Ask Lemmy

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One I'd throw in:

On Mac, it creates its own audio driver and hijacks the audio feed. That makes it hell to jump between teams and Google meets or zoom as they are constantly fighting.

My computer is old and slow so loading teams is like elder abuse

Let me check that picture that my colleague sent me. Hmm alright, let's close that. Aaaand I closed Teams. Shit.

Default opening Office documents in Teams is also a pain. "Oh wait no! Don't open it in Teams!" Here you go 2 minutes wasted waiting for the doc to open so that you can close it.

I hate how if you gotta work on something in an app in Teams, you can't have the chats open. Excel in Teams lacks a lot of features, though luckily you can launch in native app, but then co-operating is out the window.

I'm a loner, Dottie. A rebel.

Overall, the big issues I have are that when it breaks it does so unpredictably so I can't learn how to do things right.

1. It was unclear to me for a long time how to find files correctly (it still kind of is unclear). Our institution uses SharePoint for some things, Teams for other stuff, and some folks use OneDrive. It's hard to know how these things talk to each other--sometimes this data is actually shared between those ecosystems and sometimes it isn't. It's probably how some people are settings things up, but I blame the software for making those relationships somewhat obtuse. My understanding is that everything on the backend is actually SharePoint and Teams and OneDrive are just different front ends with different permissions structures. That has helped somewhat but it's an imperfect understanding.
2. Joining Teams meeting links from other institutions is fraught with problems. If I have a Zoom link from somewhere else, I click on the link and the meeting starts. That's it. I click a Teams link on a not-work computer and it can be difficult to open (SSO something something probably). So instead I'll open in browser, which may result in a "browser not supported error" on every browser (including Edge). Even if I can get in my webcam might not support backgrounds. Or the microphone/camera selection I made in browser permissions is ignored by Teams. Any one of these events occurring appears to be random, so I have to plan on a few extra minutes before Teams meetings to log in.
3. Notifications don't go always go away when seen. I sometimes have to click out if the window and click back in.
4. Incomplete markdown support (let me copy/paste a table from pandas!)
5. This is dumb, but gif selection sucks. They must do some sort of aggressive filter for work or something, and maybe that's an enterprise decision. But if I want to communicate exclusively via gifs that is my prerogative, thank you.

I just want a compact contact list with status icons. Pining conversations is a shitty solution. Just give me back icq/aim/yahoo/etc

When I first got to try it the chat didn't work. But it had a meme generator built in. So that's what I had to use for a while to send chat messages

Right click open....

In browser?

In Teams?

...

Using a kettle full of live mice?

In app (the program you installed in your computer specifically for opening these documents)?

Oh why not meet about the document from yesterday? Nah, not that one, do a search!... Okay never mind! Their search is junk. Ah well let's meet to talk about it! I can't read, can you maximize your screen so we can see and follow? Just double click here, right click here, scroll down! Push it, twist it, pull it, pipit!!!! Oh hey! We can't hear you! Can you check yorvmike"

I don't know if I hate it but it's annoying how opening links inside Teams tends to open in Teams instead of the real expected app.

It's like they want a whole OS inside of Teams.

Besides that: slack just feels better and less clunky for text chats.

They gave us Teams at work, and somehow despite me being logged into everything else Microsoft via Citrix, it decided I couldn't use it anymore. But it adds you to meetings you don't need to be in.