Yeah, maybe it’s a case of software Stockholm syndrome or something.

Oh, I’ve tried the shared mailbox thing. I had it at my last city and it worked fine, but our third-party IT service contractor here is the shittiest I’ve ever heard of.

You know you’re an old time user when you call it paintbrush :)

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.

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 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’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.

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

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.

It closes and opens itself multiple times a day for whatever reason, updating ? Crashing ? I don’t know because it always just reappears in a completely other place than where I had it before.

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.

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For the scope of WebEx and Zoom, it’s… fine… mostly. I mean I hate that I can’t really full screen a remote screen share, so it could be better, but broadly speaking, video, audio, and screen sharing is fine. Not coincidentally, this is pretty much the only standalone stuff Teams bothered to uniquely implement, most everything else is built upon sharepoint…

It starts getting annoying for chat platform. You want to scroll back, it’s going to be painfully slow. You participate in cross-company conversations, oh boy you get to deal with the worst implementation of instancing to keep your activity segregated I have seen. Broadly speaking it just scales poorly at managing the sorts of conversations you have at a larger company. If your conversations are largely “forget it after a few hours”, you may be fine.

Then you get into what these platforms have been doing for ages, Lotus Notes and Sharepoint suggesting companies build workflows on top of their platform. Now the real pain and suffering begins.

For me, it has nothing to do with how good or bad the actual application is, it’s the terms of service that go along with it. Basically microsoft hoovers up every morsel of data you put into their system, including your voice and face. I liken it to giving all your personal data to someone (including your voice and face), they put in a pretty looking safe on the side of the street and then they sell the keys to it.

Ignoring the fact that the data could be stolen from one of the many third parties it partners with, microsoft could (will) also give the data to the government which will then be used as evidence to deport or jail you or people you know for speaking out against the American regime or acted against Gods will and had an abortion. Or maybe someone in DC makes up some bullshit law targeting some arbitrary demographic which includes you, they request data from microsoft which is promptly provided; you get arrested and sent to jail or deported.

Data privacy is important, especially when the government is corrupt and insane. It’s prudent to protect ourselves and the people we know.

Haven’t needed to use it myself, but here’s an open source alternative I’ve heard a lot about:

https://meet.jit.si/

Not sure it’ll help with your work though.

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 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.

Teams has been successful in detecting my headphones and mics 20% of the time. So, my alternative is to go on my phone and also my laptop (but mute myself) so I can share my screen during meetings. Windows detects my headphones and mics just fine in other applications, like Zoom or Discord. It’s a pain in the ass.

Teams is fine for video calling and screensharing. The mess begins when organisations, as MS encourages them to do, try to embed everything there is into teams. Then it can very fast become a black hole where no one finds anything anymore

I used self-hosted rocket chat before, now I use teams, I understand perfectly all the hate

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 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.

Weird, I always cum while using Teams

(Dear employer - this was a joke)

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

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.

My biggest problems with Teams are system slowdown (this was a big issue before I got my new work laptop), and different versions of Teams launching at startup (personal as default and then you have to choose professional or whatever and wait for it to reload everything). Back during the pandemic I had two different Teams (one for my reserve component, and one for my regular job) and it was a nightmare.

Well, are you using “new” Teams, or “classic” Teams, both of which can be installed and nag for updates that fail. My “new” Teams (just finally had to uninstall “classic” altogether) just randomly crashes/restarts throughout the day, and also randomly is “unable to authenticate”, making me offline but unaware of it, so miss messages. My “old” Outlook also ~15-20% of the time, on a fresh PC start, just can’t connect to server, and nothing will fix it except for rebooting PC. Yeah, so fucking done with MS shit, it’s all hot garbage, from 11 on down through all their apps. They’ve fucked up EMAIL ffs.

Not gonna lie, I don’t get the hate.

TEAMs was terrible going into the pandemic but it’s steadily gotten better, especially over the past 18 months. Reading down the comment chain though I’m in awe at the amount of problems that people are apparently still having with it!

TEAMs via app or browser on my Windows 10 box at work? Fine. TEAMs via app or browser on my Windows 11 Surface? Fine. TEAMs via app or browser on my wheezy HP laptop with Windows 11? Fine. TEAMs via browser (Firefox even!) on all three of my Linux systems? Also completely fine!

Hell I’ve got Creative T-60 USB-C speakers, a logi webcam, and Turtle Beach headphones hooked to a USB sharing KVM for two of those linux boxes and it still just works.

I must be the luckiest dumb-ass alive when it comes to MS TEAMs because at least for the last two years it just works.

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.

ahh member skype?

RIP Clippy

I went from a small business that was entirely G Suite to a mega corp that was entirely Microsoft. Company culture wise the mega corp is soooo much better, technology wise…I felt totally limited and like I had gone back in time.

I went from being able to pull up a Google sheet on my phone to live update decision makers both back in the office and people who were remote, to having to jump through hoops to open an Excel sheet, then request editing rights, then having to submit the edited sheet to my supervisor only for her to have a manager review and approve the edit, and then he’d have to attach the edited version to an all hands email and tell everyone to download and use the new one.

It’s gotten better since I started, we now upload everything to OneDrive, but they can’t seem to get the permissions right and every once in a while someone edits a file and someone has to comb though the edit history to restore it.

Obsidian is my answer to it.

Shitty software still better than customers

Sounds about right. They tried to get me sign up for a subscription for customer service. They told me they could solve my issue (I forgot my bitlocker encryption key and was giving my old HP laptop to a family member so I needed it to whip the device) but only if I sign up for the subscription. It wouldve cost me $54 to get customer service that day. I laughed at the guy over the phone and he tried to defend the company by saying its worth it pay since I did not know how to solve my issue and needed their help. I didn’t pay and found a work around on my own

Outlook and Teams have PWAs that are actually more performant than the desktop apps (anecdotal). They are missing some features, but for the opportunity to use Linux at work, I make it work. Have to use Ubuntu for some unknown reason, but it’s better than using Windows

I imagine Microsoft has the same problem as Google, which is internally prioritizing flashy new things over maintaining useful old things. That’s why Google comes out with so many new things and kills so many old things.

If you want a raise/promotion/etc., you have a better shot at it by bragging about the new feature/service you launched than bragging about maintaining the relatively stable project that’s been running for years but could use some improvements.

It’s a really bad structure imo and I hate that Google and other companies prioritize like that :/

Do u mean doge?

Just to expand on this. There is an Exchange specific wipe feature. I think it is quite old school and not really used. Have seen it, but never tested it myself. As per documentation it can perform device wipe, but only if native mail client using ActiveSync is used not Outlook. And it probably does not work with all native mail clients, depends if app has device admin permissions.

Current Intune MDM model always uses separate Android storage so any operation including wipe will affect only this storage not your personal space so employer can not see nor delete your personal data.

In Intune there is another option without a need of enrolling device (MDM) where you can manage supported apps. It’s called MAM. If wipe is initiated it affects only data in all apps that support MAM.

In short, companies / schools cannot really wipe your device if we are talking about Intune MDM. Other MDM solutions probably can.

My understanding is that it’s called work profile. It’s like having 2 users in the same phone. One is personal and you manage it. The other is company owned and you can only install apps whitelisted by your it admin.

I’d love to keep outlook off my personal phone but there’s no chance I’m getting a company phone considering I’m a shop employee and everything in it is an afterthought for IT. Like our computers still run windows 7.

Unfortunately I need email to do my job, on a ping system for what to test and general communications with coworkers who are often not there or traveling in the field.

I think the parents suggestion was to not use it.

However, it’s a bit like avoiding water on a boat given how pervasive the cancer is.

Most of the MS suite is pretty awful. OG OneNote was a good idea. VSCode is ok, just quite slow. Oh LSP is fantastic, I believe that was developed by MS.

The Office Suite and PowerBI are terrible, by 2025 standards it’s glossy trash.