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’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.
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!
Or:
Hey, check out the new calendar! We have <features>! Want a tour?
No, you’re describing features that have been in it for a while now, it’s not that new anymore
A few days later: Hey, check out the new calendar! We have <same list of features>! Want a tour?
Still no, and I don’t mean later, I just mean no
Did you mean New Teams? Or Classic Teams? Do you want to Keep Using New Teams? Do you want to try Classic Teams? You opened New Teams last time, do you want to use that one or Classic Teams? Not to be confused with Teams (for work or school), which is just New Teams! I think!
Why don’t you want to use the new Teams? Give us your feedback so we can ignore it.
Thank you for your feedback. Say, do you know there’s a new Teams available? Try it now!
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.
you can do that stuff in slack as well, and slack sucks far less than teams
Yes, but is a giant pain in the butt. I guess I don’t understand if they do the same things why one sucks less than the other…
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Notifications don’t go always go away when seen. I sometimes have to click out if the window and click back in.
- Incomplete markdown support (let me copy/paste a table from pandas!)
- 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.
I can say from an admin side, there is some filtering you can set for gifs, but there’s very little to no control over aggressiveness.
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.
Laggy on osx
At least in my work instance, by default it sends me an alert any time someone posts a reaction emoji in one of the dozen chat channels.
So you into your settings and turn that off. Yes the default is annoying, but it’s literally a 30 second fix to never have it happen again.
I did. My point is that this productivity tool hurts your productivity until you tinker with it to make it less annoying.
It only annoys some users, a lot of people like knowing someone has acknowledged their message.
It should be off by default.
Then people who do like it wouldn’t even know it exists. It’s usually better in an environment that lacks standard training for every user to enable by default, and then have the users disable if they don’t want it.
Your car has ABS, but you don’t have to turn it on to use it, it’s on by default and users can (usually) turn it off when they don’t want it.
Cool, cool. Spamming the hell out of users is definitly necessary to let them know it exists islnstead of asking them if they want notifications the first time they start it up.
They should just know there is a setting to turn it iff then, right?
I can’t set my mic to be automatically muted when I join a meeting. I have to choose every time.
I can’t adjust the brightness of my camera exceot for whatever ‘Enhance’ does.
Guess I’ll just keep looking for settings when basic ones don’t exist.
There are settings for notifications in every single app these users have ever encountered in both their professional personal lives. The basic understand for apps by users it that notification settings exist. They may not know that there is a specific option to turn one specific type of notification on, but they should know they can turn shit off.
I’ve never noticed an issue with the muting thing, It’s a fraction of a second when joining to pick what settings I want for that meeting which does vary so it’s helpful to have.
Brightness settings for Camera… holy shit… Light yourself properly. Ring lights are $30 on amazon, get one and look actually professional when attending your meetings.
Brightness settings for Camera… holy shit… Light yourself properly. Ring lights are $30 on amazon, get one and look actually professional when attending your meetings.
Beyond the basic point that other video apps have had brightness settings for decades, saying to spend more money to fix the feature is asinine.
There is plenty of light for zoom, Teams is dark. When I go to a conference I’m not going to lug a fucking ring light around for a random video call in a quiet corner. Instead, they could just put a brightness slider in like a competent company.
It is impressive how hard you are shilling for Teams by excusing a lack of basic functionality.
There is plenty of light for zoom.
No there isn’t, if you have to adjust the brightness digitally the camera itself is not getting enough light based on what it was designed for.
Teams does have a brightness setting, it’s just a toggle rather than a slider. If that still isn’t enough, then you are sitting in a pitch black room. I just tested this, with every light in my room off, including the overhead and the direct facial lighting, the teams toggle is enough to make me reasonably visible in the light from my screen alone.
I don’t need the toggle on at all with an overhead light on, and the annoying shadows from the overhead room light go away with my facial lighting on.
Here’s a $21 clip on USB powered laptop ring light, https://www.amazon.com/Meyin-Brightness-Conference-Broadcasting-Streaming/dp/B0D1DTF7H6
My computer is old and slow so loading teams is like elder abuse
Next time I fire up my old Bloomfield era XPS to do video transcoding or whatever else, that’s what I’m gonna call it.
Funnily enough a Core i7 920 runs modern day Linux Mint just fine.
Oh yeah, you just reminded me of how unusable teams was for scrolling back up in a chat to look at older messages on a slower machine. Skype was at least capable of that because it had the history stored locally. But teams unloads the message as soon as it was out of view and needs to fetch it from the server and must have done it very inefficiently because I started giving up on checking chat history until I got my newer machine.
My work Teams is only really active for my department’s channels. My department is about 10 or so people, so I don’t suffer from the same problems others have mentioned with notifications for reactions and whatnot. My two gripes are:
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I’ll send a writeup from my Google Pixel phone while on-site doing field work and include inline photos. I’ll proofread my message and everything is good. After I click send, my phone shows my post truncated in the group chat. I cannot see the full message, and it looks like I deleted half my written message. From the desktop or my coworker’s Samsung phone, everything shows up fine.
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I’ll often find Teams silently closed on my workstation. I might minimize it occasionally, but I don’t believe I ever close it, and Windows reliability history doesn’t show any crashes.
Oh yeh, it does that (randomly closing)
It also likes to randomly update and steal context from other apps. Have sent a few accidental messages that way
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I suspect the answer by a great many people will boil down to “because I used it [and it’s shit]”
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.
It’s not much better on the Slack side in my experience. They announced a months-long issue recently
This is my number one complaint because it does mean missed messages. My second complaint is it messing up everyone’s audio choices every meeting.
I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel.
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.
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.
Six levels deep in a teams group file storage and open a file to view? Clicking the big obvious “close” button on the top right of the opened document now takes you back to the top level. Enjoy digging back in again!
Oh, you really just want to close that document and remain in the folder you were just in? Well that’s easy. Just ignore that big tempting close button and click the tiny “<” button on the left, no problem. You’ll probably remember that after reflexively clicking that close button at least once, so enjoy all that!
Honestly it’s never been too bad for me.
except that time it randomly turned on my microphone during a meeting, when I was casually chatting to my brother about the beneficial value of replacing antidepressants with a microdose of shrooms 😬
or when it wants to open docs in Teams instead of opening it in the actual program. It always opens so slow, just so I can close it.
or when it tried to force its update on me, and took me from black background to white, and suddenly the background matched my rage; white hot and seething
