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Comment by e12e

11 hours ago

Heh, now that our team has standardized on Teams rather than Zulip (so that we suffer/connect with the rest of the org whom are stuck in MS land) - and I've been given the chance to use Teams for a while - it really is worse than I initially thought.

Which means it's time to look for alternative clients. I ws hoping for something like WeeSlack:

https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

But all I found was:

https://github.com/btp/teams-cli

https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams

Are there really no good Teams clients? Doesn't have to plug in to WeeChat or be a TUI... But something?

8 comments

e12e

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dijit  11 hours ago

You'd understand why there's no even half-decent clients for Teams if you ever tried to write a bot in Teams.

That's just a pure lesson in pain.

Webhooks work, but proper bots are borderline impossible; at least without giving you the feeling that you'd rather pull your own teeth out with pliers.

  • exceptione  9 hours ago

    Sorry to hear. Pulling teeth with pliers on-premise has been out of support for a while. Please contact our sales team if you haven't tried our Pliers Copilot 365 For Teams and Dentists offering yet. It solves any problems you might currently experience.

canpan  8 hours ago

I actually had a look. Now you can get messages and stuff from MS Graph. The situation is better than a few years ago when only very useless Teams APIs were available.

But the available APIs still suck. For example there is none to just get all recent notifications. I don't know if teams itself has access to more and better apis? If not that would explain a lot.

  • TOMDM  8 hours ago

    I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't. The number of times I've heard the notification sound, gotten a toast while in the middle of something, and then been unable to find what the hell that notification was for, because some other device I'm logged in on has helpfully marked it read.

    Then begins the hunt through chats, meeting chats, group chats, channel chats and the notification pane (which doesn't show every type of notification!?) to find what it was.

    Absolutely maddening.

wizzwizz4  9 hours ago

Even authenticating to Teams is a herculean task. Microsoft's official APIs seem purpose-built to prevent people from writing proper Teams interfaces, and attempting to replicate their proprietary SSO flow is extremely painful. (In theory, you could hook into it by starting a fresh web browser at the appropriate login page, waiting for the appropriate redirects, and then harvesting the relevant cookies, but that's a really ugly solution, and it already represents a lot of invested work.)