Ask Lemmy

Why is teams terrible?

1. Why can I see multiple calendars in outlook but only see my calendar in teams? How does that make it useful to schedule team meetings?

2. Why are updates always available even though I just updated?

3. Why can I only pin one post in a group chat?

4. Why does teams always use its own audio settings over the system settings?

5. Why haven’t they implemented proper push to talk?

6. Why is it that every few updates one of my meeting members randomly gets muted?

7. Why does “Meet Now” basically accomplish what a group call does but the notifications don’t really go out?

8. Why do I need to”Apps” in my teams?

9. After my call hangs up because the phone app is having issues, how come the other person could still see and hear me?

10. Why do you assume I want to use onedrive?

11. Why can’t my favorites also appear in chats in a chronological order?

12. Why is @everyone even a feature? This isn’t discord.

Compared to skype, irc, slack, xmpp, and any other chat/phone software I've used its unreliable spyware.

Spyware in that it's used to force idle status used by middle managers to make assumptions about when and how you work.

Unreliable in that it stops showing system tray message status when it updates without alert, using vdi/Bluetooth headsets are a crap shoot if audio will work or not, and destroys history by allowing corpo policy to remove messages after X days.

Lets see, half my team randomly doesent recieve notifications/get notification audio at times. Sometimes youll get a notification that theres a new message in a channel but it doesent show up until you restart teams. Today specifically my mute button was desynced with the application mute and inverted. Sometimes audio devices wont work at all first time you join a meeting until you replug the audio devices (not an os wide issue) the status icon has a mind of its own and will say people are away or completely not available even when they are actively using the computer theres also no way AS ADMINISTRATOR to change how the icon behaves. Only Microsoft is allowed to dictate that. Not nearly enough controls as admin to define visibility in things like timeoff requests, shifts, etc. Instead of having a simple notes tab you have to use some form of OneNote shoved into the software which slows it down, overcomplicates it and sometimes wont even sync changes. Theres more thats just off the top of my head

You can look at a post, even click into it, but the notification will not clear until you leave for another page and go back

My workplace used g suite then got acquired and spent six painful as fuck months transitioning to SharePoint and teams.

Half the shit in teams doesn't work and I'm still bitter about wasting time transitioning. My favorite three current issues.

From the SharePoint homepage there's a nice little search bar, you can type in your query and get literal garbage back. If you click "search more" to get it to stop being a modal window then the search results are accurate - Teams does this shit all the time... stuff that should be the same everywhere is just randomly implemented differently on different pages.

I currently have a little error bar in Teams - it says the web view version of edge is incorrect for this version of teams. If I click it (and there's little motivation for me to do so since everything seems to be working) then it opens a pane to a web page, redirects half a dozen times, then lands on a page that says "You already have this version installed". The next time I open teams the error is back.

If someone links to a SharePoint document in a teams chat I'll often get a "You need to be signed in" link unfurling and hovering over the link yields the same message. If I click on the link it'll realize I'm signed in and stop showing that error for a while. Please bear in mind that my teams account and SharePoint account are theoretically the same account. I have the same username and password to enter into both services and can't update information for them independently... if on Microsofts backend if they're technically different accounts then I, as the user, should never fucking know that. Fix your shit.

Bonus one for privacy. If you're in a meeting and muted Teams still demands mic access. If you haven't unplugged your mic or triggered a hardwareish switch then Microsoft is still listening to you... services usually keep listening so that's not super different. But Microsoft actually exposes that it's still listening! If you or someone else has auto-captioning turned on then the autocaptions may capture and transcribe your speech when you're muted.

I was very amused to read about my coworker watching an oblivion lore video when we broke for lunch in a day long meeting last week.

Teams just fucking sucks at everything, there's nothing they do that most of their competitors all do at least as good.

My company dropped Slack for Teams, because it’s free with the Office subscription, so I guess they put a price on collaboration and culture. Weeks on none of the bots and integrations work properly because there’s no time to fix shit that was already working.

If I want to copy a text message, I have to avoid the emoji pop-up, then very carefully click and drag over the text, making sure I don't also copy the user name. Then I have to paste it in Notepad to edit out any weird hidden characters. Copy it again and paste it.

If I want to send a reaction emoji, it's just a clock away.

Who the hell designed this abomination?

Hey, wanna try the New Calendar? Tries the new calendar, it is even worse than the current one. Hey, wanna try the New Calendar? STFU Teams, I need to work!

Teams for chat and video is generally OK but when managers start trying to do scheduling, task lists, and kanbans in it it becomes annoying in my experience. A software should have a definitive scope and not try to be an everything tool. If you want that interconnectivity then it's better to implement a standard which works with another tool that is designed for that purpose instead of tacking on a bunch of shit.

Otherwise, I end up wondering "Ok where the fuck is that scheduled meeting? Was in in outlook? Was it in the teams calendar? Was it in the teams Kanban? Was it a task list item in Teams? Was it in slack? Was it in google calendar? Oh, no, it was in ZOOM! Oh wait, fuck, I actually have a meeting with this client through SKYPE FOR BUSINESS at the same time the zoom meeting starts.... Shit."

To me, Microsoft's entire transition to web technologies is a self inflicted wound. Going native is a massive performance win. They already had that, and went the other way. Just, Why!? Now, Microsoft software is all big, bloated, and slow as fuck. Even the OS. They were literally bragging about a 9 second start up time after some optimizations to Teams. They don't even know what efficiency is anymore. We all essentially have super computers, now, but sure, congrats on your 9 second load time for a fuckin chat program.

What annoys me is that they seem to just ignore any requests to fix things that are broken. For instance, I don't want to see everyone's incoming video by default. I have to turn it off for. Every. Single. Meeting.

And I'm hardly the only one. Here is an example of someone asking for this, back in 2020:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/can-incoming-video-have-a-default-to-turn-off/98c198b5-e9ad-48d5-80d4-dc7051968e51

I suspect that Microsoft views Teams users as basically hostages since it's often something forced onto a big user base at many companies. If you hate it? Too bad: if you want to stay employed, you'll just use it.

Sysadmin for a living here - Teams breaks constantly in our office. Multiple people report issues with Teams not starting or not functioning properly on a weekly basis.

This is true for Windows 11 as a whole, truthfully. Windows 11 can eat my ass for many reasons.

Current pet peeve: I'm in a meeting, and I click to switch to another app to check something, then I click the Teams icon to switch back to Teams. Clearly, in this case, I want to get back to the meeting.

Instead, it shows me the calendar view. WTF, Microsoft?

Honestly it's never been too bad for me.

except that time it randomly turned on my microphone during a meeting, when I was casually chatting to my brother about the beneficial value of replacing antidepressants with a microdose of shrooms 😬

or when it wants to open docs in Teams instead of opening it in the actual program. It always opens so slow, just so I can close it.

or when it tried to force its update on me, and took me from black background to white, and suddenly the background matched my rage; white hot and seething

Real talk? Because it's forced on people at work and it's made by Microsoft. It certainly has its flaws but it's not the worst software in the world.

I've used it at work for the past 6 years and it's just quite buggy. Sending an image only works around 50% of the time, calls go directly to voice mail despite the other person being there and waiting for my call, mobile app shows me being in a call I've left hours earlier, tabs with things like checklists never load etc. I've used worse programs, but it's far from good. On a positive note though, the background noise filter in Teams is the best I've heard.

Inability to multitask. Find the file or chat link you want and need to go back to the meeting you were up? Spend 5 minutes digging back into where you were.

Today, this morning:

It wouldn't let me into my morning meeting, it glitched out with jumping ellipses. I quit the program then when I tried to relaunch it went into a cycle of starting then immediately crash. This went on for two minutes before I restarted the computer. After restarting the computer then relaunched Teams it proceeded to crash/start four times before loading so I can attend my meeting.

This kind of stuff is habitual. I now set alarms five minutes before meetings so I have enough time to press a button.

Microsoft doesn't ACTUALLY care about teams so it's a nonstop bad UX, then they try to fix it, then they go a different direction, and so on. To Microsoft, its an add on that they mostly use to keep people away from Slack. When they spend time on it, all they are doing is enough to keep people away from Slack.

Its been like, what, 2 years there they've shipped a "new" client seperate from the existing client (at least on macOS)? People are constantly using the wrong one or switching when one breaks, and Microsoft constantly breaks the new one.

On windows the existence of the built-in "Teams" App is constantly confusing when people are trying to sign into a work account, which requires a different client. This is because the "Teams" App in Windows is just a rebadged Skype.

Before 2022 when I used it for some meetings (we used slack in our unit since we had some of our own budget, but the wider corp was on teams) it was a daily toss up as to whether video calls would work on macos or linux.

Most of my frustrations come from having to develop some integrations with teams:

1. Right now there's a massive bug for the templating language to render cards in the UI and Microsoft's answer has largely been a big shoulder shrug.

2. There are several really easy ways an admin can break a custom integration via azure. Obviously an app-based integration is better, but it's also really common in b2b to have more ad-hoc setups to send some data to teams. Even better, lots of small/medium companies have been convinced that they don't need IT people to help them with their Azure configuration, so no one ever knows how to solve any problems they create (this also applies to email fwiw... Unbelievable how many small/medium O365 customers have very broken email servers)

3. Microsoft's implementation of federation between O365 users is a mess of tiered settings, and figuring our if rhe issue is on the business side or your side is a sysiphean task. If you are in an org which doesn't have a domain hooked up to your setup (as in you use username@company.onmicrosoft.com) there is a very specific sign in page you have to use or it'll blow up on you. And it's not the generic sign in page you get when going to teams or O364's web site.

Tl:dr; Teams is a hacked together mess of bubble gum and toothpicks masquerading as a chat app. Its a miracle ir works as well as it does for "normal" usage, but it's a joke compared to Slack in every other way and quickly becomes a nightmare if you are working on integrations with it.

Because in terms of features/usability it was a downgrade from Skype for Business for my usage.

Sorting the contacts was better in Skype and I was able to have the window as a narrow strip on the leftmost screen, for showing the status of all team members. Teams doesn't allow resizing freely.

When watching a screen share of somebody, Teams has a lot of unnecessary unhidable UI elements that just take up space. For the ones that you can hide there is no setting to have it that way by default, and there are also no shortcuts for them.

Also screen sharing was quite laggy right after switching from Skype, but that might have been an internal IT problem, not sure. But it didn't help make Teams more popular anyhow.

Bad UI/UX.

When I screenshare code with my colleages, the 1 fps can be irritating. You miss subtle editing, scrolling, etc in those 1 s.

I can ignore most other things. We only use it for online meetings and screen sharing.

Which makes the new apparent calendar and appointment integration somewhat irritating. Microsoft loves to push their shit.

To me Teams pretty much represents one of Microsoft's aggravating mortal sins.

Teams got popular. More due to the circumstances than the inherent quality of the app. And once entrenched, Microsoft did what they always do in situations like this. Jack squat.

This could have been a start of a beautiful new era! Strike the iron while it's hot! Show what the money, resources and the technical know-how at Microsoft's disposal could do! Fix all of the failings of Skype tech, and really polish up the app! Did Microsoft do that? Naaah. It's a mediocre app with brand new jank! That's its destiny now.

It demands too much screen space. you can't rum less than full screen without losing important things. Even full screen I often can' see the presentation clearly because it shrunk the presentation in favor of avitars / videos of other people.

now that I'm old I cannot see tiny text like I used to. I thus get really mad at useless spate while I'm strurgling to read the presentation. you will understand when you turn 45 too.

Classic teams had a high contrast mode that worked very well. The background was dark and the text was bright yellow. The new version of teams also has high contrast but now the text and background are both shades of gray.

Want to use a Bluetooth headset? Roll the dice on if it will work at any point in time. 3 back to back meetings? Load the 4th and it's reset your audio to laptop speakers, or now your webcam won't work.

It's a mess for my team in terms of:

• someone's video isn't showing for anyone else
• someone can't see anyone else's video
• it resets my camera settings every time I restart it
• microphone settings seem to randomly break, so we always have people running off to grab backup headsets.
• it's missing thread features (like in slack) so branching discussions are a fucking mess.
• most of my team uses Linux and the screen-sharing as well as file/picture sharing rarely works right.

Before we used a combination of Slack (for text communication) and Google Meet (for video) which was much more reliable a day functional.

About 30% of the time I simply cannot transfer calls, the dialog bugs out and either won't allow me to type or won't accept the number. Not reliably able to be reproduced and restarting Teams fixes it. Done all the troubleshooting including device resets and no permanent fix found yet.

This sort of random unreliability seems extremely prevalent among all of Microsoft's products. Hell just today we couldn't do email remediation through the MS Security portal, had to do an old school investigation. 'The actions failed. Please try again later.' No details or explanation and they didn't show in the action logs either.

Microsoft products are hell to work with on an organization level.

It's not reliable. I will get a message on my phone that doesn't show up on my PC for 20 minutes. I'll get a notification on my phone but some times not on my PC. I hate that I have to have my phone ping for everything that ever happens because I can't trust the desktop version to actually tell me.

Mostly tiny irksome things that cause me to have to set up for calls 10 minutes early because I’m not sure if it’s going to behave and I can’t be “late.” The latest is the window not opening on startup even though it’s running on (MacOS). Restarting resolves. Sometimes it doesn’t do it. No idea why.

Also, minor quibble but I don’t personally like that it seems to follow that annoying UI/UX “we know what’s best for you” philosophy as Gnome does where it only shows you what you “need” to see. I get it, but I’m sorta set in my ways in how I expect UIs to act. If you’re new to it, it’s especially aggravating until you’ve used it for a while.

It's the entitlement. On Linux, it would startup on boot, and wasn't in the settings panel that disables start on boot apps. Even Discord respects that setting, but Teams had its own startup system that I had to go purge by hand.

I hate that it doesn't have some key features, like the ability to easily annotate on the screen as a viewer. The presenter (host?) must allow it first, which for me often results in frustration as I try to guide them to the top tool bar to find it.

They also don't have custom emojis like my beloved Slack. And dear god Teams sends you a desktop notification every time someone reacts with an emoji, I disabled that quick.

I also hated how they did groups/channels, also called Teams, a name I hate (why have a feature with the same name as your product?). It was like a shitty forum board, where someone would post a topic and everyone commented underneath it, made it impossible to scroll through. They changed it recently though for a much more user friendly UI.

My favorite Teams feature is that I can mute other participants on a meeting. I can feel the Thrill course through me every time.

Mobile notifications are a joke. When I’m not working I want to hear from one single emergency channel, it’s my time, not work’s. But even with all itifs but that one channel set I get pinged for every single reply in every team

Every day it fucks my login token. Takes a while to load, then shows me my DMs but with a little "login problem sign in again" at the top (WHILE LOOKING AT MY DMS)

So I click sign in in the toast. It takes forever. I'm now 1 minute late for standup.

I do not have to log in. I do not have to reauthenticate or MFA. I just click the button and it logs me in again.

WHICH IT COULD HAVE JUST DONE ON PAGE LOAD FOR FUCKS SAKE.

The behind the scenes logic must be atrocious.

From the IT side, I personally hate that 80% of the random teams issues our users have, clearing the apps cache is the only solution. An average user shouldn't need to dig around in unfamiliar directories and clear out this cache to get teams working again. From my experience, most users won't do this bc they're afraid of causing more damage (imo a smart hesitation.)

If the app can update itself can it not also refresh that cache more often? Can a button in settings not be given to users the flush cache and restart the app? (This can currently be done in Windows by going to Settings > Apps and resetting the app from the Installed Apps list, but there is no such option on Macs. It's an OS agnostic issue, we should have an OS agnostic solution.) There's got to be better ways to resolve these issues that all require the removal/refreshing of a folder's contents. I can only imagine how much of a nightmare this is to resolve within companies that don't have dedicated IT or tech savvy users to dig up these resolutions and fix the problem, especially given the often inadequate and outdated documentation Microsoft provides.