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)
I have never used teams but it’s a microsoft product so it has to be bad. That’s the universal constant.
I don’t hate or despise teams. It’s far more useful in most normal office environments to have your communication and your collaboration occur in one tool.
I think most of the people that hate it are trying to only use it for communication, usually because they received no training on how to use the collaboration parts or an unwillingness by the organization to change the way they are doing things when they got M365 licenses.
If you still have a shared network drive while you’re using Teams, your organization is doing it wrong.
If you are sending attachments in e-mails while you’re using Teams, your organization is doing it wrong.
If you are sending e-mails to get things approved while you’re using Teams, your organization is doing it wrong.
If you aren’t using planner to co-ordinate tasks for small groups of people while you’re using Teams, your organization is doing it wrong.
If your organization is paying for m365 licenses just for you to have e-mail and the desktop office suite, they’re doing it wrong.
Get TRAINING
So basically Microsoft demands using their whole ecosystem if you want their services to actually be useful?
Use the correct tool for the job.
If you only want a communications tool, only get a communications tool.
Don’t get mad when you pay for an integrated suite of products, and then find it annoying that there are more features than you need.
Tbf the people who find it annoying usually have no say in what the company uses. The problem isn’t that there are more features but that each feature doesn’t work correctly in isolation.
The literal point of teams it is to integrate systems from the entire ecosystem, using them in isolation is antithetical to that.
Eh, no, we have to have a shared network drive because we are not allowed to upload things with eg personal information to Microsoft
If you have a m365 account, what data are you not allowed to upload that isn’t already found in your e-mails? Are you not allowed to talk about that information in e-mails either? At that point, why bother having m365 at all?
This is one of the stupidest security takes that I’ve seen organizations take, pretending like some data is more secure on their own servers than in the M365 cloud.
We self host or exchange server. It seems you are the one that is stupid.
Edit: and yes, I’m in the EU where we have data protection legislation.
So why do you have M365 then?
You aren’t using it for e-mail, you aren’t using it for file storage, but you’re using it to host meetings?
What a stupid concept, get a fucking communications tool that is ONLY a communications tool.
I would love to.
We are using it for file storage. Just not for everything.
I hate your IT department.
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.
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.
Yeah, when they rolled it out, I thought they decided to ship an alpha build, to get ahead of COVID, and they’d finish implementing it over the next half year. Then they just didn’t.
I also remember like a year ago or so, they made a big fuzz about rolling out Teams v2, with a button to go back to v1 and all that. And I still remember when it loaded into v2 the first time, it threw up a loading screen and then… it looked exactly the same as before.
Well, except for that loading screen, that now shows up every time you refresh.
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.
Grey on grey.
I want to meet the idiot who thought that was a good idea. Then kick ‘em in the nuts
Because it’s run by Microsoft, which is now a Big Data player. They use Teams to “monetize” your company’s data and train their AI on it without your company’s consent. They use Teams to collect data on employees who don’t have a choice because they need a job to put food on the table, like real name, photo and phone number.
If you don’t want to give any data to Microsoft, too bad: your employer forces it on you. Don’t like it? Your only option is to resign. That’s the most egregious aspect of Teams - and Office 365, and all business-oriented Microsoft data honeypots: they use employers to collect data on employees who don’t have any say about it.
Anything you do at work while being paid isn’t yours, you’re being paid for your time and effort and the company owns that. Any data collected isn’t really about “you” as a person, so it’s irrelevant to you in the long-term.
My identify, my photo, my address are mine. I never wanted to share any of that with Microsoft. Thanks to my employer, I have to.
Likewise, I don’t want to Microsoft to know my salary, or how many sick days I take due to my disability. Thanks to my employer, Microsoft knows all about me, and I don’t want Microsoft to know anything about me.
The work data I produce at work belongs to my employer. If my employer is foolish enough to share it with Microsoft, it’s their problem - although arguably, if that ever jeopardizes my company’s ability to win contracts on the markets it operates in because Microsoft has insider knowledge and undercuts it, and my company does less well as a result, then it becomes my problem. But I’m forced to share my personal data because my employer decided without my consent to share it with Microsoft.
Your name isn’t private information. Your photo doesn’t have to be included in M365, and isn’t by default in any organization I’ve worked with.
Your personal address also isn’t in your work profile on M365, that’s usually in an HR system somewhere, not kept in Active Directory. Your salary is the same, it’s not stored in your M365 profile, and neither is your sick days. This simply isn’t normal M365 functionality.
Microsoft also doesn’t just have access to this information the way you think they do. They can’t just log in with an admin account and check your current status on teams, or read your e-mails, or anything like that.
Are you sure about that? It seems they have so many security issues that everyone else already has access
If the data isn’t in M365, it can hardly be Microsoft’s fault if the data was stolen.
Personal addresses, Salaries, Leaves, etc. should all be stored in proper HR systems.
Your name isn’t private information.
What if I don’t want to give it to Microsoft?
Your photo doesn’t have to be included in M365, and isn’t by default in any organization I’ve worked with.
My company mandates that we put our mugs on Teams so “people know who they’re talking to”.
Your personal address also isn’t in your work profile on M365, that’s usually in an HR system somewhere, not kept in Active Directory. Your salary is the same, it’s not stored in your M365 profile, and neither is your sick days. This simply isn’t normal M365 functionality.
When the fucking secretary puts all that stuff in an Excel file, and everybody’s photos - and company photos - in a sharepoint, and the accountant does the payroll in M365, it is.
Microsoft also doesn’t just have access to this information the way you think they do. They can’t just log in with an admin account and check your current status on teams, or read your e-mails, or anything like that.
That’s right: nobody logs in with an admin account: all that data you feed Microsoft is processed automatically.
You don’t really think they take your money and honestly host your data and provides services without raping your and your company’s information every which way do you? Big Data’s entire business model is exploiting other people’s data.
Microsoft’s gig is really clever: they force people who otherwise would never give any information to Microsoft to do so by selling their employers services that are cheaper than on-prem, and in turn, their employers force the employees to share their information with Microsoft on pain of getting the sack.
Your tinfoil hat is slipping.
Microsoft does not give a shit about the data from an organization small enough that their payroll is done in Excel.
They don’t have some secret database of every human and all data they’ve collected about each person in the world.
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.
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
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.
This is actually a problem with a lack of presenter training, not technology.
When presenting slides, text should be formatted for mild vision impairment. When screen sharing, you should either lower the resolution of your screen, or share only a single app and make it not take up your full monitor, or boost your text size.
In your case, even if Teams allowed it go properly full screen it may be enough for your needs, but there are people who it would not be. There are people who operate “zoomed in” all the time on a PC due to their vision impairments. Catering to these people makes content accessible to everyone.
The other big part of this is colour/contrast choices, since those are also common vision impairments.
There is a tradeoff. When someone is sharing a screen I want to see more of their screen. A powerpoint should 10 lines mx of large font. A screen share often needs me to see what they do and zoom in loses useful lines - to teams things I don’t even care about.
You don’t care about them, but they’re very useful to other people.
The thing you need to remember is that not every single feature or UI design choice is about your specific use case.
I can still hate choices that are hostile to my ability to use teams. I still miss lynx which did much better for my needsi
Can I tack on that whoever decided that minimizing teams should make it into a tiny fucking window with a confusingly labeled button to make it big again should fucking die? I loathe apps that minimize to tray or minimize to some bullshit always on top pop-up (unless there’s a clear setting to control that behavior - then whatever, we have different preferences but it’s fine).
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.
Teams is an abomination of Skype for business, lynx, and SharePoint. If you have ever used any of those then you know how bad that is.
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.
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).
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
I’ve only experienced it from Linux and it’s a huge exercise in pain. It sometimes works, but it’s just stacks and stacks of hacks.
All the other things I’ve used work for video conferencing have worked fine in Linux or a browser.
