
The Horror of Microsoft Teams - rekoros
https://medium.com/@joshuamkite/the-horror-of-microsoft-teams-c18360712361
======
timoth3y
I use both daily.

I think the biggest problem with Teams can't be discovered by feature
comparisons and performance metrics.

Teams enables a company to "secure" the application in the same way other MS
products can be. That makes the product easy to sell, but in practice, it
prevents Teams from being an effective collaboration tool.

If I want to create a new channel, I need to get approval from IT. If I want
to invite a vendor to participate, I need to convince IT that the benefit of
adding this particular vendor to Teams outweighs a raft of vague "security"
concerns. In the end, it's not worth the trouble of asking and I end up
setting up Slack channels instead.

By creating a product that can satisfy the IT policies of their enterprise
customers, Microsoft has unwittingly created a platform completely unsuited to
flexible and open collaboration.

~~~
moksly
I think Teams is exactly excellent because it allows you to secure your
collaboration tool. Especially valuable post GDPR where you really don’t want
your non-tech savy employers putting privacy data into some online Trello
board, or slack/discord for that matter. The fact that teams is just part of
your 365 platform is soooo awesome in non-tech enterprise that it’s hard to
describe just how useful it is. But basically we have 7000 employees in my
shop, 20% of them them can’t name the operating system iOS/Android/windows
when they call support. You want your IT to protect them from themselves, even
if that’s obviously not how you would word it in your strategy.

Too much control is bad though, like you say, creating channels/teams/task-
boards shouldn’t be too bureaucratic. We were a little too liberal when we
first opened up, allowing people to name their own, which resulted in mail-
list mayhem. Because Microsoft created an e-mail address with the name people
chose. This resulted in the “specialised child care department” creating a
“specialised childcare” e-mail address, that would show up in outlook. Which
in term led to some rather important e-mails getting lost, because people sent
them to the one of the now two “specialised child care” email addresses that
wasn’t getting read.

We fixed this by moving creation into our own tool and using the 365 API, so
people still get to name their own collaboration projects, but they get a
“Teams - “ in front of the name, and that’s filtered out of the e-mail listing
so they don’t show up in the outlook address book.

I don’t personally like Teams or Tasks all that much functionally wise
compared to other tools, but the fact that they are part of our 365 security
setup and the fact that we’ve already paid for them, means I’ll use them.

~~~
arsenico
How is putting privacy data in Teams different from putting it in Slack?

~~~
moksly
I’m the wrong person to ask, all I know is that Microsoft, Azure and
Offfice365 is on the government list of places we can put our data (which
doesn’t go above NSIS level 3) safely and legally. Slack isn’t on that list.

~~~
realusername
Apart from some abstract legal paperwork requirements like those, I honestly
don't see much difference between both privacy wise. If the company really
requires privacy and owning their data, they should setup some hosted slack
clone themselves.

~~~
dx034
AFAIK, Slack will store user data on servers in the US. For most European
countries (if not all), Microsoft can guarantee that data won't leave that
country. Especially for privacy sensitive sectors (e.g. finance), that can be
a hard requirement.

~~~
dimitar
Only for the UK, France and Germany

~~~
dx034
They can still guarantee to store it in the EU, which should legally be enough
for any EU company. I don't think laws are allowed to require storing data in
a specific member country.

------
mullingitover
> "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.

~~~
mysterydip
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.

~~~
broth
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.

~~~
casparz
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...

~~~
wink
Just that the guy isn't to blame. That's like saying "By switching off the
lights in the break room I shutdown the power in all the operation rooms"

------
heroprotagonist
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.

There's some fun inspecting this data, too..

~~~
SpaceManNabs
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.

~~~
osamagirl69
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).

~~~
stinos
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.

------
Solar19
The Teams client is built on Electron? Why?

Developers need to stop building slow applications. This is ridiculous. It's
2019 and software is slower than it was in the 90s.

It must take an enormous number of CPU cycles to execute simple tasks in an
Election-based app. It's just incredibly inefficient. I heard similar things
about Slack – that it was built on Node, maybe Electron, and was dog slow,
especially to open. It's frustrating that developers are bringing the slowness
of the web to the desktop. Just build proper desktop applications using native
desktop APIs.

~~~
toxican
It's built on Electron and _still_ no native Linux client. There's a web
version, but you can't join meetings or screenshare. There are 3rd party
wrappers for the web version that enable meetings, but you still can't
screenshare.

At the very least their web version needs to have parity with the desktop
application. It's 2019, browsers can handle voice chat and screensharing!

~~~
utopian3
Wow, I’m pretty sure Hipchat is built on Electron and has had all these
features for years! Microsoft must really be struggling

~~~
rekoros
What’s Hipchat?

~~~
thethirdone
What information are you expecting that wouldn't be easier to find by googling
Hipchat? I can't understand why anyone would ask this.

~~~
sebcat
No one is asking ”What’s Microsoft?” though.

~~~
cwyers
Yeah, Hipchat is EOL and Teams has a market. Now, I _hate_ Teams, but it is
nonobvious that Hipchat has a better notion of what features are necessary to
be successful.

------
bartread
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._

~~~
youdontknowtho
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?

------
stuart78
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.

~~~
ptx
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?

~~~
addicted
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.

~~~
WiseWeasel
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.

~~~
addicted
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.

------
bob1029
We currently use Teams and everyone on the team absolutely hates it. I am
actively looking at alternatives such as mattermost or slack to get us onto
something that doesn't run like complete garbage.

Also, why did this have to be developed using electron? If Teams were a native
application, or even written using something on the .NET-side, we would
probably have about 20% the complaints we do today. Watching an application
that is more-or-less responsible for managing basic text and image data on a
continuously-paginated basis occupy nearly a gigabyte of memory is simply
intolerable.

Teams makes me want to write a clone just to prove how much better it could
be. That is how bad Teams is. It makes me want to spend an entire month's
worth of weekends writing a native clone that no one will ever use.

~~~
opencl
There are already a bunch of native Teams/Slack/etc.-like applications. Matrix
has a good number of native clients[1]. There's Ripcord[2] which supports both
Slack and Discord. There's Matterhorn[3] for Mattermost.

[1] [https://matrix.org/clients/](https://matrix.org/clients/)

[2] [https://cancel.fm/ripcord/](https://cancel.fm/ripcord/)

[3] [https://github.com/matterhorn-
chat/matterhorn](https://github.com/matterhorn-chat/matterhorn)

~~~
Jaruzel
What I want, is something that ISN'T a poor copy of Slack. We've lost the rich
landscape of differing chat/collaboration clients, and now just have a mono-
culture of Slack-Clones.

~~~
benparsons
That isn't true at all - Matrix has a rich and growing ecosystem of chat
clients. For Slack clones, you're well stocked, but the links given to you by
the parent shows there is much more out there.

~~~
Jaruzel
> Matrix has a rich and growing ecosystem of chat clients.

Including ones that work on iOS and Android WITH Notifications? Not having
that feature has been a blocker for me so far.

------
DubiousPusher
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.

~~~
late2part
Do folks on your team understand how poor your product is for users?

~~~
levythe
They said they work at MS, not that they work on Teams.

------
m4tthumphrey
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.

~~~
shermozle
> 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.

~~~
vezycash
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.

~~~
evilotto
Have you sent feedback?

~~~
vezycash
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.

------
cannonedhamster
I'm an admin of both Slack and Teams. Almost all of this is due to how his org
configured Teams. While there's some valid complaints, a lot of this comes
down to IT not understanding the needs of their users or simply not caring
about the needs of their users because of some stupid opaque management
decisions. You can mute chats same as on Slack. You can be forced to autojoin
same as in Slack. I have regular meetings with customers in Teams. While Slack
is absolutely still better at what it does most of his horrible experience
comes down to crappy settings by his IT. The mobile device integration is
truly abysmal though. Hoping in apps requires you to install those apps as
well to do simple things like project management. The whole point of hooking
in an app is to not have to go directly to said app. We haven't had a problem
with notifications either. Most of what's possible in locking down Teams is
possible to do it Slack it's just not default.

------
cryptozeus
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.

~~~
realPubkey
How big is your company? Have you tried the search 'feature'?

~~~
toxican
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)

~~~
rollthehard6
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.

------
pixelbath
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.

~~~
EpicEng
#3 Skype is discontinued and Teams is the replacement. That's likely why.

~~~
WorldMaker
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.

------
bluedino
Microsoft ruins Skype, then tries making their own communication tool. Ugh.

What is it again that Microsoft is getting such accolades for? Visual Studio
Code is fantastic. Github is great, but they bought that. Office 365?
OneDrive? I'll give you those. Hosted Exchange is a thorn in my side. Internet
Explorer and Edge are (were?) both a joke.

I don't have any experience with Azure. Xbox is great. Their server products
have been fine since Windows 2000. Windows 10 is a joke. The Surface line
isn't anything special.

~~~
lowdose
> Microsoft ruins Skype, then tries making their own communication tool.

Even some rumors MS is in the market to buy Zoom.

~~~
Aeolun
To be honest, that sounds like the perfect fit. It already feels much like a
MS program.

------
evilotto
At my org, you'd never know that slack has muting as an option. @here in a
nontrivial channel gets you public humiliation, every possible "loud" reaction
thrown at you (to the point of hitting the slack limit on reactions) and
people publicly scolding you that you just notified 500 people in 12 different
time zones.

~~~
Macha
Just mute it would be a valid option if slack allowed whitelisting
@here/@channel, rather than blacklist

Our slack instance has the opposite, a bot that explains how to mute in many
"public" channels upon a here.

As is I need to remember to do the same every time I join or get added to a
channel or some inconsiderate person on the other side of the world will
@channel at a dumb time.

------
ocdtrekkie
Main 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.

~~~
castlecrasher2
There's a drop-down element in the top-right that lets you switch, but it's
nothing as easy as Slack.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The drop-down lets me sign in and out of my one account, but I don't see a way
to sign into another one. Similarly, there's a "Manage Teams" button I found,
but you can't use it to add a team from another account/server there.

------
jimnotgym
I like Teams.

I picked it up really quickly. My team picked it up really quickly. The rest
of the company started asking me for it, which was my plan. I like the
Sharepoint integration, the Outlook meetings integration, the Planner
integration. I like that it works with my mac users. Yes it could be a tad
quicker...

If you are getting too many messages it is your organisation that is broken,
not your IM app.

Most of the other complaints in this article are to do with the set up, which
the writer mentions in some cases but not others. As a manager I am very happy
that I can control who is added outside of the organisation, for instance.

------
Neil44
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.

~~~
grezql
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.

~~~
freeone3000
Skype for Business (Lync) was discontinued in July, and support will stop July
31, 2021.

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
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.

Discontinuation is news to me.

------
adzm
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.

~~~
dagw
_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.

~~~
joshschreuder
One of the comments above says Teams sets up a Sharepoint site for each team
to upload files, so it's probably the same limitation.

------
dbg31415
Teams 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 in real-time, calls were
impossible and would constantly drop people, and heaven help you if you ever
changed your password; you'd sign in again only to find all of your messages
had been erased and wouldn't ever re-download from the server. It was such a
productivity loss for everyone and I'm guessing the only people who ever had a
complete and sequential chat history of my chats were probably NSA employees
who couldn't care less.

It's absurd that Microsoft didn't just buy Slack when they had the chance.
Building this in-house has forced a lot of people to use some really shitty
software.

[https://www.inc.com/business-insider/bill-gates-passed-on-
sl...](https://www.inc.com/business-insider/bill-gates-passed-on-slack-
microsoft-now-developing-competing-team-tool.html)

~~~
selimthegrim
What happened to Yammer?

~~~
Multicomp
Still around, just on the back burner

------
possiblelion
The worst thing about Teams for me is the god-awful file managing solution.
Everything shared actually goes in to the SharePoint backend, but changes made
in Teams don't always carry over to SharePoint and vice versa.

In addition, moving folders and files is such a broken and unintuitive pain,
there's no way to do it inside Teams, you have to go to SharePoint in your
browser.

I'm sure everyone who has had the displeasure of using it agrees with me.

------
oneepic
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.

~~~
Someone
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)

------
Multicomp
My company rolled out teams but then did it in such a way or only the
designated administrators can create channels... if you're not a designated
administrator you can only do multi-party dm to dm chat.

The effect was probably half intended which is to say only the various corp
administrators actually used teams, the rest of us just ignore teams save for
their randomly blasted 'app is being updated guys!...guys?' and continue to
use our half-baked email threads or GroupMe groups or other shadow IT
solutions because the Enterprise solution is so painful / pseudo insulting.

Conversations.im / chatsecure / gajim all with an ejabberd server and omemo
style encryption works a treat. GroupMe for group chats from legacy groups
from before the xmpp days which we plan to migrate to xmpp and yeah we have no
need of teams.

------
emptysongglass
How is it that businesses get sold on these poor groupware solutions when they
can:

a. self-host open-source Zulip (or Matrix/Riot, which is not that good
compared to plain old The Lounge IRC) totally free

b. pay for hosted software that’s open-source so their information isn’t
hostaged when they decide their solution is crap?

I see these kinds of poor choices made all the time. People usually don’t want
to do the research or a salesman walks into the office and they get sold a
contract.

It really bugs me because I think: these people are making hundreds of
thousands of dollars for taking other smart people on a ride. Is making
hundreds of thousands of dollars orthogonal to big picture thinking?

Is there a position where someone hires me to walk into their office and save
them thousands of dollars on unnecessary SaaS contracts? I’d do that job with
glee.

~~~
dflock
> self host ... totally free

Self hosting stuff is work for someone, and either needs hardware or rented
VMs - it's the opposite of "totally free". This is why this happens.

~~~
empath75
Not to mention the engineering hours spent managing it.

~~~
Aeolun
My experience with these things on AWS is that they are pretty much set up and
forget.

------
bitL
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?

~~~
selimthegrim
And I still can’t set urgent priority on a reply

------
richdougherty
Apart from the notification noise drowning out important messages I'd like the
ability to select messages and copy them. Sadly if you drag and select you
only get the bit of the Electron DOM that's currently visible on the screen.
Vote here:
[https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...](https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/31918531-allow-
copying-whole-chat-conversations)

------
robocat
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.

~~~
macns
Not to mention this thing kept installing itself even when I uninstalled it
for the 5th time! I gave up!

~~~
tremon
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.

------
unixhero
I like it. The reason is that in my situation, large enterprise corporate
setting, it's the best I can get. Believe me it's been a breath of fresh air.

~~~
seren
Same here, I don't feel that it is necessarily great, but it is not terrible
either, and it is better for persistent goup chat that any group chat IM.

I believe some teams have used Matterhorn or Slack internally but it was not
necessarily 100% approved and not company wide

Maybe, I should but I don't think that the using one solution versus another
is such a game changer. People rarely fight about email clients either.

Since we are subscribed to Office 365, I believe Teams is part of the package
and it is likely an easier sell.

Pretty clearly, it shows the power of Microsoft and bundle. Also, I am also
glad that the "new" Microsoft is really focused on providing better tools, and
not stuck with Office/Sharepoint only.

------
kisna72
My main frustration with Teams are:

\- Caching + searching : Their caching and searching is just terrible. It's
surprising how hard it is to search older messages especially in a private
group chat. scrolling up takes a long time. Images don't show up in the
desktop app, so I have to open web app all the time.

\- Centralized control: I agree that Teams is designed for centralized
control. some of it might be good, but its a communation software, and telling
people how to communicate seems like it'd defeat the purpose.

\- Not being able to add External people: Agree with the OP, this is a pain.
People in my org did this well with slack, but once we were asked to move to
teams, we weren't collaborating with external folks the same way.

\- Chat and Teams are two different windows. WHen I am in private chat area, I
never see new messages in Teams area. Notifications for chat work fine when I
am in teams area.

\- Threading: I think threading is poorly implemented, since it collapses the
thread when you reopen the app.

I feel like it would be an excellent improvement over email if this came out
before slack. But slack has shown what a good chat software can do, and teams
falls short in many ways.

------
alkonaut
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.

~~~
pluma
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.

------
jackvalentine
I had the misfortune of renaming a file that was shared in Teams and we were
chatting about. This completely broke it so if you click on it you can see the
chat but it won't open and has the error "This item might not exist or is no
longer available".

You can now only open it from Sharepoint and changing the name back didn't fix
anything. Thanks teams.

------
umvi
I think Teams is pretty good, but then again my company had been using Cisco
Jabber prior to it.

~~~
wcoenen
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...)

------
brynjolf
Reading this thread [0] on their Uservoice shows that no progress has been
done since August 2018 on notifications management for the end user. I'm sure
they allow control when you create a channel but convincing the teammanager
who very day pings the entire channel to say their work hours that day is
impossible so that feature is more or less useless. The fact that you can
praise coworkers with unicorns, being implemented before proper notifications,
has made me go from believing in the future of Teams to now praising Slack. It
is maddening.

[0]
[https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...](https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/20592283-mute-
a-channel-mute-chat-is-complete)

------
jimbobimbo
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.

~~~
walshemj
I use focus assist on and I don't get to bothered by teams at work (it is a
small <35 person company though).

And teams works better for a/v conference that whatever Microsoft has done to
poor skype.

------
Insanity
Teams is horribly unintuitive to use. The UI is much worse than Slack.

Took me long to realise I was looking at the chat window and to follow along
the threads..

~~~
CharlesW
> _The UI is much worse than Slack._

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.

~~~
Insanity
The chat feels so hard to follow

------
Andrex
Slack vs. Teams doesn't interest me as much as Teams vs. Hangouts Chat. Anyone
here use both and can compare?

~~~
evacchi
as a user of Hangouts Chat, reading this Teams description, they look terrible
just the same. Misfeature-wise, they are very much alike.

------
cleandreams
We use it heavily but these aren't the features I dislike. In function Teams
is a workflow browser but compared to real browsers it is very low
functioning. No good bookmark system and ugh, no tabs. Even the back arrow
doesn't scope properly, and anyway I find myself jumping around because I need
multiple contexts. I find the meetings and phone to be fine. It does suck
memory like a hog. Because it is a workflow browser I have to have the app
open and also several browser accessed versions. That means my laptop slows
down a lot.

------
NoxArt
I could pardon a lot of stuff early on, but what worries me is that
_development_ of Teams is horribly slow. Given how basic it still is there's
almost no progress.

Probably the worst thing for me is that Teams seem to be able to hold like 6
chat messages in memory, if I scroll to the past it starts loading and it
takes about 5+ seconds to load 6 more. If I go back it starts to load the
messages I just seen again. Performance-wise it's catastrophically bad

------
vbordo
> "[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?

~~~
inetknght
> _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.

~~~
vbordo
Interesting approach. I'll give it a try. Thanks for the suggestion.

------
codeape
IMO, MS Teams works pretty well. Not as good as Slack, but not horrible.

------
goda90
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.

~~~
B2B_human
I'm sorry to hear to hear about that! Just curious, What's better about the
replying in Teams? (Disclosure: I work at Mattermost)

~~~
goda90
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.

------
uglygoblin
I'm not necessarily a fan of Teams but there's an unofficial Linux client that
I use almost daily. It has some issues but mostly works.

[https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-
linux](https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux)

------
makecheck
The problem for me is that people haven’t really clued into social norms for
chat clients as it is, and poorly-implemented clients make this worse.

Some people honestly seem oblivious to any current chat status, launching into
complex questions and expecting immediate replies just because you seem alive
right now. I’m sorry but once I’m “in conference call” or otherwise really
busy, you should get the hint. I shouldn’t need a chat client that lets me be
virtually invisible just to get work done.

And generally, I hate chat for work. E-mail/bug-track is enough. I want to
deal with things when I actually have time to deal with them, not when someone
else assumes I have infinite availability.

------
noddingham
I'm sorry but you've got to at least spell check if you're going to put
something on the internet for others to read.

Regarding the content, "It can take half a day because of all the fiddly
little options that are so easily forgotten". What? If you've really been a
"long time" Outlook user, then this is 10 minutes. Half hour tops. But a half
day? This makes me not take anything you say after that statement seriously.

And your complaints about teams are related to admin policies. Believe it or
not enterprises actually have admins and policies regarding their desktops and
tools.

Unfortunately this represents what I've come to expect from medium content.

------
fulafel
Teams is replacing "Skype for Business", right? Horror must be relative. At
least now with the Web clients MS-invested orgs might stop asking people to
install virtual machines running Windows to videoconf / chat with them.

------
Clubber
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.

------
nudpiedo
To me that sounds like a “agile” failure. They were to agile for a design, to
collect user feedback or any variable input, to fix the known problems, and to
try a realistic set up as the client does.

------
throwaway7000
Disclosure: 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?

~~~
OhSoHumble
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.

------
vadym909
Fortunately I live wo either of these im tools. I know I'd go crazy trying to
live an 'always on' life.

I doubt the numbers MS throws around though to show how they are succeeding.
If they are bundling Teams with Windows or Office of giving it away for free
with Office 365 or Outlook, they could claim every single Windows laptop and
PC as an active user and soon be at 1B users. Technically correct but oh so
wrong!

------
martijn_himself
In my experience Teams is often used alongside other 'channels of
communication and collaboration' which makes it a burden more than anything
else.

Ever since it was introduced it seems more like an unfinished tech experiment
(but Slack felt the same to me). It seems to be designed with the aim of
increasing productivity rather than making it easier to communicate with
people.

------
carlospwk
Our Teams has Planner to do lists. Great, I thought, now our to dos are
integrated into our chat platform. Then I tried to edit a comment I made on a
card. Couldn't figure out, contacted our vendor only to find out it's NOT
POSSIBLE! Googled it, tons of requests from years ago asking MS to implement
edit and delete options for comments. Unbelievable.

------
baxtr
As a long time hater and forced user of slack: how does Teams compare to
slack? Should I be happy “that we at least have slack”?!

~~~
entropea
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.

------
rsynnott
It’s astonishing how bad Microsoft seems to be at things like this. I don’t
really understand what’s going on in there.

~~~
smacktoward
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.

~~~
rsynnott
I think their problems with internet-y stuff in particular started before they
became the new IBM. Outlook was still pretty awful in the 90s, say.

------
mxuribe
A Teams client for linux - meh. I mean, I guess I wouldn't mind it I guess
(assuming I don't have to pay more for it per my office365 monthly fee), but i
certainly don't seek it. On linux, I'm perfectly happy with libreoffice.
However, what I do want is a native onedrive client for linux.

------
Aeolun
My company is switching to Teams right now, because Slack “does not have
active directory integration”.

I asked them if it wasn’t a better idea to just enable that then, but
apparently the ability to actually use any corporate software is just not very
high on their list...

------
scottlegrand2
Reminds me a lot of the horror show that is Amazon chime, Amazon's alternative
to slack.

That said it had some half implemented good ideas, but whenever you found a
bug in it, its AWS-based team pretty much told you where to shove that bug
report.

------
dinofacedude
I am going to have to use Microsoft Teams next semester at my college for
project management class. Not looking forward to it. Especially since there is
no Linux version, and Linux is the only OS I enjoy using.

~~~
atq2119
Then be glad that it's at least not Skype for Business: Teams has a decent web
client, SfB doesn't.

------
Wistar
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.

~~~
deathhand
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.

------
jjwhitaker
This sounds like ad administrative issue with how Teams are built and
organized within Teams. It can be clean, simple, and effective when managed
properly but user training is important.

------
empath75
This thread should give some much needed perspective on all the people who
assume MS is going to destroy slack. I bet slack destroys outlook before teams
destroys slack.

~~~
dagw
A few of us here at work were using free Slack and I asked about paying for
Slack back in March. Got a hard No, since they where rolling out Teams over
the summer and it was 'free' and easily integrated with all their other MS
stuff. That is how they're going to win.

------
francisofascii
Kind of related. I cannot login to Teams from home. Some sort of infinite
redirect loop in both IE and Chrome on my home PC. It is pretty horrible.

~~~
CharlesW
FWIW, I'm using Teams from home as I type this, and I've never seen this come
up as an issue in our (large-ish) company's communications channels. I don't
believe you're experiencing a Teams problem.

------
stevesimmons
Messages with a single emoji are displayed 4x the size, with animation that
can't be turned off.

Teams is just not a serious business tool...

------
nl
Teams is like Sharepoint.

It compares with the competition really well on paper, but the details suck
the life out of you.

------
csours
The lack of muting/do not disturb is why I just leave MS Teams off all the
time.

~~~
mastry
Teams does have a "Do not disturb" setting. Either right-click the taskbar
icon or click your user picture in the app.

------
junkri
another annoying bug is the "John Doe is out of office and may not respond."
message banner at chats which of course can't be turned off

------
mastazi
Am I the only one noting the irony of criticising a piece of software by
writing a post on Medium?

------
marble-drink
I've been using IRC since the 90s and Teams is a regression, plain and simple.
I agree with all the points made in the article. But hey, at least it has
"stickers" for children.

------
acollins1331
Is there a reason that companies don't just use discord?

~~~
bob1029
Is there an enterprise hosting option? Any open source options? If no, and no,
there is your quick answer. Also, the target user base and UX of the
application make it unsuitable for a wide range of business cases.

I think something like Discord for Business could be an amazing opportunity
for growth. This isn't the first time I've seen someone bring up the idea.

------
donmb
> I realise that WhatsApp doesn’t have a proper desktop client

That's just not true. The Desktop app of Whatsapp is imo excellent.

