This is gonna sound like a troll post but i assure you it is not.
I don’t have a coding background but I’ve used Teams in a lot of workplaces and really only encountered like 2 issues entirely.
Either I got seriously lucky or it was before enshittification.
Why do you yourself dislike it? Is it UI? Performance?
I should also say I use Teams for basic purposes like messaging and uploading files, I literally don’t touch anything else and performance hadn’t been an issue. (Likely because I’ve been given thicc-ass workstations in the past)
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.
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!
Did you mean New Teams? Or Classic Teams? Do you want to Keep Using New Teams? Do you want to try Classic Teams? You opened New Teams last time, do you want to use that one or Classic Teams? Not to be confused with Teams (for work or school), which is just New Teams! I think!
Why don’t you want to use the new Teams? Give us your feedback so we can ignore it.
Thank you for your feedback. Say, do you know there’s a new Teams available? Try it now!
Doubt they have fixed the issues, even if they have, don’t tell me because I don’t care, I will still hate them.
Because clicking on a link on mobile does not always work for whatever reason so I have to manually type in the stuff.
Because it does not work on my computer.
I want to use free open source software, and if I were a business customer I would certainly want my business to use free open source software when reasonable.
If all we’re doing is sharing files and messaging each other, I don’t know why we would need Teams. There are so many other options that work quite well.
I don’t hate it, but I don’t think it would typically solve my problems in ways that other software doesn’t already do better.
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
This makes me want to scream, daily. Holy hell please just mark as read when I open it, same for Outlook
Why does ux layout eat so much screen space? We have a channel for the team to say hello at the start of shift, the lunch/goodnight.
The UX lets you see maybe 3-4 total posts at once. That is one example, but it takes so much effort of scrolling to be sure you’ve seen everything
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Notifications don’t go always go away when seen. I sometimes have to click out if the window and click back in.
- Incomplete markdown support (let me copy/paste a table from pandas!)
- 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 can say from an admin side, there is some filtering you can set for gifs, but there’s very little to no control over aggressiveness.
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 it then started and crashed 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.
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 Slack guy, when forced to use Teams it just always tried to get in the way of anything I wanted to do and Slack would get out of the way.
Sadly Slack are busy trying to make Slack as obnoxious as Teams.
For a counterpoint, my wife loves Teams. She uses it all day every day, and only has good things to say about it.
Despite the Hype, Slack and Teams are not direct replacements for each other.
Teams is meant to be a Communications AND Collaboration platform. Slack is meant to be a Communications platform.
I suspect your wife takes advantage of those collaboration features, and therefore finds teams to be helpful in her job. Your role may not require collaboration in the same way, or maybe you other 3rd party tools for that type of collaboration and teams is just getting in your way by duplicating things you already have a process for.
I just want to point out that you’ve huffed a little too much product marketing bullshit. Sure, different platforms have different capabilities but what the fuck is a collaboration platform that isn’t a communication platform.
Hell, I consider github/labs/etc to mostly just be a communication platform, most of what you’re doing is just ticket focused.
I literally use this tool on a daily basis, it works very well. I’m not spouting anything marketing related, only how I see and use it.
A communications platform allows you to talk to each other via text, voice, video.
A collaboration platform allows you to work on information together which includes things like document co-authoring(SharePoint and Office) and group task management(Planner), but can extend much further into things like Shared Pages (OneNote or Loop), Database-lite systems with Forms (SharePoint Lists, Power Apps), Workflows (Power Automate), and more.
I’d consider Slack to potentially qualify as a collaboration platform though, it integrates really well into both SharePoint and GDrive to enable shared editing - that editing isn’t baked into slack but slack does go out of its way to support it through link unfurling and document embedding.
I actually think Teams is weaker in this regard because it’s too easy to accidentally download and copy files when you’re intending to edit a shared copy (and SharePoint has some wonkiness with syncing changes in a reasonable time frame).
IMHO it just tries to do everything and fails at that. It’s not horrible, but not great either.
Chat and calls should be the focus, but even that is buggy. In the “teams” feature I personally have zero overview and I miss a lot of stuff. But that might be user error
At least in my work instance, by default it sends me an alert any time someone posts a reaction emoji in one of the dozen chat channels.
So you into your settings and turn that off. Yes the default is annoying, but it’s literally a 30 second fix to never have it happen again.
I did. My point is that this productivity tool hurts your productivity until you tinker with it to make it less annoying.
It only annoys some users, a lot of people like knowing someone has acknowledged their message.
It should be off by default.
Then people who do like it wouldn’t even know it exists. It’s usually better in an environment that lacks standard training for every user to enable by default, and then have the users disable if they don’t want it.
Your car has ABS, but you don’t have to turn it on to use it, it’s on by default and users can (usually) turn it off when they don’t want it.
Cool, cool. Spamming the hell out of users is definitly necessary to let them know it exists islnstead of asking them if they want notifications the first time they start it up.
They should just know there is a setting to turn it iff then, right?
I can’t set my mic to be automatically muted when I join a meeting. I have to choose every time.
I can’t adjust the brightness of my camera exceot for whatever ‘Enhance’ does.
Guess I’ll just keep looking for settings when basic ones don’t exist.
There are settings for notifications in every single app these users have ever encountered in both their professional personal lives. The basic understand for apps by users it that notification settings exist. They may not know that there is a specific option to turn one specific type of notification on, but they should know they can turn shit off.
I’ve never noticed an issue with the muting thing, It’s a fraction of a second when joining to pick what settings I want for that meeting which does vary so it’s helpful to have.
Brightness settings for Camera… holy shit… Light yourself properly. Ring lights are $30 on amazon, get one and look actually professional when attending your meetings.
Brightness settings for Camera… holy shit… Light yourself properly. Ring lights are $30 on amazon, get one and look actually professional when attending your meetings.
Beyond the basic point that other video apps have had brightness settings for decades, saying to spend more money to fix the feature is asinine.
There is plenty of light for zoom, Teams is dark. When I go to a conference I’m not going to lug a fucking ring light around for a random video call in a quiet corner. Instead, they could just put a brightness slider in like a competent company.
It is impressive how hard you are shilling for Teams by excusing a lack of basic functionality.
There is plenty of light for zoom.
No there isn’t, if you have to adjust the brightness digitally the camera itself is not getting enough light based on what it was designed for.
Teams does have a brightness setting, it’s just a toggle rather than a slider. If that still isn’t enough, then you are sitting in a pitch black room. I just tested this, with every light in my room off, including the overhead and the direct facial lighting, the teams toggle is enough to make me reasonably visible in the light from my screen alone.
I don’t need the toggle on at all with an overhead light on, and the annoying shadows from the overhead room light go away with my facial lighting on.
Here’s a $21 clip on USB powered laptop ring light, https://www.amazon.com/Meyin-Brightness-Conference-Broadcasting-Streaming/dp/B0D1DTF7H6
People love to hate Teams but I also think it’s more maligned than it deserves.
It’s mostly fine for me most of the time. It could be that I just haven’t had the pleasure of using better options so I don’t know what I’m missing? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I do have to say it’s infinitely better in my experience than Zoom. Whenever I have a Zoom meeting the experience for me is so bad I am essentially unable to participate in the meeting.
Lately the reason that I hate it is that when I click on the channel and start typing, it starts browsing through the channel link instead of putting what I type into the channel. And it’s intermittent, so much more infuriating.
It starts using an entire core for UI work when I move my mouse (Roccat Cone Pure 2017), and becomes unresponsive. Had to get a different mouse just for this shit. At least I got my workplace to pay for it.
Support did not even try to replicate the issue, instead they wanted me to upgrade to the “New” Teams when I explicitly told them that I didn’t have that option in my org.
