My boss has gotten to the point of "As Ashe would say, fucking Microsoft"
Let's not forget the endless name changes, 404'd documentation that points to non existent tools all of the time, the GUI that barely works. Always an adventure
I despise these blurred backgrounds. I understand if you use it when working from home and don't have a dedicated office, but so many people do it even when they're at the corporate office. The flickering is just super annoying.
Beats WebEx. I contracted at Cisco after they had bought WebEx and the dev teams had to stagger their scrums in the morning because WebEx infra couldn't support all the meetings at once.
Actually we just finished our switch from Skype to Teams and honestly, as much as I love having GIFs to express my disdain for work, at least Skype could group chats, didn't require all the RAM in the world, and automatically saved chats which, in a records management hellscape was an absolute lifesaver. Also my headphones would automatically answer a call when I put them on my head but I have a feeling that has more to do with the settings than anything else.
Also I'm tired of having to tell people "no we can't do that because Microsoft hasn't integrated that very valuable and highly requested feature you're asking for"
Just transitioned from a Google + slack company to a Microsoft account company.
I asked if we put our email accounts on our phones to be able to answer after hours, my supervisor said very few people are given access to emails on their phones.
I am fine with the switch, I used to get 40-60 emails to sort through a day. Now I will be doing maybe 5-10 a day and only 3 or 4 might actually be for me and I only have an 8 hour day with no after hours meetings.
I've had a company require employees to install MDM on personal phones (remote control/management) to be allowed to use them for 2fa app or email access.. there was a surprised Pikachu when I refused. Eventually they issued me a company phone, because it was impossible to do most tasks without 2fa. That device was on 9 to 5 only.
I have an MDM on my work phone and I can't even access PlayStore anymore. It only allows Company Allowed Apps which is to say nothing. YouTube is broken because MDM somehow controls my DNS records. Firefox cannot be installed so Ads everywhere. Chrome only and it can only go to approved websites because Yahoo is safe but Ars Technica is not???
Why would anyone want that on a device they pay for?
Oh man, screw that! I don't even like having my company machine on the same VLAN as my personal ones when I'm WFH. The thought of installing MDM on my personal phone makes my skin crawl.
They must have some intense data retention policies. You can configure compliance levels to allow anyone into their Outlook acct using the app without any special permissions pretty easily.
My particular company emails contain privilege information and there is absolutely zero trust in letting smart phones aka roaming data leaks anywhere near that.
Yeah, channel management is super important. It's useful to have a full featured chat client that can integrate into other systems, but it's important to know what the limitations are. We use Slack for internal chat only (no customers) and it works pretty well for our use case but with all the integrations available it could easily get out of hand if we let more people manage it.
IMHO, you need to know how to admin a good slack workplace. Properly setup workflows, bots and plugins can proactively funnel a lot of people toward the correct intake and resolution systems. You also need to train people on best practices, and revisit that training so bad habits don’t set in.
Training + automation are kind of required to make any communication platform effective.
Uhm... Have you considered that slack has cat picture plugins?
And meme plugins, and 30 other plugins that look for keywords then spam gifs for what you assume can only be an in joke before your time?
Oh, and one of the plugins actually creates tickets from chat, but jira is down and the guy who maintains it is busy writing a panda facts plug-in. So now it just vomits out an error message so everyone avoids the words "ticket", "issue", and "status"
"I am very busy and have my work day planned to work efficiently, so I won't be handling your request immediately. This means things can slip through cracks if there is no ticked describing the task created - create one if what you are asking for is of any importance."
Followed by not doing anything that doesn't have a ticket and didn't come directly from people you report to.
Also I have notifications disabled and only check slack between tasks or if I take a breather from a task - on average 4-5 times a day. I also check email as the first and last thing in a workday only
I don't particularly like the UI, but I haven't had any Issue with teams ever tbh. It even worked on Firefox with uBlock, NoScript (ofc allowing like one or two domains for it) and VPN. For me, Office in general just works most of the time. I would never use it for private stuff, let alone pay hundreds for it, but for work it's more than fine.
Except Outlook. Holy fuck, how is such a central application such a pile of steaming garbage? It has the worst UI/UX I have ever seen in any mail client by far.
Same. Teams isn't exactly good, but it works pretty okayish most of the time. I absolutely don't get the love for slack, it seems to be more like an "I use Arch, BTW" thing.
Outlook is a fucking mess. I wanted to search for a keyword in a long-ass email yesterday, so of course I did ^F, like a normal person would. That opened the dialog to write and send a reply??? Why???
And web browser outlook having no keyboard shortcuts whatsoever is fucking criminal.
I'm forced to have two separate Outlook accounts, I quite literally can not use both accounts on the same computer without getting stuck in a neigh inescapable login loop from hell.
If your job has Office365 access, use the web version of Outlook. You can open multiple accounts in separate tabs and the interface isn't from 1995. I have multiple boxes I have to run and this saved me from having to constantly log in and log out of Outlook.
I'm a software consultant and juggle multiple accounts without issue in Outlook. Whenever the authentication expires I have to sign in again in a bunch of places, but that only happens once a month.
But I also harp a lot to my superiors about donating to open-source projects we utilize, make loads of money thanks to them, yet never give anything back.
I kinda get that some projects with limited backing can't "get their shit together", when successful users don't give them anything. It's a stupid pattern, and I hope we can break it.
That's the dumbest fucking part of teams, half of the problems that make people hate it are simple dumb shit like this that just prove they, like every other fucking company, prioritize business facing improvements, to the detriment of any user level improvement. IM LOOKING AT YOU AUTODESK!
I have so many issues using Teams with a normal headset. I went into sound settings, and turned off exclusive access to the device.
I disabled communication devices. I turned off the sync buttons setting in Teams.
Yet Teams still loves to randomly unmute my mic even when it's muted from the PHYSICAL button. Makes no sense
You probably can. The issue is that most bt headsets mount themselves as a pair of stereo headphones, and a handsfree kit. And for some weird reason Teams will ONLY EVER broadcast audio to the handsfree kit. If you change the volume control to the handsfree kit, blam, you can change the volume.
It isn't just teams. That's how the hardware is implemented and it also means that you cannot have high quality audio and use the mic at the same time. It's actually Windows, not the bt device or the app.
Legacy decisions that keep getting carried forward
I figured out you can disable Bluetooth telephony services if you navigate deep into the printers and other devices control panel. But this might also disable the mic. I'm not able to test it right now.
Microsoft actively hates its users. Why are all of the keyboard shortcuts in the most inconvenient place possible? Why does Outlook not mark mail as read/unread in an intuitive way? Why does Teams schedule send require one tap on mobile but two clicks on desktop? Also this isn’t even the thread to get into whatever tf is going on with LinkedIn. Planting seeds and harvesting crops was a mistake.
We were forcibly moved from Mattermost to Teams (because cost) and the lack of custom emotes is sorely felt throughout the company. I never counted, but I wouldn't have been at all surprised if we'd had >100 of them. So many in-jokes gone forever.
I don't know if I could deal with this bullshit. I work at such a small office we don't do anything but calls, faxes, and shitloads of emails. The odd side text sometimes. Adding a whole chat space thing where I'm constantly on the hook for a reply would do my head in.