Technology

Teams meetings aren't really that much worse than Zoom, it's mostly minor gripes, although there are quite a few of those. The Teams chat client on the other hand is an absolute garbage fire that's significantly worse than Slack, Discord, or pretty much anything up to and arguably including IRC.

An organization , "team", channel, and chat are confusing as hell, that breakdown does not in any way align with the way communication works in a large organization. Why is there so little configuration available for notification settings? Why can't I completely silence or ignore a "team", channel, or chat? Why do I not receive notifications half the time for the things I actually want to be notified about? Why aren't there threads or at least a sensible and easy to follow "reply to" option? Why can't anyone seem to agree on the correct way to organize things? Half our groups are creating gigantic "teams" that include half the company, while the other half are creating shared channels nobody knows about. Both options suck.

Teams is mostly fine these days and I think it's the only MS product that is getting better over time instead of worse. If you have a competent IT team then the various MS integrations can actually work well to make Teams a usable one stop for comms, recordings/transcripts, scheduling, file sharing, etc.

New features are slow to come but they do come. The insane memory footprint became much more reasonable for me when they moved from Electron to their own Edge-based WebView2 thing last year. The preview builds have finally combined the "teams" channel listings and ad-hoc chats into one tab where you can group them together however you want.

Teams still pisses me off on occasion but no more than any other piece of enterprise software. It's fine.

Teams randomly selects the wrong microphone, so either people can't hear me or they can hear everyone around me too (laptop mic).

How hard can it be to store my microphone preference?

I had to enroll users in teams. Doing so was confusing and 1 user would never get the invite. I ended up ditching it after about a month.

I use it for school. I'm in different groups and I need to use it for chat, file and image sharing on different projects and its an absolute nightmare trying to keep track of channels, I'd rather use literally any other software to accomplish this task. Most of us just jump on discord and use that.

I had to use teams with multiple accounts with multiple organisations. Sometimes my account is added to their organisation, sometimes I used their provided account. Microsoft was going for a one sign in approach and the whole thing just totally failed to account for my situation. It never successfully let me switch accounts, running multiple concurrently certainly never worked.

With one situation the work around was to follow the original organisation invite again, reset my password then proceed with my meeting. I'd do this maybe ten times a day sometimes if I had to bounce between different companies.

And all controls are basic as fuck. It's a business tool that thinks its target market is my grandma. All controls were apple-ified. I'd get a long error code and I couldn't select it to copy and paste it, and if I clicked off the window the notification displaying the error code would go away, so i'd have to print screen the error code, paste out somewhere, and then type it out manually into Google to try and diagnose. This was a solved problem 30 years ago. Why are we going backwards?

Anyway, rant over. It's a pos. Slack is light years ahead.

Teams is annoying because even when you don't use it, it prioritizes itself and opens making it take longer to get to the programs I actually need and use. This is only a few seconds on new computers but can be minutes on older ones. First world problem sure but my computer should run how I want it.

I've also never been able to get the web version to work there's no error code it just doesn't connect. IT doesn't know and the Microsoft guy just said to use the app, which goes back to the above. If it's going to be an app then leave it as an app if you have a web version then maybe it should fucking work.

The leave button is right next to the share button. That's my biggest complaint.

I only use it incidentally but my biggest gripe is the total inability to perform its one function of teleconferencing.

The bit where it lags the audio badly and then speeds it up to catch back up to real-time is absolutely infuriating to listen to, and such a failure of a tool that had. one. job.

I'm in the same shoes about new job having to use teams and I wildly disagree. It is awful.

The best part of it is the noise cancellation on the microphone in calls seem pretty good and having a chat created for meetings is a good integration. BUT..

• voice quality significantly decreases as soon as it's more than 2 participants.. you can clearly tell the difference as soon as a 3rd member is invited.
• annotating on the screen share is extremely useful in slack (not sure if zoom has it too), not a thing I could find in teams
• the channels Vs chats separation in the UI is just weird
• the chats don't have threads.. that's such a strong feature to contain conversations. I know the channels kinda serve this purpose but it feels weird to use them and closer to sending an email or posting on a forum than directly talking to someone (with having to write a title and bring presented in 1-2 messages per screen due to the size

Compared to zoom, I guess it's not a big deal really. I'd prefer zoom but it's oh well. Compared to slack (which has it's own set of problems, but still) however it seems like a pile of shit in my opinion.

I manage teams in a MacOS environment and ive seen teams fail to notify when people get a message or phone call straight up. Ive seen it fail to deliver a message, automatically select audio devices (because it has to use its own selection of audio devices) sharing screens is like watching a slideshow no matter what network you are on, controlling another users computer is even worse. Our headsets are Plantronics “certified for teams” or whatever its called and the mute button sometimes desyncs with the client and the headphones may be muted but the client not or vice verse. Theres much more but im so tired from dealing with teams all day. I also think its just a wildly unintuitive ui, settings are completely strewn across all sections

I’ve also had no issues with Teams and haven’t had coworkers with issues in probably six years. I prefer it significantly over Slack, and my first job was using IBM/Lotus Notes before they switched to teams, that was a clunky nightmare.

So when my old job had it, about 5 (out of 30) people in my area just couldn't open it.

Not the same five, IT would frequently reinstall it to fix it, but it would just break constantly.

Work computers, very locked down, couldn't do any alternative to it at the time, and we worked remote, so while everyone else had chat, some unfortunate people needed constant updates via email.

The question was who would be SOL, not if someone would be, that day.

It uses a fucking inordinate amount of resources to accomplish its task, mostly.

I use control panel enough that i would be seriously pissed if they removed it. Why is it considered bloat?