
Global availability of Microsoft Teams - happy-go-lucky
https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-teams/
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cwyers
All of the file-sharing features are tied into "OneDrive For Business," which
isn't OneDrive and is just some Sharepoint garbage. The new sync client helps
a lot, but it doesn't work for the _sharing_ part at all, which is what Teams
uses. It's a huge liability for Teams until Microsoft can make OneDrive For
Business not terrible. And when I evaluated it, it was missing any kind of
snippet support, which I consider a dealbreaker (some workflows may not think
this way, which is fine).

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seahckr
They will probably fix it over time, and also closely integrate with
everything else, like LinkedIn, O365, Word / PPT / Task Tracking etc..

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mrmondo
I highly doubt that, the yammer, SharePoint, onedrive, O365 etc... integration
is abysmal and every product seems to get worse as they seem to tie them
together with silly string behind the scenes.

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iDemonix
My work is a bit of a mess, we've historically never been that joined up of a
business, but on the same floor we have people using Skype, Skype for
Business, Slack and Teams.

Skype - Actively getting people to move away from this, fairly easy as new
people in to the business don't setup accounts, everyone has experience with
Skype, it's not a business tool.

Skype for Business - Clunky, conversation history is there, then disappears,
sometimes it appears in your Outlook (in our case in a folder), sometimes it
doesn't. Feels like a half-baked platform, but as my office is very
Office365/MS-in-the-cloud they force it upon us.

Teams - Better than SfB, but still not usable. It tries to do everything, such
as integrate planners, to do lists and so on. It dresses up as a business
tool, then it has 'make your own meme' generators, which makes it seem a bit
of a confused app. My biggest bug bear is when you're viewing a conversation,
if someone replies to an old message, the entire message thread then appears
as the 'newest'. I've missed countless conversations because of the funky
ordering of chat.

Slack - Awesome. A bit memory hungry, but a really well thought out app in
terms of UX. Does exactly what you need it do, clicking a username does what
you expect, as does mentioning and so on. You can apply themes, tons of
plugins and extra stuff.

Whilst Slack is everyones preferred app, the business refuse to pay for it as
they pay for Office365. wORK are, for that reason, promoting both Teams and
SfB, because Teams has planners and so on, but SfB has somewhat usable VOIP.
Anyone slightly technical uses Slack though on the free plan, it's just a lot
better and features like Code Snippets are great for tech teams.

There are a subset of us that are thinking of moving to IRC, which has the
added feature that PMs and managers can't figure it out.

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fs111
I still don't get why everybody is hyping slack so much. I have used MSN,
skype, hangouts, MS office messenger thing, IRC, hipchat and slack in my
professional life and it is really all the same. You chat, you send files, you
make calls. Nothing stands out really. What is so great about slack, that
everybody is going nuts over it?

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vertex-four
Everybody is going nuts over it. That's what's "great" about it. As you say,
it was done several times before.

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nojvek
Slack does what it needs to do. SFC can't even keep messages in sync across
devices. Everyone is going bonkers because they didn't go crazy

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dade_
Just keep adding to the sludge! More proprietary protocols and islands! The
biggest problem with "Unified Communications" in business is effortless
federation with your vendors and customers. Teams just makes a bigger mess,
but then so does Slack and Cisco Spark. So add a Web conference tool or two (I
have WebEx and Skype for Business conferencing), but the audio is annoyingly
poor on S4B business. Don't forget our phone system, SharePoint, OneDrive and
Yammer. And while you are at it, have you kept up on LinkedIn and Twitter? To
communicate with international colleagues, you will also also need Whatsapp.
Perhaps you are working at a company with Google Apps with Hangouts, and may
your deity of choice help you if you have Salesforce Chatter (A torrent of
mental diarrhea) Of course bots are the future because I always wanted a text
interface, or better yet, an ASR/TTS interface because I like practicing my
English with a 3 year old.

This is a cluster and it is quickly getting worse. None of these companies are
actually trying to help. So far as I can tell, they just want to grow their
adoption numbers, try to preserve some revenue as long as they can and maybe
kill the PSTN, but I can't even make a phone call between any of these
systems. Then, with one small blip an entire system goes down, so I have to
call you and send a email with the file you need.

XMPP is dead, SIP/SIMPLE isn't appropriate for IRC/Slack type apps. WebRTC is
great for clients, but what about the backend, and federation? I love what I
see with Riot, and I appreciate Google trying to move forward with the IMS
replacement of SMS (Good luck explaining that one to the public, let alone
market it...)

While all of these companies will babble on endlessly about being open and
committed to international standards bodies, real time communication
applications are where they are at their worst.

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tremon
Meh. I've tried to use it, but I quickly filed it in the "totally useless"
bin: the amount of windowdressing vs actual content is staggering. I'm not
exaggerating that in a 1680x1050 window, I get maybe 6 lines of content, the
rest is spacing and navigation.

Then there's the abysmal threading features: conversations are collapsed by
default, and are not kept in chronological order. When trying to read back a
conversation, you're constantly working the mouse to click folds or scroll
back and forth.

The icing on the cake was its memory and cpu usage: it got so bad (with only 4
teams joined) that my entire laptop slowed to a crawl. I uninstalled it and
told my colleagues to just send me e-mails if they really want my feedback.
I'm dreading the day my company makes its usage mandatory.

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cmsd2
We've had preview access at work. It seems nice enough and I'm looking forward
to playing with the APIs. It does still rely on the other o365 components for
features, which just shows up how janky lync and sharepoint can be.

we've had slack and irc and hipchat. honestly I don't care which chat system
we use as long as internally we can all come to some kind of agreement. That
speaks more to our er diverse user-group than the quality of any given chat
system though.

I haven't been able to log in from a linux system unfortunately. The browser
user-agent detection barfs on both chrome and firefox for me.

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TorKlingberg
So Teams is clearly Microsoft's answer to Slack. But, how does it relate to
Skype for Business (Lync)? It doesn't seem to interoperate much.

~~~
douche
Teams will snipe any incoming Skype for Business IMs that you receive before
you can accept the toast on your real Lync client, which is always fun...

It's either got the Skype for Business Web SDK or raw UCWA jammed in there to
log you into Skype, deal with presence, and handle messaging.

