So to have a productive comment on all this teams shit (and slack shit too IMHO)
What is currently the best self hosted solution?
I used to habe nextcloud with only office, offering and allowing multiple users to work simultaneously on documents, next cloud itself rocked, but what about video and audio calls, what about chat? Anything out there that is integrated easily in next cloud?
At this point I prefer to Skype before I’d teams, and I hate Skype with a passion already.
Call quality is abysmal compared to meet, it’s a continuous crash, feature suddenly inexplicably doesn’t work, and what not more. There is always somebody who can’t get video turned on all of the sudden, always effin around with audio and this morning o cut off a teams call and decided to call the person by phone because that at least worked.
We’re so tightly integrated with the M$ ecosystem at my work, it’s painful. My department has even been going out of it’s way to self host (F)OSS alternatives where we can, just to avoid as much of the cludge as possible.
Has anyone tried out the new Teams integration feature that Mattermost recently rolled out for Enterprise customers? If so, any good?
If we can seamlessly sync calls/meetings from Teams into Mattermost and ditch the Teams client for our day-to-day comms, I might have a fighting chance at convincing my supervisor to pivot my department.
I have to use Teams as a student and we never even do video calls, just sharing files, and there are so many issues we have with it such as bugginess and no one understanding the UI.
Okay but could they please hide the microphone settings a little deeper under menus that are already hard to find such as whatever makes the PowerPoint presentation go full screen? No one has ever figured out that one. It’s just that we love the resonance of that beautiful feedback sound. As soon as one of the old farts joins the meeting, we know that beautiful sound that slices thru all mosquitoes in the area is coming. But all too soon someone walks through the procedure for turning off the microphone. If we could have it for another 10 minutes without automatically detecting it like almost any other software from the 90’s would, that would be sweet!
? You can just mute someone in the call if they can’t find the button, which is literally in the top right of the screen, right next to the share and leave buttons.
Maybe my experience is different because I use Teams exclusively on my work Mac, but it tends to work better for calls than anything else I’ve used (Zoom, Slack, Google Meet). I’ve literally never had issues in my end with the desktop app. Maybe the webapp is different?
That said, I hate teams. The chat function sucks, especially when trying to post code snippets, or really any form of formatted text. And for some reason, some of our business-y types refuse to use Slack, so I’m stuck having to deal with two separate chat systems at work. But the video has pretty much never given me problems.
When something is both universally hated and almost always chosen above less hated competitors, that’s usually a sign that there’s some kind of market failure. Maybe it’s anticompetitive conduct by the provider (like Microsoft using its market power on Outlook/Exchange to push other services like Teams over its competition), or a principal-agent problem (like the person paying for Teams not actually having to live with most of the shittiness).
And also all of their competition also kinda sucks. So like, Teams is worse enough that if you’re using it every day you’ll hate it but not worse enough that if you use it once or twice you’ll notice.
It’s as simple as this really. It’s included therefore a subscribing company can just not renew a slack, Zoom, or whatever contract and say “hey we saved money”
They actually just decoupled teams from o365 in preparation for this exact situation. As of April 30th you no longer get teams with your tenant skus anymore unless you are grandfathered in to the older skus that bundled it.
Maybe it’s anticompetitive conduct by the provider (like Microsoft using its market power on Outlook/Exchange to push other services like Teams over its competition)
That’s exactly what it is. They leveraged their dominance/monopoly in one market to gain a stranglehold on another market. It’s not exactly a new tactic for Microsoft either.
Not trying to simp for TEAMS, but what issues are people having? Every now and then I have to go in and change mic and speakers back to laptop, presumably from some update our IT deployed.
Other than that and wanting it to show on MY screen when I’m transmitting sound, I can’t think of any improvements. Works better than the conference calls we used to have.
how resource heavy and slow for what it is, how notifications break a lot of the time, how obtuse and unintuitive it usually is to do some simple stuff like sharing meetings and how everything thats not an absolute core feature will glitch out 8 times out of 10.
i’m sure some of these were fixed while they broke other stuff, they fuck around with it all the time. im thankfully not being forced to use it for a while right now.
We used Teams at the last org I worked at, we rarely had issues. The UI wasn’t bad in my eyes, we had integrated our phone system into teams too. Calling someone on the other side of the country via teams was simple.
Admittedly the service did get worse before I left and there were a couple of Microsoft outages which cut all our text based communications for a day (phone system still worked)
I’m using slack right now but would prefer something self-hosted but that’s well out of the scope of the current mob I’m with.
Eh, it works pretty well in our org. We use it for almost all of our meetings, and we have pretty much no issues. Then again, our entire team is on macOS and we have it integrated at the corporate level (so meeting rooms and whatnot use it), and it’s a pretty solid experience.
My main complaints are:
chats absolutely suck
seems to use a bunch of resources
people we interview seem to have issues (I’m guessing the webapp sucks?)
We use Slack for text communication and impromptu video chats, so the chat issues don’t bother me all that much.
On macOS, with virtual desktops, it steals focus even on the desktop that it is not in! If I pick an empty desktop from Mission Control, then Finder should be the app with focus. J. F! C!! No other app fucks it up this badly. This also means I can never ever use command+tab to go back to the Teams window because it thinks that window is already showing. So every time I need to go back to view Teams, I need to go to Mission Control and go back to the desktop where it is really showing. Fuck! You! Microsoft!
Oh! When typing a message it underlines misspelled words but doesn’t do autocorrect or even suggestions. It just sits there staring at you. So you have to double click the word and retype the whole thing and hope you spell it right this time. J! F! C! Again, no other app integrates with macOS dictionary this poorly.
During screen sharing it puts a control bar across the top center of the screen which blocks 75% of the menu bar of the main running app in full screen. With no way to dismiss it early. I just have to sit there fuming for 300 seconds at the start of every screen share until it goes away.
We use 2FA, and the integration is miserable. It literally never has a clean login. The app always starts with an error banner about some unknown problem and there is a button to take some action. But what you don’t know is that in the background it is doing something for like 300 seconds quietly without telling you and when it is done then it will pop the beginning of 2FA. But also, if you are a damned fool and press that action button, it starts the whole secret process over again. You could probably enter an infinite loop of pressing the button and never being able to log in. And don’t tell me it’s our 2FA system because all the other apps work fine with it.
All I want are badges. This is asynchronous communications. When I reach a pause point I will check Teams for any new messages. But it won’t badge the app icon. So … oh fuck it! Spent too much time on this reply all ready
Have you been forced to use “New Teams” that loves to close itself randomly throughout the day and also doesn’t allow you to pin it to the taskbar even though the option is there and selectable? It also has a permanent “Update” button at the top of the window that nags you to update but when you select it, it tells you that you’re running a newer version than what’s available.
Mine decided that starting with Windows was like spitting in a baby’s eye and disabled it for everyone, now I have to remember to turn it on or write a batch file but I’d rather not because Teams is fuckered
My main gripe is that the web version only asks that once it spent ages loading the old version… And it’s not even a choice because I already switched on desktop. Can’t you just load the fucking new version to begin with?
But then Microsoft can’t say that people are opting to move from Teams to New Teams, and show how amazing the people think New Teams is. I don’t know if that’s why they’re doing it that way, but it feels like that.
I can’t say I’ve run into those issues with the new teams. Worst I’ve experienced is the app freezing during a call, which has happened twice in the last year or so.
Coming from a Slack office is pretty damn painful when you get tossed into Teams. The lack of chat organization and chat threads is painful.
Microsoft also moves at a glacial pace. Terrible bugs float around in their products for months / years. That company doesn’t know how to ship stuff anymore. All they do is reorg product and engineering teams every 6 months, then wonder why they can ship anything on time on time.
That may be, but I’m not sure that’s a problem for a communication platform. I remember one time when they moved the share screen button around and some less tech savvy users thought the feature was removed!
Teams has something like chat threads too. E.g. you can reply to a message in a channel and it groups all replies, and you can also focus that thread if you want. But I agree it isn’t hidden “off the main topic” quite like slack threads.
At the end of the day, slack simply has a larger feature set and more options for organizing and staying engaged with conversations. Almost everyone who has clocked in significant time and Teams and Slack will tell you that.
And, unfortunately, Microsoft moves so damn slow, and prioritizes such weird crap, that they can’t seem to get some of the basics implemented.
We use both: Teams for meetings, Slack for everything else. Slack sucks for meetings IMO, and Teams sucks for chat. We have to use Teams due to corporate (all the meeting rooms are integrated with it, all corporate meetings use it, etc), and we picked Slack because it sucks less.
Agreed. If I have to pick, I’m going with the OG Slack + Zoom combo. Only problem is that recordings and meeting chat are not integrated. But, honestly, I’ll gladly give up that one feature if it means I get the mountains of other stuff. Also, when meeting chats aren’t saved, they become a lot more lively. People know the chats aren’t going to clutter up any important meeting notes.
Someone should face jail time for this piece of crap that I can’t opt out of.
And OneDrive as well. That piece of shit installed itself as the default save as location, and after removing it from my system, the save as dialogue now hangs for 20 seconds. And the policy to remove OD as a save location doesn’t work whatsoever.
Am I taking crazy pills? Discord and Slack suck just as much imo. They are all a shitty web app repackaged for the desktop. And they are all fine, barely anything to chose betweem them. Teams is probably the best as the calendar integration with outlook and hosting ad-hoc drop in meetings in a room is good, no really, the virtual office is fantastic for pairing and team work.
IM peaked with IRC though, the simplicity was excellent, Matrix the closest thing to it imo. I do wish more stuff integrated with it to offer the same business experience as teams
Yeah they are shit, but aren’t forced down your throat by the OS.
I hate teams with a passion. As long as you have to work with more than one organization, nothing works whatsoever. You are constantly logged out, have to go through their stupid authenticator app, can’t save a second login (only a private one, not an organization), links open in the wrong org (even if you are logged in), etc. etc.
I’ve reached the point where I use teams exclusively in Edge, alongside with Outlook, because both of their desktop apps are utter crap.
I literally have Gmail connected into Outlook at work because of how much better it is than the shitty way that Gmail deals with long threads of emails, emails with attachments, and just finding old emails in general. GSuite in general is just hot trash compared to proper Office.
Gsuite workflow is terrible. You can’t copy paste files in drive because fuck you.
Gmail chat takes forever to load. And when it loads, it defaults to search contact. So if in the meantime, you pressed the contact you want already because it takes 5 seconds to load, it goes back to the search contact.
You need to have 5 different tabs to work within the ecosystem.
Google docs is dogshit. At this point, I prefer markdown with a latex converter over Google docs.
No desktop clients for their services.
The Gdrive shared with me vs your drive is terrible.
The only thing worse is New Outlook. They took away all of the power features and a good deal of the customization, and so you are left with something that feels like it was designed for a mobile app while you try to manage thousands of emails.
I probably wouldn’t have either of my CISO didn’t have to deal with it (and bitched at me to try to find a fix) because new outlook is just the shit mail app with a fresh coat of paint.
They’ll have to take old outlook out of my cold dead hands.
IT here: you’re all insane. Outlook is a dumpster fire, Outlook for Mac is a slightly prettier dumpster fire. The idea of locally syncing emails in 2024 is laughable, a web browser is exactly where you should view your emails.
IT here: you’re right about Outlook being junk, but I disagree with your current year argument. What’s laughable about having your emails synced locally?
If your company doesn’t pay up or there is a failure with the processing, you would still have all your mails locally instead of your cloud provider deleting them all plus all backups.
its clear that eventually all the office apps will be web apps in either your browser or their own individual chromium instances. At least it means Linux users will finally get Microsoft office 🙃
Big-time disagree. Been using Windows and Mac versions of Office for over two decades. The Windows version is far superior in pretty much every metric I can think of.
No way. I just switched to a Mac at work And I love the lack of integration with OneDrive, 365, etc. office on Mac is better because it hasn’t been made worse yet like the windows versions.
Recently a LOT of my emails with hotmail have been getting blocked at the server level, they arent even reaching my junk mail, which makes troubleshooting why I’m not getting emails a nightmare, ESPECIALLY in this day and age if 2fA
New Outlook is just the old Windows Mail application reskinned. The fact that you can have both Outlook and NEW Outlook installed at the same time is weird. Working in IT, its one thing I check when working with end users.
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