idea what you are on about, or even if they do, they are behind a corporate firewall with torrenting blocked/on a work machine and can't install a client.
It's great for ad hoc groups of people to chat or for direct chat. It's also great for meetings. Where it gets cumbersome is in the persistent chat room management.
And as someone who is not a fan of chat rooms as a replacement for emails (I can't even filter or categorize information) I'm glad about that part.
I’ll take that in return for it not trying to replace email, which, at the very least has folders, and rules, and starring (nearly every implementation has some version of this), multiple clients, the ability to access from non GUI clients, etc.
I really don’t understand at what point we decided that email sucked and really what we needed was a proprietary solution that are up a ton of RAM and hardly had any ability to customise or optimize in ways thateven non technical people have successfully managed wth email.
For all the non email like features, I.e. instant chatting with an individual, or a group of people, Teams works great.
(It really is amazing how much Teams has lit up "we have the ability to do that now" for SharePoint features that have existed almost forever. I was particularly amused when someone asked me why so many Teams features have SharePoint URLs when SharePoint didn't support them and then showing them the three or four step process to do it on SharePoint that has been there all along.)
Even on 1:1 chat sharing a file just uploads it to OneDrive and uses OneDrive links.
Users are pretty meh about it, but legal and compliance are big fans, because their process stays the same.
NB All Teams have 0365 Groups but not all 0365 Groups have a Team.
Honestly, any important discussion that gets too chatty for teams, should be a meeting.
That being said, everyone in my team generally sits on the same floor, so collaborating physically isn't an issue. I am sure a few of teams's shortcomings will become more evident once we start collaborating with remote teams.
Full disclosure, I work at MS. And I have never used Slack though would be glad to try it.
Damning with incredibly faint praise, there.
That being said, the Teams UX will slowly and steadily improve. It will be interesting to see where we are in a few years. I hope to see both Teams and Slack support SIP, they surely must already be working on it.
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.
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.
Microsoft doesn't listen to feedback through their official channels. They might step back temporarily when there's overwhelming negative outcry from the news but they'll definitely attempt it again after a while.
You think that they people who brought us "The Word Ribbon" and Metro UI are going to make things better?
That's not how M$FT rolls. Their customer base is deathly allergic to change. They lose their minds if things change perceptibly from what they looked like when they bought the system.
The word ribbon is definitely an example to follow.
Metro isn't, because , wtf. They can't make up their mind.
Just shows that the OS is for Microsoft's benefit, not for your productivity.
Not a Microsoft developer or even read the road map before posting this comment. Ouook, Zoom, etc already do this and it would be foolish of M$ not to fix this soon.
I've felt this frustration with Teams and Slack. Effective search in any real-time messaging platform seems difficult to deliver. Has anyone else had this problem and found a good solution to it?
Log chats to text files and learn `grep`. Keep chat logs organized in a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly directory hierarchy.
I think many people would be amazed at just how fast their disk can read tens or hundreds of MBs of chat logs; how fast `grep` can find what you're looking for.
Keep your chats short and to the point...I never even noticed there was a search feature
And teams works better for a/v conference that whatever Microsoft has done to poor skype.
That said: what we came from was Skype. No not the business kind, the regular one with blinking ads.
Compared to that, Teams isn’t that bad. Nothing is.
We evaluated Slack and a few others but the cost difference to slack when you already have a huge tab at Microsoft for their tools is pretty substantial if I remember correctly.
I'm working as a contractor so I also use Slack a lot but Slack was a terrible fit for our company and its GDPR compliance is extremely sketchy at best. Also the calling features are practically useless -- I haven't once managed to get anywhere near acceptable quality from that. And don't get me started on using Slack on dodgy wifi (which Slack seems to be either incapable or uninterested in fixing, if my conversations with Slack devs are anything to go by).
If you're already on Office 365 and mostly Windows, Teams is a no-brainer.
Slack is a replacement for IRC. Teams is a replacement for Skype for Business. There is a lot of overlap, especially in how Teams is covered in the press, but ultimately I feel there are more differences than commonalities, especially if you account for software like Mattermost and RocketChat.
IRC is free, has channel administration & granular permissions, a working & functional tab complete, many different clients with extremely low memory & cpu usage. The biggest problem with IRC though is not being able to read back without the use of a bouncer or something like paid IRCcloud.