Agree -- I just don't understand why Teams would make someone so angry.
There's so much more in Windows to be angry about, lmao. You must adapt to this Windows world that has been made for us -- it SUCKS, but... you adapt and you evolve and you learn ways to make your workflow work for you.
We recently switched from Slack to Teams. IMO, it's the worst software that MS produced particularly when there is a baseline such as Slack that they can get inspired from.
- All the channels are named General for every Team I am part of and it shows several "General" channels in my pinned list. Unless someone mentions me, I simply miss those conversations in other channels.
- Search is pretty bad and it never works. Slack is pretty powerful and conversations in Slack are like KB.
- If a screenshot is shared, sometimes it takes forever to show when I click it.
- Every time I have to click 'New conversation' to post in a channel.
- I use a 34" monitor, when I expand Teams app - it hardly uses 50% of the real estate. Content is centered and lot of whitespace (or blackspace in dark mode :p)
> And basically anything coming out of Atlassian. How do you actually make software that's so indelible, while still being overly complex and sloooow?
Simple: you make it super customizable with options, configuration, and plugins so managers and administrators can implement and mandate any sort of workflow they can dream up, no matter how nonsensical, counterproductive, or downright user-hostile it may be. Then you do the same for reporting and dashboards on whatever misleading metrics they want.
After that, the PTBs will cling to the illusion of control it gives them to their dying breath.
I preferred Teams over Slack. Teams has a much better Giphy integration. Since distributing memes is the most productive thing you can do with such a chat platform, Giphy is a must.
Ironically my layout complaint is the polar opposite of yours, which is that I have smaller monitors and the minimum window size is really large, and for what? I would like to pop out a couple channels and have them always on-screen but they take up too much room.
The current minimum width is 2x my smartphone which is kinda weird considering the app runs fine on the phone itself.
It's the worst software I use on a day to day basis and it's not close. Granted that's on Linux which likely isn't Microsoft's main focus but still nothing else does this much this badly.
Your giving up does not mean others should. I have worked 40 years with practically no contact with anything MS-bound. (I have a few times had to chase down a bug in, uniquely, the MS port of a product; and used a full-screen Linux VM running on top of W7, elsewhere.)
All the highest-paid programming jobs are not MS-bound.
I'm fine with Windows, as long as you disable the Microsoft account and don't look much at the start menu it mostly gets out of the way, and doesn't have UI latency.
Teams, on the other hand, is an UI nightmare:
- It has noticeable UI latency even in the best computers.
- If you open a document within it, there is no way (that I know of) to get back to the chat to discuss something about the document, and then back to the document again. Once you go to a chat, the document is closed and you have to navigate the whole file system to find it again, click it, and wait for several seconds for it to open because lag.
- If you search for messages with a given word, it shows you a list of the messages but it doesn't allow you to click on each to look at the context, which is what I want to do like 99% of the time I search for a message in a chat app.
- If you have it set up to launch on startup, it will open private conversations and again, take a couple of seconds to close even if you're a fast clicker, because of its ubiquitous lag. Incredibly inconvenient if you use the laptop to give a presentation (of course I know that I can just set it to not open on startup, but I shouldn't need to do that. It makes sense to have it on startup 99% of the time as I almost always use it, just don't open a private chat and stick it in front of the screen with focus as the first thing you do!).
- The filesystem is a nightmare (not only Teams' fault, but the whole Office ecosystem): files associated to a team, vs. files on someone's OneDrive, vs. SharePoint. After 2 years of using it, I still don't get the difference between OneDrive and SharePoint and I'm still not able to find anything without stumbling around, and I'm supposed to be a tech guy.
- Sometimes you drag a file on a chat to send it to the other person and it makes you explicitly set permissions (using a laggy UI, of course) so the other person can access the file. Why would I send a file to a private chat if I didn't want to show it to the other person?
- Calls don't scale. Quality degrades fast.
- Sometimes a "team" will go bold for no reason. I click on it, and there is nothing new. Or a chat window will go blank and only come back when someone types a new message.
Mind you, it has good things (I like the simplicity of partially typing a few names in the search box, having it autocomplete, click on the people and starting a group chat, for example) but the UI is a dumpster fire. I'm not anti-Microsoft as a whole (I like Windows, and kind of like Excel) and while I kind of tolerate it, there are plenty of reasons to get angry with it. And some of the issues above (like search not showing context, rendering it all but useless) are really basic, I don't know how they could even pass QA.
- Never noticed UI latency - and I use it mostly in a virtual desktop (Horizon Client)
- I have chat and documents open for collaboration all the time - how have you missed it?
- don't have it set to open on startup, perhaps? We're not allowed to have any apps open on startup that aren't of the handful of "approved" ones, so my first task every morning is [command] (I run VDI on my MBP) then click Outlook and Teams from my start menu. Takes about 10 seconds
- never had issues with the Teams/OneDrive integration ... and I've been using it for a couple years now day in, day out
- never saw a perms issue sharing/sending a file ... is it a restricted file type by your organization, perhaps?
- been in Teams calls with well over 500 people. Hardly a dropped sound.
- chat windows do age-out after a certain period of inactivity; they're still "there", but they're not in the most-recent list any more
I especially like the task cards you can create and monitor - and how comments/updates create their own chat threads, so you can tag someone via chat, and it'll bring them to the task card just by dint of replying to the conversation ... THAT was brilliant
I also like that when you create a meeting in Teams, it auto-creates the Teams room/links for everyone invited. Whereas if you make it in Outlook, you either need the Teams plugin enabled, or you need to manually add the conferencing info after the fact
A lot of companies that use macOS still rely on O365 and teams.
What are the other options? Zoom? A lot of companies ban Zoom for security reasons and the connection to the CCP - even without that it's not really that much better than teams anyway.
I think gathertown is pretty cool, but really all of these video chat services work well enough for what you need them for.
Slack was probably my favorite of the bunch for non-video communication, but now that they've sold themselves to salesforce they'll probably wither away and die (or at best remain in stasis) like everything else that company acquires.
I dunno man, we're in a Windows world. I word at an MSP and I am a linux enthusiast at heart, but I had to adapt to this Windows world and Teams is a huge part of that.
Do I wish that we could just use... idk an internal IRC server? Yeah sure, that'd be great.
But Teams allows us to organize meetings and communicate EFFECTIVELY.
Sometimes adaptation is a huge part of this industry, in my opinion. I think that if you dislike Teams, and can not adapt, you may not be effective in this job market unless you free-lance or find some small startup that ... doesn't use any of the modern communication applications.
Teams runs on Linux, and almost any conceivable alternative runs on Windows. I don't see what Windows has to do with it, other than suggesting a general cultural tolerance for bad user experience.
I’ve actually been evaluating email providers for a small business, and it turns out that if you need:
1) shared mailboxes (that multiple people can manage)
2) sane auth[entication|orization]
3) retention of deleted emails
then there are only 2 players in the game: Microsoft and Google… and once you pick one of them, it makes sense to also buy into the rest of their respective ecosystems, since everything is well-integrated.
The choice then ends up coming down to whether your users prefer Google Docs/Sheets/Mail or Microsoft Word/Excel/Outlook…
is there just no commercial email provider with those features or is there not even any tech out there that solves those problems?
with shared mailboxes i assume you mean the ability for multiple people to access mails to an address and have everyone synced on responses without sharing login.
There really are no other [sane] alternatives ... unless you want to go to 50 vendors to save 50 cents per user per year on licensing (and waste 50 hours a month of everyone's time trying to get them use tools that don't integrate in any understandable/low-friction manner)
this is not about saving money, but about avoiding the behemoths that dominate the market. it would be rather disappointing if the options were so limited.
Wasting 10s or 100s or 1000s of 1000s of hours of time across an organization is stupid just for the sake of "avoiding the behemoths that dominate the market"
i prefer 50 because the likelihood of them failing or denying service all at once is lower. much lower. this goes beyond email, but it would be insane to put put everything my business depends on into the hands of a single company.
Your choice of 50 unrelated, unintegrated vendors introduces 50 single points of failure to business
That's incredibly stupid - unless you truly have no choice
It introduces a huge amount of unnecessary risk to the company, and immense overhead in additional personnel (product admins, contract management, vulnerability monitoring, end user time/training, etc)
It's why multicloud is mostly not a thing: outside of a few niche cases, running cloud workloads across multiple providers is more expensive than running it all in one. Sure GCP might have something that's cheaper than AWS, and AWS than Azure, and Azure than GCP - but now you have to manage data going into and out of three providers instead of one, three separate contracts, three sets of credential groups, etc
I've been doing a bit more research and I have to amend my previous comment: there's also Zoho, which has its own ecosystem.
Other than that, all of the standalone email providers seem to be running a standard Linux or Windows email stack (i.e. Postfix/Dovecot/Roundcube or Exchange Server). The Linux stack doesn't seem to be able to do it (well, either that or the providers don't offer it).
It's been over a decade since I've used Windows for anything other than testing that something works on Windows. Most software engineers I know are in a similar position.
I suppose if I wanted to work a a really big company, that would change, but the "Windows world" feels more like a historical relic than a present reality.
In Pittsburgh, I have not been able to find a company that lets software engineers use OS X or Linux. I'm actively looking so I'll be very happy to be proven wrong if anyone knows of a place.
You don't need to look in Pittsburgh anymore. Many, many companies now hire remote literally anywhere at all, particularly those located in New York City.
Depends where you are I guess. When I attend conferences these days--which to be fair tend to be open source-oriented although not exclusively--I see very little Windows in use and, to be honest, more MacOS than Linux in general.
To the topic at hand I've used Teams a couple times. Don't remember it being especially good or bad and probably wouldn't otherwise be a deal-breaker on a job I really wanted to take. But I probably prefer either Zoom or Google Meet.
OP didn't say this, but it's probably more that Teams rarely stands alone.
If they're using Teams then surely they are also using office365 and exchange & outlook and you probably are forced to use a MS account and a laptop running Windows and must use Outlook.
If they used Teams, but you didn't actually have to spend all day on Teams, and everything else was fine, you could work on your own linux machine and use thunderbird for email, and you just had to fire up the linux Teams occasionally, then that should be fine.
But if you have to be logged in all day, even if everything else is good, then it's effectively a large part of your life and you should seek to identify such things rather than just suffer them.
I think the argument for Teams falls apart when Slack, not IRC, is factored into the equation. The only argument that is justifiable for Teams is if you're on O365 is slots into your organization easily, outside of that Teams is pretty bad. It's main selling point seems to be "you already have it". It's as if MS execs pointed at Slack and said "engineers make us that" and gave them a weekend to do it. The UX on Slack is almost unusable. It's some of what Slack does but with about 5 more clicks needed per operation, assuming you can even do the operation.
Of course there are -- and thats great. But... the point is the same. Not many businesses these days are using a linux stack. Is it unfortunate? Yes. Do I like it? no. But working in IT in any capacity means that you have to adapt... thats my main point.
I frankly think you have it backwards. Practically the majority of business server+cloud software runs on Linux, unless you're a literal desktop janitor.
Teams only show 4 streams at a time on Linux, the video/audio quality is mediocre and the video quality in the webclient is worse than the one using an Electron container, probably to force the app. Screensharing always tends to get stuck after a while, and they ignore any requests to start supporting Wayland, even while it takes minimal changes(update Electron).
Nowadays it's easy to setup your own conference server, and use webbased clients that don't require yet another Electron container. For instance, Galene(https://github.com/jech/galene) is an excellent resource-friendly SFU built on top of Pion(Golang).
There's so much more in Windows to be angry about, lmao. You must adapt to this Windows world that has been made for us -- it SUCKS, but... you adapt and you evolve and you learn ways to make your workflow work for you.