I have a laptop with an i5 processor and 8G of RAM. Hard drive is an SSD. It sometimes takes me a full minute and a half to get Teams open and ready to join a meeting. It is driving me crazy.
At my company, the developers are all on fairly powerful MacBook Pros, and everyone else in the company has Windows laptops (I think generally Surface devices)
For the developers, Teams works... as good as Teams can. So not great, but it works most of the time (for me, anyway). For everyone else though, I hear nothing but issues. Constantly having to restart to make Teams work. And again, this is on Surface devices, so Microsoft is making the app, the OS, and the hardware!
Even aside from the performance, I just think Teams is laid out horribly and it stifles communication. The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre and constantly causes confusion. It's so much worse than Slack (which we used to use, and I used at a previous job) where all communication channels are listed along the left side, and you didn't have to dig through menus and trees of categorization to get to certain places to talk to your coworkers. And since Teams channels are sectioned off behind another screen from your chats (where you'll probably be most of the time), the only way to be aware of when someone posts in one of the channels is to turn on notifications for it. Which is very annoying!
edit: oh also a recent update made it so when you paste a code snippet into the plaintext editor thing (whatever it's called, you activate it by typing 3 backticks), it strips all the whitespace from the left, meaning you lose all the code indentation. Just great
Teams is like the most developer-hostile piece of burning rubbish that I have ever had the misfortune to have to use. Sending little code snippets is such an important part of development. If a company has mandated Teams for all communications, you know they cannot be “developer friendly”—some management level is making decisions about what the engineers need.
While we’re bashing Teams—why are their notifications some awful custom window that doesn’t respect your OS notification settings?!??!
I love it when the teams "you have a meeting now" notification pops up in front of the meeting lobby window you already have open and blocks you clicking the join meeting button.
Teams at least is slightly better than Skype For Business, which would hijack copy paste to put the sender's name and for some reason insert zero-width characters between every space.
It also stomps on the .mimeapps.list file every time it starts (in Linux) up even if its already in the list. Annoying for me because mine is a symlink into the read only nix store in NixOS.
Not sure when, but on Windows at least, they finally integrated into Windows native alerts. You have to go find and enable the setting which is of by default...
We used Teams at my last job. It was unpopular and we didn't use it a whole lot since the building was small enough that we could just... ya know, yell.
Then MS introduced that weird semi-forced threaded discussion feature that make following conversations a nightmare and nobody, not a single person in the whole company, sent a message over Teams ever again. We kept running it to appear online, but literally nobody actually used it.
We did spend a fair amount of downtime talking about how much we hated Teams, though. And Azure DevOps. More than one person there considered it some of the worst software they've ever used, and they're right. It was a horrendous mess or awful UX (but tons and tons of charts for the managers to value far too highly).
That was a year and a half ago or so, maybe it's better now. But at the time, having switched to that from Gitlab, it was atrocious and we avoided it as much as we could.
I first had the pleasure of using Teams in 2016 or 2017, I forget exactly when, and at the time they didn’t have accessibility features. None. You couldn’t even increase the text size in the app. It was nigh unusable then. I left for a different job and within a year, Teams again reared its ugly head. I’ve thankfully moved on from that job too.
Whatever cost savings Teams affords, the difference is more than lost in confusion, miscommunication, and frustration across the workplace.
May I never have to use it again.
Interestingly, my team now uses Discord for communication and we really love it.
> ...The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre and constantly causes confusion...
Oh yeah, I'm with you! I'll admit that Slack's UX and UI is not my favorite either, but at least any challenges are in a single dimension (not like Teams in multiple, challenging dimensions)...Meanwhile Teams' is just awful. I mean, the Teams "rooms" (I guess i call them "rooms" because its annoying to call them "Teams Sites"?) almost exist like channels/rooms in good ol' IRC...but then Teams has channels underneath Teams Sites/rooms...?...Plus, if i want to chat with an indiviodual, those live in the separate "Chat" area...Ugh! To the valid point about slack, at least its all there on the left. I guess i could sort of see if there was drastically different functionality between Chats and Rooms/Sites...but i dont think so. So, why then separate them? As much as i dislike Microsoft as an organization overall (for their historic corporate behavior), they often don't jhave the worse UX ideas...But for Teams, ugh!
I'm gpoing to pivot a little to matrix, and specifically the Element client...which is the most popular matrix web client. I'm an admitted matrix fanboy, so clearly i'm biased...but even Element has areas that are simpler for me to comprehend and utilize...Also, Element in my mind is still waaaaay early in its evolution, and still very much far from their UX being topnotch. But even in Element's infancy is leaps abovew what Teams is now after several years. I acknowledge that Teams "does more" (like embedding Office software, etc.)...and of course the underlying matrix protocol is NOT limited to chat...But, wow, is Teams sucky.
Teams is bad, but Element/Matrix is the only chat app I've used in maybe 10 years (outside of SMS) where I miss messages. I get a notification, want to read the entire message, open the app and it isn't there. I'm 99% sure it didn't get deleted, but I'll never know what it said. And since iOS makes the notification go away when you tap it, I can't even see what it was.
Discord should just sell a white label version or start a subsidiary to sell to enterprise. Slack will probably get smushed by Salesforce, and short of Satya Nadella's personal laptop bursting into flames because of Teams, I doubt they'll slim down the client.
My introduction to Teams was creating a chat room, trying to add someone not on our actual org team into it, and Teams telling me that I couldn't have non-Team members in that kind of chat.
Which... was bizarre, coming from Slack.
As parent phrased it, "the redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels" is mind-bogglingly stupid.
I can't actually imagine a user who would desire that. Maybe someone from HR worried about secrets being shared in a chat?
I work for an institution that has gone balls deep with MS products and it's driving me crazy considering they are always worrying about budgets and saving money.
When I started everyone was communicating with email. Drove me nuts. I convinced the team I was assigned to, to drop emails and switched to hipchat ( loved it) then slack ( meh )
When covid hit, everyone needed to be on chat. Top brass told us we were not allowed to use anything but MS Teams. The devs hate it. It's run by the main IT dep so we have no control over how it works.
I want to stage a revolt and install mattermost on one of our servers lol
The code formatting is so badly broken now. It simply cannot have been tested. i just can't believe they want it to work like that. i also really hate that copy and pasting into a chat preserves the styling/formatting of the original. why would i want that? and the search... oh the search!
If you run teams on light mode and copy paste to someone who's running on dark mode he simply can't see your message cause it's text color is black on black background.
The fact that this happens on a piece of software which natively supports dark mode tells a lot of the amount of testing that teams is getting before being pushed to users.
Wait until you discover that copy and pasting from the chat might introduce no-break Unicode spaces that looks like spaces in most diff tools! I did the hard way.
Favorite terrible teams UX: it only allows you to be logged in to one account but when you click log out, it takes you to a separate screen with all 1 of your sessions and asks you to select which account you'd like to sign out of as a separate step.
Back when I was using Ubuntu for work, teams used to crash my whole system 2-3 times a week. I know it was teams because it'd start with the mouse lagging, and then a few seconds later would just completely freeze up, but if I were fast enough to notice I could right click the teams icon and exit out of it before it had the chance, and then I'd be alright...for another day or so.
Now I'm on Windows, and it doesn't seem to be a problem anymore (or at least it doesn't crash my system anymore, its still always top of the list for memory usage), but it is very irritating to use
From what I get, they are pushing users to use the "advanced editor" a.k.a. the format button. A few things ONLY work there:
- Lists: A few months ago you can simply use markdown style lists in any chat and hitting enter would create a new list item instead of sending the whole message off. A few updates since Nov slowly stripped off this option for Chats, and then Channels. The only option to send lists is to use the format button.
- As you said, code snippets, now they stripped off all indentations if you are not using the format button (and have to go through a tedious process to insert code)
One of the most awful pieces of software I've ever had the displeasure to use. It's decent for calls, that's the only positive I can name.
The chat experience is by far the worst I've ever had to deal with:
- My sidebar is riddled with old meetings chats nobody cares about anymore. Makes it hard to find actual important direct conversations with people.
- The text editor is absolute jank, I've yet to figure out how to get out of a quote after starting one, lists constantly glitch out, it keeps "bold/italic" state like office but with no easy way to remove it.
- Because it connects to sharepoint you get to enjoy all the lovely permission bullshit when trying to share a simple freaking file. Half the time I post a picture it glitches out for me and I can no longer see it. Or I can see it but not if I make it fullscreen.
Honestly the abysmal performance is just the cherry on top...
Teams was a not-insignificant reason for leaving my last company. My day to day stress levels immediately plummeted after going back to using Slack. People say Slack is terrible, but I tell them go to use Teams and then come back to me. It is by far the biggest dumpster fire software I've had the displeasure of using. It's the only software that has made me consistently angry. All of the issues you described I have experienced. One of the most plaguing issues was actually viewing new messages. When clicking a channel to view new messages, 50% of the time the screen would be blank and I would have to click away and back to render the chat.
That blank screen issue has happened to me as well. The pandemic massively increased how much I needed to interact with Microsoft Teams, and let me tell you, it did not make me happy. Not one bit. Perhaps it's a giant ploy by Microsoft to try and get people to hate remote work.
Whether a company uses the Microsoft suite is definitely a factor when I look for jobs. I simply won't put up with Teams or Windows - not unless the salary is at least 2x what I can get elsewhere. I know I'm not alone in this. Developers want to work with good software.
I've had to put up with it before and I won't do it again. I can almost feel my cortisol levels rising just thinking about it.
The chat is so bad people end up @ing the whole team in the team channel just to get people to see it. It fails at its most basic purpose.
There are seemingly countless different ways to start a chat. You could start a thread in a channel (or is it team?), or just start a new channel/team, or invite people to a group chat. There ends up being a forever growing list of chats/rooms/whatever because people can't find the previous one so just make a new one.
People are forever accidentally starting a new thread instead of replying to the current thread. Most stupid UI ever. I find 99% of the time people just want flat chat and find whatever the easiest way to get that is.
And why the hell do you need to give me a top level notification that won't go away when someone "reacts" to the thing I've just said in the chat I'm still viewing?!
Oh, and the random breakages. It seems every other week they break code pasting. Currently viewing images is broken for me. I just have to keep retrying until on the tenth time it finally works.
The reacts are my biggest pet peeve. Someone just simply wants to register they received my message/instructions and it created 4 additional clicks for me to address.
I have an external monitor with USB audio, but no volume in macos there because reasons. It's hooked up to a hardware amp with a real hardware volume control. Every. Single. Teams. Call has a dialog box saying I might not be able to hear because I'm at 0 volume. And it comes back every single time the window maximizes.
If I share a window on one screen, the teams call carefully placed on the other monitor helpfully minimizes to a floating window in front of what I'm trying to share. So then I have to re-maximize because I sometimes like to see the reactions when I'm sharing stuff.
One person I call, I can't. He has to call me back. Every Time.
It's not the worst video chat I've used. That's either skype or any of the pre-facetime real-video things that never really worked. But it's not good either.
I randomly miss out alerts of notif and calls
The stuoid thing keeps ringing denoting that I am getting a call but I can't see who is calling u less I have their chat window open then it shows a Join button
Legitimately irritating as it happens several times a day
Root cause? Their notification is generated but we can't see it unless we do alt tab
I doubt anyone would be using Teams if it had not been produced by Microsoft. It has so many shortcomings that I know I will miss some, but here's a gripe list anyway:
1) Echo cancellation. This is a solved problem and pretty much every other conferencing app does it right. Microsoft probably rolled their own which is why it does not work right.
2) I have Teams installed on my desktop, Android phone, and iPad. (Unfortunately, my company wants us to use it.) Regardless of the notification settings in the apps, if I was on the desktop but switched my KVM away, my phone and iPad will not notify me of incoming Teams calls, messages, etc.
3) Editing a document using the collaborative environment is painfully broken. Sometimes it will take many seconds to register a keystroke (on a gigabit-class CONUS connection). Sometimes edits will disappear completely, or sometimes just temporarily. Change tracking doesn't work right. Google Docs had collaborative editing perfected over 10 years ago.
4) Moving files in/out of Teams "Folders" can be painfully slow.
5) Interoperability between the desktop Teams app and govcloud/non-govcloud users is hosed, but it seems to work fine on phones and tablets. Desktop users must access meetings via browser if their "home" Teams account govcloud flavor does not match that of the meeting originator, but no such restrictions exist on phones & tablets. WTF?
6) The Linux desktop version of Teams does not operate with govcloud at all.
7) Depending on the platform, users cannot share their desktop when using the browser-based version. Chrome actually supports this better than Edge.
> 1) Echo cancellation. This is a solved problem and pretty much every other conferencing app does it right. Microsoft probably rolled their own which is why it does not work right.
I don't know if Teams is worse or not, but my take is that it is impossible to do right for conversations since it introduces too much lag. I sincerely prefer echoes. Old time phones worked just fine and it felt like you stood next to the person you were speaking too instead of speaking through some filter group delay.
Old timey phone systems did have echo cancelation. One of the tones in high speed (hah!) modem handshakes is intended to disable the echo cancelers, so that the modems can do it better, but the system echo cancellers usually worked well for actual voice communications.
They also had a whole heck of a lot less latency. Sure, routes were probably less direct, but if you had an honest to goodness analog line, the only added latency was from amplifiers and multiplexing equipment, neither of which added significant latency. More likely your call would be digitized and sent as part of a T1 or similar circuit; but that doesn't add a lot of delay, because a T1 is multiplexed as one sample per line, 8000 samples per second per line. Where your is connected at digital telphone switches, there would need to be a buffer to match up timing, but it only needs to be one sample long. There's not likely to be that many switches on a call, so total added latency is going to be a few sample lengths, and maybe around 1ms. (This is in addition to the transmission delay, of course)
In contrast, modern computers have meaningful audio sampling delays, and transmitting each sample would kill your network, so you batch a few samples (usually 10-40ms worth), there's delay from the encode/decode, and packet switched networking also adds delay in waiting for a send slot.
Echo cancelling with all that latency is even more important, cause the echos are hard to tune out when they come back so late.
I can't express how much I hate teams, and two years into a remote work revolution, they honestly don't have any excuse.
My teams client is CONSTANTLY confused about this "work account home account" garbage. Holy crap Batman it's a disaster.
Clicking on teams links causes my teams client to freeze up with a blank screen sometimes for minutes. So I've been late to many meetings because the Teams client just doesn't connect.
I'm yet to hear a SINGLE instance of someone using teams other than "we already bought it" or "we have some strategic partnership with MS, so we have to use it" – some BS that's shoved down people's throats.
The multi-account stuff is something slack and discord got right from day one. And years into it, MS still hasn't figured this out. It's appalling how bad Teams is, years later.
Anytime I see a teams link in a calendar event, I groan loudly.
There are a few conferences in my field that, for some reason, use Teams, and a number of UK universities seem to have been pushed into using it. It is bad enough that one warned everyone that, if their university used Teams, to please provide a non-university email address, because the university using Teams would likely prevent the university email address from being used to log in to the conference.
For the actual talks, of course, most of these conferences use Teams to send out Zoom links. Using Teams for those would be a disaster.
+1 for that.
Recently in W10 MS is requiring to login with your personal account only and not a work account to the apps store. Can't get the logic behind that.
I don't know how attributable your problems are to Teams; what you're describing sounds more like a general problem of misunderstanding AzureAD. But maybe you're right; it can feel like everyone has to be in the tenant for things to work. Have had many problems with _EXT clients.
Ex office dev here. Actual dev work is done on i9 workstations running 64 gb of ram, and usually located very near an Azure data center, regardless of where the dev works. The result is that it's fast for us.
Everyone knows that it runs like poop, but there are other priorities, and no performance regression tests.
It's Microsoft. Corporations of that size don't really have to worry about technical details that much - the competition can eat their lunch here and there and they'll still survive. They know they can crush any small fish any time.
I mean, look at this very thread: Slack effectively invented this "modern IRC" bullshit, but still, when MS decided they had to have an answer, they cloned it and effectively imposed it to millions of users, no matter how inferior a product it might have been - in just a few years. They can throw hundreds of millions in the fire and they'll still be okay. No need to rush for a few perf tickets...
I feel Teams is thrown together by a few interns that are trying out Scrum to be "agile". Every few days a button moves to another place or some weird bug is introduced. The latest is that the left and right cursor keys stop working after a while. Makes me wonder what they are doing to have such issues and not notice and why isn't that fixed quickly? Search is basically useless. The built-in wiki isn't searchable at all. It''s just all out terrible.
The only thing that works well is calls, voice and video. I am sure they have plans to destroy that too :-)
I often use _phrase_ to italisise. This seems to trigger the left/right arrow key bug semi-regularly. This fix is to find the Teams icon in the Taskbar, right click and Quit.
My favorite teams mishap is while I’m on a call, my Microsoft ecosystem access token would expire, prompting me to login and do the 2FA dance, wait on the text with the code, etc
But if I’m to go back to Teams, I get a BLOCKING window that lets me know that I’ve been logged out and NEED to log back in.
You can’t interact with the call at all, even though you’re still connected and can hear people talking. There’s no way to unmute and say “i need to drop so that Teams can relog me in”, EVEN THOUGH I’m on the call already…
From the other people’s perspective I just hang up the call without saying anything.
Teams is not meant to be good, friendly or performant. Teams is meant to check boxes in executive meetings, and to beat the competition's price when purchased in bulk.
100% agree! I suspect that Teams is just a fancy front-end to Sharepoint, so it was "easy" to build. Just fire up Electron and duplicate Sharepoint features. Oh, and tack on a chat function while your at it. Done!
I assume you mean Viva Insights...I'm curious as to what managers can see about your activities when that is enabled. The euphemism is "Organisational productivity reporting".
Readit News
For the developers, Teams works... as good as Teams can. So not great, but it works most of the time (for me, anyway). For everyone else though, I hear nothing but issues. Constantly having to restart to make Teams work. And again, this is on Surface devices, so Microsoft is making the app, the OS, and the hardware!
Even aside from the performance, I just think Teams is laid out horribly and it stifles communication. The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre and constantly causes confusion. It's so much worse than Slack (which we used to use, and I used at a previous job) where all communication channels are listed along the left side, and you didn't have to dig through menus and trees of categorization to get to certain places to talk to your coworkers. And since Teams channels are sectioned off behind another screen from your chats (where you'll probably be most of the time), the only way to be aware of when someone posts in one of the channels is to turn on notifications for it. Which is very annoying!
edit: oh also a recent update made it so when you paste a code snippet into the plaintext editor thing (whatever it's called, you activate it by typing 3 backticks), it strips all the whitespace from the left, meaning you lose all the code indentation. Just great
While we’re bashing Teams—why are their notifications some awful custom window that doesn’t respect your OS notification settings?!??!
Then MS introduced that weird semi-forced threaded discussion feature that make following conversations a nightmare and nobody, not a single person in the whole company, sent a message over Teams ever again. We kept running it to appear online, but literally nobody actually used it.
We did spend a fair amount of downtime talking about how much we hated Teams, though. And Azure DevOps. More than one person there considered it some of the worst software they've ever used, and they're right. It was a horrendous mess or awful UX (but tons and tons of charts for the managers to value far too highly).
That was a year and a half ago or so, maybe it's better now. But at the time, having switched to that from Gitlab, it was atrocious and we avoided it as much as we could.
Whatever cost savings Teams affords, the difference is more than lost in confusion, miscommunication, and frustration across the workplace.
May I never have to use it again.
Interestingly, my team now uses Discord for communication and we really love it.
Oh yeah, I'm with you! I'll admit that Slack's UX and UI is not my favorite either, but at least any challenges are in a single dimension (not like Teams in multiple, challenging dimensions)...Meanwhile Teams' is just awful. I mean, the Teams "rooms" (I guess i call them "rooms" because its annoying to call them "Teams Sites"?) almost exist like channels/rooms in good ol' IRC...but then Teams has channels underneath Teams Sites/rooms...?...Plus, if i want to chat with an indiviodual, those live in the separate "Chat" area...Ugh! To the valid point about slack, at least its all there on the left. I guess i could sort of see if there was drastically different functionality between Chats and Rooms/Sites...but i dont think so. So, why then separate them? As much as i dislike Microsoft as an organization overall (for their historic corporate behavior), they often don't jhave the worse UX ideas...But for Teams, ugh!
I'm gpoing to pivot a little to matrix, and specifically the Element client...which is the most popular matrix web client. I'm an admitted matrix fanboy, so clearly i'm biased...but even Element has areas that are simpler for me to comprehend and utilize...Also, Element in my mind is still waaaaay early in its evolution, and still very much far from their UX being topnotch. But even in Element's infancy is leaps abovew what Teams is now after several years. I acknowledge that Teams "does more" (like embedding Office software, etc.)...and of course the underlying matrix protocol is NOT limited to chat...But, wow, is Teams sucky.
Discord should just sell a white label version or start a subsidiary to sell to enterprise. Slack will probably get smushed by Salesforce, and short of Satya Nadella's personal laptop bursting into flames because of Teams, I doubt they'll slim down the client.
Which... was bizarre, coming from Slack.
As parent phrased it, "the redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels" is mind-bogglingly stupid.
I can't actually imagine a user who would desire that. Maybe someone from HR worried about secrets being shared in a chat?
I work for an institution that has gone balls deep with MS products and it's driving me crazy considering they are always worrying about budgets and saving money.
When I started everyone was communicating with email. Drove me nuts. I convinced the team I was assigned to, to drop emails and switched to hipchat ( loved it) then slack ( meh ) When covid hit, everyone needed to be on chat. Top brass told us we were not allowed to use anything but MS Teams. The devs hate it. It's run by the main IT dep so we have no control over how it works.
I want to stage a revolt and install mattermost on one of our servers lol
The fact that this happens on a piece of software which natively supports dark mode tells a lot of the amount of testing that teams is getting before being pushed to users.
It really is, why do I get notifications in chat sometimes and not the Teams room that everyone is a part of?
Why are people referencing others in these chat channels when that's what we discuss in the Teams channels?
And I'm a senior software engineer!
Deleted Comment
Now I'm on Windows, and it doesn't seem to be a problem anymore (or at least it doesn't crash my system anymore, its still always top of the list for memory usage), but it is very irritating to use
- Lists: A few months ago you can simply use markdown style lists in any chat and hitting enter would create a new list item instead of sending the whole message off. A few updates since Nov slowly stripped off this option for Chats, and then Channels. The only option to send lists is to use the format button.
- As you said, code snippets, now they stripped off all indentations if you are not using the format button (and have to go through a tedious process to insert code)
The chat experience is by far the worst I've ever had to deal with:
- My sidebar is riddled with old meetings chats nobody cares about anymore. Makes it hard to find actual important direct conversations with people.
- The text editor is absolute jank, I've yet to figure out how to get out of a quote after starting one, lists constantly glitch out, it keeps "bold/italic" state like office but with no easy way to remove it.
- Because it connects to sharepoint you get to enjoy all the lovely permission bullshit when trying to share a simple freaking file. Half the time I post a picture it glitches out for me and I can no longer see it. Or I can see it but not if I make it fullscreen.
Honestly the abysmal performance is just the cherry on top...
How do you screw up a chat program this badly?
I've had to put up with it before and I won't do it again. I can almost feel my cortisol levels rising just thinking about it.
There are seemingly countless different ways to start a chat. You could start a thread in a channel (or is it team?), or just start a new channel/team, or invite people to a group chat. There ends up being a forever growing list of chats/rooms/whatever because people can't find the previous one so just make a new one.
People are forever accidentally starting a new thread instead of replying to the current thread. Most stupid UI ever. I find 99% of the time people just want flat chat and find whatever the easiest way to get that is.
And why the hell do you need to give me a top level notification that won't go away when someone "reacts" to the thing I've just said in the chat I'm still viewing?!
Oh, and the random breakages. It seems every other week they break code pasting. Currently viewing images is broken for me. I just have to keep retrying until on the tenth time it finally works.
If I share a window on one screen, the teams call carefully placed on the other monitor helpfully minimizes to a floating window in front of what I'm trying to share. So then I have to re-maximize because I sometimes like to see the reactions when I'm sharing stuff.
One person I call, I can't. He has to call me back. Every Time.
It's not the worst video chat I've used. That's either skype or any of the pre-facetime real-video things that never really worked. But it's not good either.
Legitimately irritating as it happens several times a day
Root cause? Their notification is generated but we can't see it unless we do alt tab
Worst of all, it will open all links in edge, unless you configure Edge to Not do it. WTF? Why is this even possible?
To me it looks like another failed attempt to solve communication without really giving it a good thought - resulting in an incomprehensible mess.
It’s included and integrated with Office.
1) Echo cancellation. This is a solved problem and pretty much every other conferencing app does it right. Microsoft probably rolled their own which is why it does not work right.
2) I have Teams installed on my desktop, Android phone, and iPad. (Unfortunately, my company wants us to use it.) Regardless of the notification settings in the apps, if I was on the desktop but switched my KVM away, my phone and iPad will not notify me of incoming Teams calls, messages, etc.
3) Editing a document using the collaborative environment is painfully broken. Sometimes it will take many seconds to register a keystroke (on a gigabit-class CONUS connection). Sometimes edits will disappear completely, or sometimes just temporarily. Change tracking doesn't work right. Google Docs had collaborative editing perfected over 10 years ago.
4) Moving files in/out of Teams "Folders" can be painfully slow.
5) Interoperability between the desktop Teams app and govcloud/non-govcloud users is hosed, but it seems to work fine on phones and tablets. Desktop users must access meetings via browser if their "home" Teams account govcloud flavor does not match that of the meeting originator, but no such restrictions exist on phones & tablets. WTF?
6) The Linux desktop version of Teams does not operate with govcloud at all.
7) Depending on the platform, users cannot share their desktop when using the browser-based version. Chrome actually supports this better than Edge.
I don't know if Teams is worse or not, but my take is that it is impossible to do right for conversations since it introduces too much lag. I sincerely prefer echoes. Old time phones worked just fine and it felt like you stood next to the person you were speaking too instead of speaking through some filter group delay.
They also had a whole heck of a lot less latency. Sure, routes were probably less direct, but if you had an honest to goodness analog line, the only added latency was from amplifiers and multiplexing equipment, neither of which added significant latency. More likely your call would be digitized and sent as part of a T1 or similar circuit; but that doesn't add a lot of delay, because a T1 is multiplexed as one sample per line, 8000 samples per second per line. Where your is connected at digital telphone switches, there would need to be a buffer to match up timing, but it only needs to be one sample long. There's not likely to be that many switches on a call, so total added latency is going to be a few sample lengths, and maybe around 1ms. (This is in addition to the transmission delay, of course)
In contrast, modern computers have meaningful audio sampling delays, and transmitting each sample would kill your network, so you batch a few samples (usually 10-40ms worth), there's delay from the encode/decode, and packet switched networking also adds delay in waiting for a send slot.
Echo cancelling with all that latency is even more important, cause the echos are hard to tune out when they come back so late.
My teams client is CONSTANTLY confused about this "work account home account" garbage. Holy crap Batman it's a disaster.
Clicking on teams links causes my teams client to freeze up with a blank screen sometimes for minutes. So I've been late to many meetings because the Teams client just doesn't connect.
I'm yet to hear a SINGLE instance of someone using teams other than "we already bought it" or "we have some strategic partnership with MS, so we have to use it" – some BS that's shoved down people's throats.
The multi-account stuff is something slack and discord got right from day one. And years into it, MS still hasn't figured this out. It's appalling how bad Teams is, years later.
Anytime I see a teams link in a calendar event, I groan loudly.
This thread is much needed therapy. Teams is truly awful on so many levels.
For the actual talks, of course, most of these conferences use Teams to send out Zoom links. Using Teams for those would be a disaster.
Everyone knows that it runs like poop, but there are other priorities, and no performance regression tests.
I mean, look at this very thread: Slack effectively invented this "modern IRC" bullshit, but still, when MS decided they had to have an answer, they cloned it and effectively imposed it to millions of users, no matter how inferior a product it might have been - in just a few years. They can throw hundreds of millions in the fire and they'll still be okay. No need to rush for a few perf tickets...
1) what other priorities?
2) has anyone that worked on teams actually used it? It has one of the worst UX's ever.
The only thing that works well is calls, voice and video. I am sure they have plans to destroy that too :-)
I often use _phrase_ to italisise. This seems to trigger the left/right arrow key bug semi-regularly. This fix is to find the Teams icon in the Taskbar, right click and Quit.
Then restart Teams.
But if I’m to go back to Teams, I get a BLOCKING window that lets me know that I’ve been logged out and NEED to log back in.
You can’t interact with the call at all, even though you’re still connected and can hear people talking. There’s no way to unmute and say “i need to drop so that Teams can relog me in”, EVEN THOUGH I’m on the call already…
From the other people’s perspective I just hang up the call without saying anything.
Worst call software I’ve used.