The last couple of places I worked at used Teams, as did a number of the clients. We never found anything much better for the video calling aspect, and my understanding is that Teams comes for free with all the other Microsoft Shit - so you may as well.
I didn't find the chats/discussion UI at all clear initially, but once I'd had it explained to me, I could see what was going on.
(I do remember it taking a long time to load, and apparently using a surprising amount of memory once it was finally done, but aside from providing reliable fodder for water cooler conversations with other 40+ year old colleagues this never actually seemed to cause a problem in practice. At my last Teams-using job I would restart my PC no more than once or twice a week, something I could let happen in parallel with making the cup of tea that I'd always be making at some point anyway. And it had 64 GB RAM, which isn't even a lot by today's standards, but still Teams didn't actually fill all of it.)
Zoom, Slack and Google Meet all work as well or better than Teams for it's primary purpose: video calls. Teams freezes up, consume ALL your resources, going from one call to another and it just stops working.
The only thing I've used that's worse is Chime.
>> I didn't find the chats/discussion UI at all clear initially, but once I'd had it explained to me, I could see what was going on.
This is an example of how bad it is: you had to have the chat UX explained to you. Combined with MS cramming as much crap into teams as possible and trying to tie you to their other products with integrations that barely or rarely work - and the AI features are terrible (and yet another MS AI offering called Copilot?). It really is that bad and I'm glad I no longer have to use it.
I keep hearing this on HN, but I never run into these issues with Teams. Video calling is fine and chat is ok. We generally just use chats instead of channels as that just seems like an unnecessary abstraction.
I don't disagree about the chat UX. The chat vs channel distinction was not at all clear when I started using Teams, at least not to me, and actually not to any of my colleagues either, and it was a large part of why we quickly started using Slack at that place. It wasn't until I did some work with a client that had long gone full Microsoft that I encountered somebody that had an idea of what was going on.
(In fact, it's not really that complicated. If you squint right, it might even be more useful than what Slack gives you! But something about the UI just didn't make it remotely obvious.)
Anyway, even if the text chat isn't awesome, for video calls, we never had a problem, and it scales pretty well with number of participants.
I've never used teams, what's bad about it? my newco is moving from webex to teams for video but keeping slack. I'm a bit worried keeping slack is a short term thing.
I can list off a few issues, but as usual, who and how many will share these experiences is a complete toss-up:
- random chunks of chat log can go temporarily missing at random when you scroll up. temporarily as in, they'll load on another device. on the regular one though, who knows when you'll get them back...
- if you manage to call someone the same time they do you, all bets are off. got things softlocked more than a few times.
- the usual recent Microsoft obsession with (keyboard-focus hijacking!) popups is of course also a thing in Teams
- text styling is hell, and sometimes when you click on the copy button in code blocks or copy out stuff in general, you get html tags polluting your copied data
- chats & group chats vs. team chats is extremely unnecessary and cumbersome
- multitenant support does a complete ui reload after which you miss notifications from the tenant you switched away from (might be different now)
- the localization is funky, just like in all other Microsoft products; from the small, like calendars starting on the wrong day, to the bigger, where if you ping @everyone in your Teams set to your native locale, then on the other side people will also see the ping in your native locale. It's just like Exchange/Outlook in this regard.
- the audio settings like getting mixed up, especially if you happen to disconnect and reconnect your stuff on the regular.
- they seemingly hardcode the URL preview thumbnail logic per trusted site, instead of using opengraph. their hardcoded integrations are also ignorant of e.g. url encoding and have other minor blemishes. I dare you to link the C++ wikipedia article to someone.
- profile pics go away sometimes (mine has been missing for weeks now, appears everywhere else), and statuses can get stuck or be null
These are all ongoing things that persist after years of use. Other, more questionable, already solved, or rare / one-off qualms would include:
- one time I tried screensharing, and when I clicked the button it showed me an emoji picker flyout instead of a share options flyout (lol)
- used to crash all the time in Edge of all things (not sure about other browsers), fixed since
- screenshare can freeze without you knowing any better thanks to the often extremely low framerate.
- slow (might be my terrible workstation)
- happily lies about delivery status and reorders messages
Today, Teams decided to update itself during a video call. It started acting wonky during the call until I force quit it, and then when I restarted it, it had a whole update procedure that I had to wait for. Meanwhile, I just used slack's video call thing. Luckily, my meeting was easily moved over.
I only use the PWA. Typing is not keyboard friendly, you need to use the mouse for formatting. Some keyboard shortcuts exist, but some don't work if you don't have an English keyboard.
It cannot keep track of what messages you have read, often you need to read the same messages twice. The set of emojis is limited (could be deemed a childish problem, but with 100% remote team emojis are important to have some fun). The layout of threads sucks, sometimes you have only a small side panel to work with. When you want to delete old notifications, it sometimes just says "Cannot delete".
It't the worst application I have to use at work. As soon as I have the possibility I will join a company again hat uses Zulip. Unfortunately those are rare.
It is a worse slack client chock-full of Microsoft bloat. My company tried to move to it after getting an E5 license and the entire technology org screamed bloody murder until they reversed course.
IMHO… Slack and Zoom are the best combo. Zoom being necessary because for some reason Slack just cannot handle meetings well.
Fine in b2b settings but in some b2c cases (particularly when the “b” side is some municipal or governmental entity - those LOVE Microsoft products) it’s kind of hard to get options.
I’m incredibly biased (I work at Microsoft) but I love Teams. It’s a great meeting app and a great chat app. It blows my mind that there are companies that have totally separate apps for each (Zoom/Slack).
It’s more incredible to me that Microsoft has different versions of teams that don’t work with each other, but are named the same thing, and that the home version of teams that doesn’t work with enterprise teams comes forcibly bundled with an pro or enterprise os.
Teams is the only meeting app where I am usually late because it doesn't just let me join my meeting. Zoom will never lock up letting you join a meeting because someone decided you need to reauthenticate Teams regularly.
This would be understandable if it happened quickly but normally Teams has a seizure for a minute or two when you try to join the call and then you get told to sign in. Whoever allowed this behavior to ship should be fired out a cannon... when I click join a call, absolutely nothing should stop me from joining a call.
In fairness this might not be explicitly Teams' fault. It's built on top of a terrible authentication platform which also seems to be down at least four or five days a year. 365 is one of those things that could not exist if not for the incredible monopoly Microsoft has over Excel.
The last couple of places I worked at used Teams, as did a number of the clients. We never found anything much better for the video calling aspect, and my understanding is that Teams comes for free with all the other Microsoft Shit - so you may as well.
I didn't find the chats/discussion UI at all clear initially, but once I'd had it explained to me, I could see what was going on.
(I do remember it taking a long time to load, and apparently using a surprising amount of memory once it was finally done, but aside from providing reliable fodder for water cooler conversations with other 40+ year old colleagues this never actually seemed to cause a problem in practice. At my last Teams-using job I would restart my PC no more than once or twice a week, something I could let happen in parallel with making the cup of tea that I'd always be making at some point anyway. And it had 64 GB RAM, which isn't even a lot by today's standards, but still Teams didn't actually fill all of it.)
Zoom, Slack and Google Meet all work as well or better than Teams for it's primary purpose: video calls. Teams freezes up, consume ALL your resources, going from one call to another and it just stops working. The only thing I've used that's worse is Chime.
>> I didn't find the chats/discussion UI at all clear initially, but once I'd had it explained to me, I could see what was going on.
This is an example of how bad it is: you had to have the chat UX explained to you. Combined with MS cramming as much crap into teams as possible and trying to tie you to their other products with integrations that barely or rarely work - and the AI features are terrible (and yet another MS AI offering called Copilot?). It really is that bad and I'm glad I no longer have to use it.
I keep hearing this on HN, but I never run into these issues with Teams. Video calling is fine and chat is ok. We generally just use chats instead of channels as that just seems like an unnecessary abstraction.
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I don't disagree about the chat UX. The chat vs channel distinction was not at all clear when I started using Teams, at least not to me, and actually not to any of my colleagues either, and it was a large part of why we quickly started using Slack at that place. It wasn't until I did some work with a client that had long gone full Microsoft that I encountered somebody that had an idea of what was going on.
(In fact, it's not really that complicated. If you squint right, it might even be more useful than what Slack gives you! But something about the UI just didn't make it remotely obvious.)
Anyway, even if the text chat isn't awesome, for video calls, we never had a problem, and it scales pretty well with number of participants.
I don't see this behaviour at all, and I live in Teams on Windows, web and Android. It has improved over time.
This sounds wonderful, many of us just need to work somewhere and other things are more important than some of their unfortunate software choices.
The way the job market is right now, I wouldn't flee a company running MS-DOS.
I've never used teams, what's bad about it? my newco is moving from webex to teams for video but keeping slack. I'm a bit worried keeping slack is a short term thing.
I can list off a few issues, but as usual, who and how many will share these experiences is a complete toss-up:
- random chunks of chat log can go temporarily missing at random when you scroll up. temporarily as in, they'll load on another device. on the regular one though, who knows when you'll get them back...
- if you manage to call someone the same time they do you, all bets are off. got things softlocked more than a few times.
- the usual recent Microsoft obsession with (keyboard-focus hijacking!) popups is of course also a thing in Teams
- text styling is hell, and sometimes when you click on the copy button in code blocks or copy out stuff in general, you get html tags polluting your copied data
- chats & group chats vs. team chats is extremely unnecessary and cumbersome
- multitenant support does a complete ui reload after which you miss notifications from the tenant you switched away from (might be different now)
- the localization is funky, just like in all other Microsoft products; from the small, like calendars starting on the wrong day, to the bigger, where if you ping @everyone in your Teams set to your native locale, then on the other side people will also see the ping in your native locale. It's just like Exchange/Outlook in this regard.
- the audio settings like getting mixed up, especially if you happen to disconnect and reconnect your stuff on the regular.
- they seemingly hardcode the URL preview thumbnail logic per trusted site, instead of using opengraph. their hardcoded integrations are also ignorant of e.g. url encoding and have other minor blemishes. I dare you to link the C++ wikipedia article to someone.
- profile pics go away sometimes (mine has been missing for weeks now, appears everywhere else), and statuses can get stuck or be null
These are all ongoing things that persist after years of use. Other, more questionable, already solved, or rare / one-off qualms would include:
- one time I tried screensharing, and when I clicked the button it showed me an emoji picker flyout instead of a share options flyout (lol)
- used to crash all the time in Edge of all things (not sure about other browsers), fixed since
- screenshare can freeze without you knowing any better thanks to the often extremely low framerate.
- slow (might be my terrible workstation)
- happily lies about delivery status and reorders messages
The text copying is pretty much the only remaining issue I have with Teams, and it is so infuriating when you encounter it.
Today, Teams decided to update itself during a video call. It started acting wonky during the call until I force quit it, and then when I restarted it, it had a whole update procedure that I had to wait for. Meanwhile, I just used slack's video call thing. Luckily, my meeting was easily moved over.
I only use the PWA. Typing is not keyboard friendly, you need to use the mouse for formatting. Some keyboard shortcuts exist, but some don't work if you don't have an English keyboard.
It cannot keep track of what messages you have read, often you need to read the same messages twice. The set of emojis is limited (could be deemed a childish problem, but with 100% remote team emojis are important to have some fun). The layout of threads sucks, sometimes you have only a small side panel to work with. When you want to delete old notifications, it sometimes just says "Cannot delete".
It't the worst application I have to use at work. As soon as I have the possibility I will join a company again hat uses Zulip. Unfortunately those are rare.
It is a worse slack client chock-full of Microsoft bloat. My company tried to move to it after getting an E5 license and the entire technology org screamed bloody murder until they reversed course.
IMHO… Slack and Zoom are the best combo. Zoom being necessary because for some reason Slack just cannot handle meetings well.
The only complaints I have is that is slightly sluggish.
Fine in b2b settings but in some b2c cases (particularly when the “b” side is some municipal or governmental entity - those LOVE Microsoft products) it’s kind of hard to get options.
I’m incredibly biased (I work at Microsoft) but I love Teams. It’s a great meeting app and a great chat app. It blows my mind that there are companies that have totally separate apps for each (Zoom/Slack).
It’s more incredible to me that Microsoft has different versions of teams that don’t work with each other, but are named the same thing, and that the home version of teams that doesn’t work with enterprise teams comes forcibly bundled with an pro or enterprise os.
It's so fucking bizarre that there are multiple versions of the same thing, that are called the same thing but aren't the same thing!
It's gotten so much better recently, and I used to be a Teams hater.
Teams is the only meeting app where I am usually late because it doesn't just let me join my meeting. Zoom will never lock up letting you join a meeting because someone decided you need to reauthenticate Teams regularly.
This would be understandable if it happened quickly but normally Teams has a seizure for a minute or two when you try to join the call and then you get told to sign in. Whoever allowed this behavior to ship should be fired out a cannon... when I click join a call, absolutely nothing should stop me from joining a call.
In fairness this might not be explicitly Teams' fault. It's built on top of a terrible authentication platform which also seems to be down at least four or five days a year. 365 is one of those things that could not exist if not for the incredible monopoly Microsoft has over Excel.
I would prefer to have a job that pays me money than to not have to use Teams.