It did feel like a carefully and beautifully crafted long-suffered rant -- but on the other hand, I've worked with people who've understood Microsoft products (and the renaming / rebranding / incompatibilities between then all, with that same (disturbing) level of understanding <sic> ... however it's rare to find someone with the ability to tie it all together that well.
i sometimes wonder if i am more of a crazy person for a) believing in the existence of kafkaesque madness within their product suite, one that isnt quite actually as bad as i make it out to be or b) my delusion that no one at microsoft understands better than me how bad it really is. why is no one fixing this /sobs. Why is there no Steve Jobs esque person who stands up and says “look, usability is more important than features?” I ask this earnestly, how does ANY company actually successfully deploy Office 365 and use SharePoint OnLine cross platform?
almost all my frustration comes from simply trying to coherently respond when someone asks an incredibly simple "how do i?" It is IMPOSSIBLE to communicate a correct+coherent+concise+laymen answer to an office 365 question. (Why doesnt my Office 365 Group Team Site Document Library aherm Group OneDrive, show up in my iOS OneDrive app? You didnt press FOLLOW in the SharePoint Web Interface...)
I honestly dont think its as hard to fix as Microsoft seems to be making it.
GIVE CLIENTS AND SERVERS DIFFERENT NAMES. Exchange/Outlook. SharePoint/OneDrive. Lync/Skype-Teams. IIS/Edge. SomethingServer/Windows. Do not deviate.
FIX FUCKING FOLLOW/SYNC in OneDrive. I should be able to Right Click the system tray icon and see available group team site document libraries for sync. I should be able to see potential groups to sync in File Explorer. I should be able to select "sync this group to all my devices." Stop Driving people into a maze of webapps (owa, sharepoint, teams.) Maybe get rid of the word sync entirely. If I FOLLOW a group, it should appear in every Microsoft client I have.
End this default program madness. If I set Acrobat or BlueBeam to my PDF viewer, leave it until I tell you otherwise. Never reset it to edge. Dont hide the interface to change it behind an ad for edge. My new favorite one is Windows setting Mail as my default mail app, when I have PAID for the enterprise Outlook product. Settings > Apps > Defaults > Mail > "Click > Outlook" > "Are you sure you dont want to try mail." Ill be honest and say this new "are you sure you dont want to try our product" when changing a default is borderline anticompetitive.
Probably buy an Intranet Overlay company like Powell365 or Bonzai, and clean up the SharePoint/Yammer/Teams mess. Out of the box, there is no well integrated way for cross functional communication across companies. Yammer is a partially deserted Island, Teams isn’t for big groups of people who don’t know each other to create consensus.
Microsoft still doesnt own UserVoice. Microsoft's products are so inefficient at helping teams communicate and gather feedback, that they turn to a third party product.
Microsoft has actually done a decent job of merging Microsoft Accounts and AAD Accounts. They’ve eliminated the Outlook Groups app.
Skype for Business is still one of the most confusing renames in history. Start using PRO as the high end name for everything. OneDrive Pro, Skype Pro, Word Pro, Surface Pro, OneNote Pro, Windows Pro, Teams Pro. Make Pro a feature that gets turned on in each client, not a separate program.
FWIW, everything I've heard & read about what goes on inside Microsoft suggests that it's perfectly possible -- highly likely in fact -- that no one within the organisation has the same level of understanding of these problems as you do.
The silo nature of every product line, the competitiveness within and between teams (not Teams), the frequent rebuilding or reinventing of similar-but-never-quite-same fundamental components for different products ... also explains why even if someone within the organisation did understand all that was wrong, wouldn't be able to effect change.
Depressingly it may simply be an ineluctable effect of large organisations producing software.
For the past five years I worked with a vendor who sold a range of application & network optimisation, monitoring, reporting tools -- many of those were acquisitions -- and the work to properly integrate all those (by themselves, coherent) applications was clearly never going to be completed, despite claims and some efforts to do so.
Nowhere near on the scale of Microsoft, and certainly the problems and workarounds were understandable by every engineer and sales person in the organisation, but for whatever reasons - resourcing, prioritisation, technical, etc - it simply wasn't going to happen.
This year I've started working in a shop that uses the whole Atlassian suite (last exposure was with a few components only at a gig in 2011 - I haven't come into this role with high expectations).
It suffers similar (again, not to the same scale) problems. Some doubtless due to acquired products never really fully being integrated back into the mothership. Others are brought upon themselves -- notably the breathtakingly annoying feature disparities between SaaS and on-prem versions of the same product. As per your frustration arising from not being able to answer a simple question with a simple answer, their forums are full of people asking very simple how-to questions ... and then needing to get used to disappointment.
I'm still amazed that neither in OWA for iOS nor Outlook for iOS could I send an email/reply with high/urgent priority. You'd think mobile was an important use case for this sort of thing.
Is that claw sufficient, though?
It did feel like a carefully and beautifully crafted long-suffered rant -- but on the other hand, I've worked with people who've understood Microsoft products (and the renaming / rebranding / incompatibilities between then all, with that same (disturbing) level of understanding <sic> ... however it's rare to find someone with the ability to tie it all together that well.
i sometimes wonder if i am more of a crazy person for a) believing in the existence of kafkaesque madness within their product suite, one that isnt quite actually as bad as i make it out to be or b) my delusion that no one at microsoft understands better than me how bad it really is. why is no one fixing this /sobs. Why is there no Steve Jobs esque person who stands up and says “look, usability is more important than features?” I ask this earnestly, how does ANY company actually successfully deploy Office 365 and use SharePoint OnLine cross platform?
almost all my frustration comes from simply trying to coherently respond when someone asks an incredibly simple "how do i?" It is IMPOSSIBLE to communicate a correct+coherent+concise+laymen answer to an office 365 question. (Why doesnt my Office 365 Group Team Site Document Library aherm Group OneDrive, show up in my iOS OneDrive app? You didnt press FOLLOW in the SharePoint Web Interface...)
I honestly dont think its as hard to fix as Microsoft seems to be making it.
GIVE CLIENTS AND SERVERS DIFFERENT NAMES. Exchange/Outlook. SharePoint/OneDrive. Lync/Skype-Teams. IIS/Edge. SomethingServer/Windows. Do not deviate.
FIX FUCKING FOLLOW/SYNC in OneDrive. I should be able to Right Click the system tray icon and see available group team site document libraries for sync. I should be able to see potential groups to sync in File Explorer. I should be able to select "sync this group to all my devices." Stop Driving people into a maze of webapps (owa, sharepoint, teams.) Maybe get rid of the word sync entirely. If I FOLLOW a group, it should appear in every Microsoft client I have.
End this default program madness. If I set Acrobat or BlueBeam to my PDF viewer, leave it until I tell you otherwise. Never reset it to edge. Dont hide the interface to change it behind an ad for edge. My new favorite one is Windows setting Mail as my default mail app, when I have PAID for the enterprise Outlook product. Settings > Apps > Defaults > Mail > "Click > Outlook" > "Are you sure you dont want to try mail." Ill be honest and say this new "are you sure you dont want to try our product" when changing a default is borderline anticompetitive.
Probably buy an Intranet Overlay company like Powell365 or Bonzai, and clean up the SharePoint/Yammer/Teams mess. Out of the box, there is no well integrated way for cross functional communication across companies. Yammer is a partially deserted Island, Teams isn’t for big groups of people who don’t know each other to create consensus.
Microsoft still doesnt own UserVoice. Microsoft's products are so inefficient at helping teams communicate and gather feedback, that they turn to a third party product.
Microsoft has actually done a decent job of merging Microsoft Accounts and AAD Accounts. They’ve eliminated the Outlook Groups app.
Skype for Business is still one of the most confusing renames in history. Start using PRO as the high end name for everything. OneDrive Pro, Skype Pro, Word Pro, Surface Pro, OneNote Pro, Windows Pro, Teams Pro. Make Pro a feature that gets turned on in each client, not a separate program.
FWIW, everything I've heard & read about what goes on inside Microsoft suggests that it's perfectly possible -- highly likely in fact -- that no one within the organisation has the same level of understanding of these problems as you do.
The silo nature of every product line, the competitiveness within and between teams (not Teams), the frequent rebuilding or reinventing of similar-but-never-quite-same fundamental components for different products ... also explains why even if someone within the organisation did understand all that was wrong, wouldn't be able to effect change.
Depressingly it may simply be an ineluctable effect of large organisations producing software.
For the past five years I worked with a vendor who sold a range of application & network optimisation, monitoring, reporting tools -- many of those were acquisitions -- and the work to properly integrate all those (by themselves, coherent) applications was clearly never going to be completed, despite claims and some efforts to do so.
Nowhere near on the scale of Microsoft, and certainly the problems and workarounds were understandable by every engineer and sales person in the organisation, but for whatever reasons - resourcing, prioritisation, technical, etc - it simply wasn't going to happen.
This year I've started working in a shop that uses the whole Atlassian suite (last exposure was with a few components only at a gig in 2011 - I haven't come into this role with high expectations).
It suffers similar (again, not to the same scale) problems. Some doubtless due to acquired products never really fully being integrated back into the mothership. Others are brought upon themselves -- notably the breathtakingly annoying feature disparities between SaaS and on-prem versions of the same product. As per your frustration arising from not being able to answer a simple question with a simple answer, their forums are full of people asking very simple how-to questions ... and then needing to get used to disappointment.
I'm still amazed that neither in OWA for iOS nor Outlook for iOS could I send an email/reply with high/urgent priority. You'd think mobile was an important use case for this sort of thing.
https://outlook.uservoice.com/forums/293349-outlook-for-ios/...
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