Ask Lemmy

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 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.

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!

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.

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.

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

No push to talk aside from some crappy implementation that requires window focus and can't be bound to a different key. Runs like absolute ass on their own hardware which I'm required to use at work

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"

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I actually like teams because it does way more than zoom for the same cost (I'm the one paying the bills, so that matters to me). My general experience is that people don't know how to fully use teams, so it gives a kinda terrible experience. For example, you can embed a PBI into a teams channel to make access to analytics easier. You can also embed a calendar/schedule/plan through planner. Someone at my company created a power app that serves as a menu to direct a user to helpful information, which was also embedded into teams. I guess the pattern you see here is that you can use it as a one stop shop for team info.

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.

For me it updates frequently and changes a lot of little things (like button placement, or defaults) that just don't need to be updated.

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.

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.

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 [email protected]) 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.