That’s all.
Unpopular opinion: I actually like MS Teams
Look, I know this might get downvoted, but Teams is… actually fine? Yeah, it’s not perfect, but it just works. The best part is that everyone and their grandma knows how to use it because it’s the corporate standard around here.
I can’t tell you how much time I’ve saved not having to do the whole “can you hear me? let me try reconnecting… oh wait try updating your browser” dance that happens with other platforms. My company recently switched to Google Meet and honestly? It’s been a downgrade. Teams might not be the coolest kid on the block, but at least I’m not spending half my meetings troubleshooting audio and video issues.
Yeah, I have a similar experience, but it certainly lacks in features compared to other messengers. For example:
- chat - formatting is terrible, Slack is way better here
- groups - haven’t bothered figuring them out, in Slack making a channel or group message is super natural
- resources - Teams eats RAM like crazy, Slack seems to be a bit more respectful
- recent chats/messages - I can never find what I’m looking for, with Slack it’s simple
I like the integration w/ Outlook because we’re basically forced to use it at work, but Slack is way better for almost everything that doesn’t interact directly w/ Outlook. So if it’s not a scheduled meeting, I and my team much prefer Slack.
Gotta say, formatting of text isn’t a high priority for me… I’m pinging someone about a thing, I’m not writing a presentation. Adding emojis is about as much as I need 🤔
And - to me - adding people to an adhoc group call / chat is straight forwards - and finding those conversations later is too
But, I believe that there’s a few Corp IT settings that can be adjusted (we’ve recently lost the ability to add gifs for example), so maybe that’s what’s going wrong.
But we’re a long way from AOL IM 😉
I send code snippets, quote sections of linked documents, and provide in-line links pretty often, kind of like here on Lemmy. Slack isn’t as nice as Markdown, but it’s good enough, whereas Teams is a complete pain in in the butt and it completely butchers code blocks. That said, I’m a team lead, so I fairly frequently post about recent releases, security issues, or give cliff notes of recent meetings, so formatting for me matters quite a bit.
And for calls, we have multiple logical groups of people, such as:
- development teams
- team leads (for all teams)
- groups by location
- groups by role (developers, QA, etc)
- release groups - may be part of a team, multiple teams, or parts of multiple teams
- automated alerts when prod has an issue
And we have ad-hoc group chats where just a handful of people need to be involved, but they don’t fit cleanly into one of the established groups above (e.g. project manager wants to know a rough estimate for an upcoming project).
Teams works fine, but I find it annoying to use.
For me “it just works” doesn’t ring true. Generally at least once a day, I join a call and it won’t let me unmute, and I have to restart Teams.
Scrolling through history is obnoxiously slow.
The activity feed is mostly useless, spammed with stuff that isn’t important and it’s the only place that vaguely tries to keep track of ‘Teams’ conversations.
In my company, I’ve been added to about 70 Teams and it’s pretty much impossible to interact with them, so as a result no one does, they all just start ad-hoc chats, since that’s the only thing that vaguely gets managed in a way people can follow.
When going cross-organization, it’s a crap shoot whether or not we can use text, voice, and screen share/remote control. I know this is generally due to obnoxious company ‘security’ policies and other solutions have it, but it is a frustration. One recent call with a particularly screwed up company had us on two different meeting platforms at once as well as on an old fashioned conference call, because text was only allowed on one platform, screen share on another, and no audio was allowed on either (despite both supporting all three).
Sure, Teams suffers, in part, because like all corporate tools it connects you to generally dysfunctional work communities. However it broadly does have it’s own annoyances.
I haven’t really used any other platforms so I can’t really compare but I have encountered enough audio issues too. Especially with new Teams and bluetooth devices.
I went from teams/ms at another business to google at my current one. If they changed to Microsoft anything I’d burn the place down.
I went from outlook and office to Google suite (Gmail and Google docs). So, so much better. Maybe excel has more bells and whistles, but Google docs has everything I need and works so well everywhere. I would consider quitting if they dared to change to Microsoft.
Regarding communication, we use Slack for text and zoom for video, and it’s fine. I also have installed teams and Webex (for customers) and they are all okay-ish. Once I used bluejeans and audio quality was impressively better, but no one seems ot use it.
Microsoft Teams *are dogshit.
I think “is” is grammatically correct here. Teams is the name of the application, singular.
Teams is the name of the application, singular.
Teams *are the name of the application, singular.
Yeah, you’re completely right. Microsoft Teams refers to multiple communications platforms, not just one. Wikipedia and Microsoft themselves made the same mistake as OP here. Hope you can help!
( ¬_¬)
Microsoft OneDrive is the maggots in the dog shit
Onedrive is pretty ok, other than being annoying. A company I worked for was acquired by another company that had their own cloud storage product. After the acquisition, they forced us to migrate from onedrive to their product. It was so bad… Files would constantly corrupt and disappear, the speed was terrible, trying to share files didn’t work half the time, when sharing folders the people you shared with wouldn’t see all the files in the folder. They also limited our storage from 1TB to 25GB making it pretty useless for storing builds of our product or trying to share VMs.
And the worst part is that they also closed our SMB network share to force us to use that piece of shit.
After that experience, I will never complain about Onedrive again.
There shouldn’t be worms in the poop of a healthy dog. This analogy just keeps getting better and more accurate.
Oooh, I hate it so bad…… I used to click “Save” and my word document would ask to save in the only folder I save ALL my documents in. Change the name, save, so easy!
Now it asks if I want to save to OneDrive… Fuck No Mr Paperclip! I want it in the folder I always use and don’t want to have to select “Other” then dig through screens to select the thing I use every time!
On Mac, I would use Keyboard Maestro to try to automate that. I think AutoHotkey can do the same kind of thing on Windows?
So annoying. The OneDrive documents folder masquerading as your actual docs folder. Diabolical.
At least it’s better than Slack and Discord. Still shit of course, but it could be worse.
365 is just shiiiit. Even Google’s stuff (free) is far better and less intrusive/annoying.
