
Ask HN: Is anyone using Microsoft Teams? - tuyguntn
We are considering moving from Slack to Microsoft Teams, if anyone is using it here, can you share your experience with it?
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rarrrrrr
Microsoft is smart to build their own Outlook killer, and they certainly
succeeded in freaking Slack out[1]. We (SpiderOak) evaluated teams as
competitive research when building Semaphor [2] (our own end-to-end encrypted
alternative to Slack/HipChat.)

I found Teams to be a credible offering. It's shortcomings are mostly about
being very new (e.g. no linux client yet, some unpolished UI associated with
window resizing.) The O365 integration is nice. The client seems to be built
using Electron and TypeScript, and if the pace of development maintains I
expect it will be a serious threat to Slack. Of course Slack and Teams require
trusting the vendor with your unencrypted content.

[1] [https://spideroak.com/articles/slacks-morning-
after](https://spideroak.com/articles/slacks-morning-after)

[2]
[https://spideroak.com/solutions/semaphor/business/tour](https://spideroak.com/solutions/semaphor/business/tour)

~~~
mdekkers
Wow, what a negative, condescending article.

~~~
gumby
I first thought this was a flip comment and then read the article so I could
laugh at mdekkers. I was the dumb one: spideroak's article actually _is_
amazingly condescending.

~~~
rarrrrrr
For context: it's in response to Slack putting a very condescending 1 page ad
in the NYT addressed to Microsoft.

[http://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/theres-a-major-problem-
with...](http://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/theres-a-major-problem-with-slacks-
full-page-ad-in-the-new-york-times.html)

------
darklajid
We're using it. It is bad. Company just started to introduce Salck, MS
announced this thing and we had to jump ship because everything they deliver
is considered flawless in certain circles.

The mobile app is crap. There's no Linux client. No 3rd party integration that
I've seen so far. Lots of bugs and I highly doubt that this project will
move/improve at a VS Code level. A beta for your corporate communication
needs.

The only upside? It might replace "Skype for Business" which is worse than
almost anything else.

Sorry for the rant, but this is a very active issue in my day to day business
right now. If I could, I'd stay the hell away from Teams.

~~~
apapli
You do know it is still in preview right?

Also I use the web client and it works for me, although have to agree it would
be nice if the mobile app had access to some of the tabbed content. What else
is wrong with the mobile app from your perspective?

Finally, here is the API reference if you want to look at it:
[https://dev.office.com/microsoft-teams](https://dev.office.com/microsoft-
teams)

I am looking forward to when they integrate Flow with Teams. That could make
things interesting, given all the 3rd party apps that Flow supports now.

~~~
darklajid
I know that it is in preview, which is why I'm so upset about the idea of
adopting it at this point. Seriously: I'm ranting about this product because
it is unfinished and unpolished, but obviously the blame for adopting this
thing lies in this company. I wouldn't criticize it that much if I'd be able
to watch the painful first steps as a bystander..

You use the web client? I assume you mean teams.microsoft.com? The URL that I
see nowhere in my notifications etc? Every notification mail links to a
landing page that wants me to download a "native" client (even if none exists
for the platform I'm on). Notifications also never include any details: They
say "Look, you missed stuff on our service. Come back!" instead of actually..
providing any information. The web client has quite some bugs, a fun one is
opening a document (which embeds a 365 viewer, I guess) and resizing the
window. Last I checked the document view cannot grow. Lots and lots of issues
like that.

That API site? Yes, I've seen that. I think last time I checked you had to
submit your stuff to let MS decide if it'll be part of a non-existent future
"app store" thing. At least for Office365 hosted instances?

------
donmatito
My opinion(1), after playing a while with MS Teams:

The pros : the product is quite good, let say it is good enough and much
better than the status quo of relying on emails or Whatsapp. It is integrated
with the Office suite, and if I understand correctly, will be free for pro
Office users. It has a handful of very interesting product decisions, like
threaded replies and iframe apps.

The cons : MS Teams is not as polished as Slack, the UI (especially of the
chat area) is not as clear. The installation/onboarding is not as fluid. They
have less apps and integrations (obviously, this is just the beginning).

My guess : MS Teams will not even begin to make a dent in the almost 100%
market share of Slack among startups, agencies and similar small, agile
groups. The whole Office ecosystem is simply to heavy, the UX is not as great,
and some integrations might be missing. On the other hand, it might win big in
the entreprise segment, where Slack is less present, and where being in the
Office family is not seen as a drawback but actually an sign of solidity

(1) I am an independent dev, working on an app for their platform, so this is
an educated guess based on my testing. I will enable Teams to connect with
each other or with Slack teams through shared chat (www.smooz.io/microsoft).

~~~
Spooky23
The problem with the product is that it really exists to keep big companies on
the O365 E3+ plans.

Microsoft's big focus now is to retain subscription revenue. Skype and
OneDrive are shit and MS is trying to bulk up the ecosystem around these
products. If you work for a big company, you're not going to get approval to
POC Slack, Dropbox, Webex, etc as long as you're stuck with the Microsoft all
you can eat subscription.

Slack is a killer threat because it displaces email. Exchange has always been
the glue that holds the biggest Microsoft cash cow together.

~~~
gwicks56
OneDrive ( then SkyDrive ) used to be awesome. A folder showing all my files,
including the online only ones. Then they ruined it. I still don't understand
why.

~~~
Spooky23
They have a compulsion to recycle parts that are there. OneDrive is
SharePoint, so you get much of the baggage that comes with SharePoint.

They also offer feature parity with on-prem SharePoint, which kneecaps the
product. The main point of that product is to block Box or Dropbox sales.

It's only now getting better, in the form of a mobile app on Windows 10 only.

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apapli
Yes, adoption is still an issue for us as it is in a pre-release phase and we
have too many options (yammer, email, outlook groups, slack etc) but it's very
promising. Once they officially launch it that will help (hopefully) provide a
clearer product direction.

It's pretty feature rich for an app in "preview".

It's also free, and I like the tabbed experience. Bringing in Microsoft
Planner, some document libraries and PowerBI makes for a pretty compelling
story.

Microsoft haters will never use it, but plenty of digital teams may get forced
to use it if their IT team have already purchased Office365. And it's not that
bad once you forget it was made by Microsoft.

Slack ought to be worried.

~~~
basch
>we have too many options (yammer, email, outlook groups, slack etc)

and thats the million dollar problem. year after year microsoft announces a
new product / "best practice" as THE way to collaborate.

The sharepoint team is clawing back power after being pushed behind the scenes
for a bit.

How can you be confident enough to move forward with groups when the sync
client just started working, and they already are pushing out something new
that is nearly identical!

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px1999
We're slowly rolling it out to individual product teams in our small (~50
people) ms-based dev organisation. Things are going reasonably well.

We'd have picked slack over teams in a minute, though it has compliance issues
making it unusable for us - slack is just more polished and has a lot more
that you can get out of the box / with plugins. That said, teams still has
some great features for us, so we'll stick with it for at least 2017. We've
tried a few similar options before (primarily group chat) but they all had
gaps / issues that resulted in them being not as useful/used as we'd have
liked.

There are still a couple of massive gaps in teams for us:

* No on-premise TFS integration

* It seems that Office 365 is all or nothing - we can't tie the o365 account to our primary email address without it messing up external email routing.

If you're trying to replace a culture of email + some IM + files tucked away
in some document management system that don't get updated as frequently as
they should, it's a good start. If you've already got good communication then
it's less valuable.

~~~
donmatito
Good enough product vs crappy status quo + massive Office userbase = will
probably end well for them :-)

~~~
px1999
That's pretty likely. If people don't know how to use collaborative tools,
they get frustrated and give up, so a successful product can't alienate its
userbase. Skype teams is familiar enough for the email generation to use, but
still improves slightly on communication.

There's a huge market out there that's scared of Slack etc, but will love
Skype Teams.

------
pvdebbe
Our company bought into Office 365 ecosystem and Teams was a natural choice to
try. We haven't used Slack or similar tool before.

Well, Teams allows discussions, but at least in November its built-in Skype
for Business (SfB) client worked exactly like the other SfB clients work: not
at all well with others. (Serious issues with race conditions on how the
server sends the messages to what client, with several listening clients
everything turns into a mess!) Given that it wasn't working for us to run
ordinary SfB plus Teams, we had to drop it. Can't say I'm overly depressed
over this decision... ;)

If Teams's SfB client gains the features the original SfB lacks, or
alternatively if Teams would allow to disable SfB part of the software
altogether, it might have been workable. I personally didn't like the
intrinsic delays the chat process have unlike say IRC (feels very much
realtime even though the delays are there under the surface).

There's no info on what updates Teams has seen so we've kept to our original
comm channels for the time being.

~~~
basch
>(Serious issues with race conditions on how the server sends the messages to
what client, with several listening clients everything turns into a mess!)

This makes the mobile client nearly unusable in its current incarnation. I can
be sitting on Facebook on my desktop and Messenger on my phone and alternate
each sentence between each device. I cannot pick up my phone and continue a
Skype for Business conversation I was just having on my desktop. Cant transfer
the existing conversation at all. It is almost, nearly, surprising how ill
conceived and poorly executed the experience is. I end up switching back to
outlook when a person and I want to have a conversation while we constantly
bounce between devices, because our email works and syncs everywhere
perfectly.

~~~
pvdebbe
SfB (Lync) is terribly done in terms of the client-server architecture.
Messages don't get consistently saved for offline recipients, the issues with
several listening clients. For a business communications application, it sure
seems a lot less suitable for business/corporate use than Skype Personal.

Yammer's another fiasco. Teams, on the other hand, might turn out to be very
decent but the SfB integration brings it down.

------
ndespres
After using Slack on my team for about a year to get away from the annoyances
of Lync/Skype for Business, management made us shut it down for not being an
approved product/not defined by company policy/contributing to team
fragmentation across other depts who weren't on it. Fair enough, I guess. We
turned on Teams as it comes with our existing Office 365 subscription and we
are much likelier to get approval to use it for cost and "Microsoft is a known
quantity" reasons. I was excited for something that would finally help us
transition into using anything better than Lync compabywide.

So I was disappointed with the chat experience, the notifications, the way my
colleagues still using Lync wouldn't consistently get my messages, and the way
groups vs private messages are displayed. We all found it really frustrating
to use.

------
herghost
I'd be interested to know why any smaller orgs / teams might consider moving
since I see this as Microsoft's way of cashing in the on the Enterprise market
who are loosely aware of Slack but entirely comfortable with having it
blocked.

------
sergiotapia
I can't even find their pricing page. Clicking Free Trial and they are already
asking me for information when I don't even know what it costs.

I guess it's startup unfriendly and only marketed for enterprise.

What made you want to switch from Slack to Microsoft Teams? How large is your
team? Curious to see the responses to this thread.

~~~
oduis
The trick is that it's is part of Office365, you can't buy it separately. But
for a few bucks you get a coherent suite of many products, Microsoft Teams
just being one of them. So it does not have to be greater than Slack, just
good enough, since you bought it anyway with your Office365 subscription.

------
pducks32
I once did Client work that required certain data protection practices. Can
anyone speak to Microsofts draw in that regard. Is it up to the standard you
need if you work at a hospital or something like that?

------
anondevel0per
I switched from slack after 4 years and I honestly can't say I've missed any
features.

------
lucb1e
Sounds like a good question for
[https://reddit.com/r/sysadmin](https://reddit.com/r/sysadmin)

I don't mind the discussion here, I just feel like you might reach a more
specific and bigger audience there.

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hiby007
I think slack should charge on per user basis for any number or team, instead
of having to pay for the same user in two different teams.

I also think there should be cheaper/better competitor for slack in the
market.

~~~
gkoberger
You won't get cheaper AND better. There's already a _ton_ of competition.

Cheaper exists (everything from IRC to HipChat to Mattermost to dozens of
Slack clones[1]); you're more than welcome to use any of those. The reason
people don't is because Slack is the best (great UI, works well, lots of
integrations, network effect, etc).

[1] [http://blog.capterra.com/the-top-13-slack-
alternatives/](http://blog.capterra.com/the-top-13-slack-alternatives/)

~~~
it33
Hi @gkoberger, Mattermost team here. Thanks for the mention.

I'd share that Mattermost has gotten popular as a Slack-alternative recently.
There's hundreds of contributors and we're now available in Chinese, Japanese,
Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Dutch and Russian--whereas Slack
is English-only.

Also, the open source community has added many features Slack doesn't offer,
like threaded messaging, multi-team accounts, markdown support, etc. See:
[https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-
its-o...](https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-open-
source-alternative/)

Right now, Mattermost is most popular among IT organizations looking for an
open source, private cloud messaging solution they can control and customize,
and we're branching out from there.

------
tiernano
Yea. We moved to it in the office. We used ryver for a while, looked at slack,
but, given we are on office365 and are a Microsoft shop, it was an easy move.
So far, so good.

