Why do you hate Teams/Why is Teams despised?
Why do you hate Teams/Why is Teams despised?
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)
Its super slow, one of the biggest misuses of electron I have seen. The website unironically works better than than the app. It seems to subtly break in weird ways every new release. Reactions are notifications. And the whole old/new teams thing causes a whole lot of confusion.
Yeah, this one and the same crap for the Outlook 365 stuff. So we can currently decide if we want to try the new Outlook, which removes a bunch of features I use, or just not switch to the new Outlook.
You would think the "old" Outlook then stays the same until we are forced to switch, but no, recently they changed the whole look of it somehow. I thought I got the update to new Outlook now by force but actually it is still the old Outlook, soooo, what?
Lmfao New Microsoft Teams or Microsoft Teams New, which would you prefer?
Okay, this I can explain. New Microsoft Teams is the new app. It was also installed before the person installed the old Teams. "Microsoft Teams New" is actually just "Microsoft Teams". The "new" is part of the Windows UI, not the name. It just denotes that it's a new option for opening "msteams" links. It's a new option because it was recently installed. The real solution to this is just don't install two different Teams clients. The old one is actually retired now so that's not an option and it's a solved issue.
Reactions are notifications.
This alone is why Teams needs to burn.
Honestly, the "View meeting chat notifications" not being globally mutable needs to fucking die. Our company uses Slack & Teams so the text chats in teams are never relevant to fucking anyone.
Also, super invase. Every damn start it tells me "features" that are obvious, no one cares about and I've seen already.
Reactions are notifications only by default, you can go turn those off in the settings. Easy enough.
Why is teams terrible?
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Why can I see multiple calendars in outlook but only see my calendar in teams? How does that make it useful to schedule team meetings?
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Why are updates always available even though I just updated?
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Why can I only pin one post in a group chat?
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Why does teams always use its own audio settings over the system settings?
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Why haven’t they implemented proper push to talk?
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Why is it that every few updates one of my meeting members randomly gets muted?
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Why does “Meet Now” basically accomplish what a group call does but the notifications don’t really go out?
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Why do I need to”Apps” in my teams?
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After my call hangs up because the phone app is having issues, how come the other person could still see and hear me?
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Why do you assume I want to use onedrive?
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Why can’t my favorites also appear in chats in a chronological order?
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Why is @everyone even a feature? This isn’t discord.
- Why is the agenda of a meeting not visible in the mini-view of the meeting. Why do I need to click into the meeting details to see the agenda (which is often just a SharePoint link for most meetings).
Heads up, you can see multiple calendars at the same time. The apps thing is interesting because you can embed things like PBI dashboards into a channel, making it easy for everyone to access. It is possible that the configuration at your work is preventing these things. But even when properly configured, everything is just 16 easy clicks away. Ugg.
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You can see other people's calendars in Teams, just click "schedule meeting" and use the scheduling assistant just like you would in outlook. If you're looking at calendars manually before booking meetings you're doing it wrong to start with.
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They aren't.
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To prevent stupid people pinning so many messages that the feature becomes useless.
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Because the system settings are usually not what you want, most people don't leave their headset on all day and only pick it up for calls.
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What's wrong with Ctrl+Spacebar? I use it all the time
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Why are updates happening during your meetings? How would that even work?
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I'll agree with this one, meet now isn't useful. Just call the person.
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Because teams is a Communications AND Collaboration tool, if you're only using it for communication you're clearly haven't taken any sort of training on how to use it properly or you'd be using the apps all the time.
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Never had this happen
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I agree with this one, I hate OneDrive, it's bad data governance. Everything should live in a shared space at work.
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If you have so many favorites that it's an issue, you're doing it wrong. See #3.
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Because some types of organizations use this frequently, just because a feature doesn't apply to your work situation doesn't mean it doesn't apply to others.
Edit: Oof, people don't like to have it pointed out that they lack education do they?
- I have literally three people on my team. It is more efficient to have three people's calendars up and just create a meeting for the open space. Why would I do something that is LESS efficient because that's how teams wants me to work?
- I'm glad that you can agree that there aren't always updates. Could you pleaes explain why, then, there has been an "Updates available" button on my teams for three weeks even after I press it?
- OK. There are again, three people on my team. Also, maybe don't form chats with stupid people?
- Nobody in my organization uses a headset. Ever. We use bluetooth headphones.
- Because i'd like to set my own shortcut like literally every other voice application?
- There are not updates in my meeting. Every few updates of the application, when I am on a call with team members, someone randomly gets muted through no action of anyone in the call.
- I've tried to use the collabration tools. They aren't that useful. OneNote is more useful. I understand if you are forced to use it because you don't have more efficient methods of collaboration. But I do. So, again, why would I choose a less efficient way of collaboration?
- Yes, it's a bug.
- Why do you think I have too many favorites? I have 5.
- The exact opposite arguement can be used for so many of your replies.
- Because the system settings are usually not what you want, most people don't leave their headset on all day and only pick it up for calls.
So this is where I think you may be misunderstanding system settings, because the system device can switch automatically when a headset is connected. Teams does not.
If I am at my home office, I don't bother with a headset, I use the built in speaker and mic of my laptop. At work, though, when I don't want to broadcast my meetings out to everyone, I connect my Bluetooth earbuds. So I connect those, my system knows to automatically change my audio device, I connect to a Teams call, and...the audio is still coming out of my speakers.
No other application on my PC works like this. Zoom works fine. Discord works fine. Like Teams, those sorts of apps have in-app selections for audio device, but unlike Teams they have the courtesy to include a "use system default" option.
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You can look at a post, even click into it, but the notification will not clear until you leave for another page and go back
This makes me want to scream, daily. Holy hell please just mark as read when I open it, same for Outlook
My workplace used g suite then got acquired and spent six painful as fuck months transitioning to SharePoint and teams.
Half the shit in teams doesn't work and I'm still bitter about wasting time transitioning. My favorite three current issues.
From the SharePoint homepage there's a nice little search bar, you can type in your query and get literal garbage back. If you click "search more" to get it to stop being a modal window then the search results are accurate - Teams does this shit all the time... stuff that should be the same everywhere is just randomly implemented differently on different pages.
I currently have a little error bar in Teams - it says the web view version of edge is incorrect for this version of teams. If I click it (and there's little motivation for me to do so since everything seems to be working) then it opens a pane to a web page, redirects half a dozen times, then lands on a page that says "You already have this version installed". The next time I open teams the error is back.
If someone links to a SharePoint document in a teams chat I'll often get a "You need to be signed in" link unfurling and hovering over the link yields the same message. If I click on the link it'll realize I'm signed in and stop showing that error for a while. Please bear in mind that my teams account and SharePoint account are theoretically the same account. I have the same username and password to enter into both services and can't update information for them independently... if on Microsofts backend if they're technically different accounts then I, as the user, should never fucking know that. Fix your shit.
Bonus one for privacy. If you're in a meeting and muted Teams still demands mic access. If you haven't unplugged your mic or triggered a hardwareish switch then Microsoft is still listening to you... services usually keep listening so that's not super different. But Microsoft actually exposes that it's still listening! If you or someone else has auto-captioning turned on then the autocaptions may capture and transcribe your speech when you're muted.
I was very amused to read about my coworker watching an oblivion lore video when we broke for lunch in a day long meeting last week.
Teams just fucking sucks at everything, there's nothing they do that most of their competitors all do at least as good.
For the web view one, I was told by IT that it was my fault I’d updated Teams, they had to go into windows add remove programs and update edge web view manually… but I have no recollection of this …and even theoretically if I did, how does an entirely ms stack get into this state except through Teams being a shitty citizen
How dare you update a self updating web wrapper!
If I want to copy a text message, I have to avoid the emoji pop-up, then very carefully click and drag over the text, making sure I don't also copy the user name. Then I have to paste it in Notepad to edit out any weird hidden characters. Copy it again and paste it.
If I want to send a reaction emoji, it's just a clock away.
Who the hell designed this abomination?
You reminded me how Teams defaults to emoji when typing too.
I’ve had times where I’m making a point like “ Here is a point (here is context): “ and Teams will turn that last ): to a sad face emoji….
It’s been a while since I’ve encountered that, but I had no idea how to undo it and it irritates me that they default to emojis over grammar for a work-first application.
If you double click on a message it will highlight everything (including the name and emoji crap)
If you triple click it will only highlight the single line or paragraph.
What annoys me is that they seem to just ignore any requests to fix things that are broken. For instance, I don't want to see everyone's incoming video by default. I have to turn it off for. Every. Single. Meeting.
And I'm hardly the only one. Here is an example of someone asking for this, back in 2020:
I suspect that Microsoft views Teams users as basically hostages since it's often something forced onto a big user base at many companies. If you hate it? Too bad: if you want to stay employed, you'll just use it.
Microsoft is awful at that... and that's why my windows machines are all on 10 - for some reason (to general objections) Windows 11 doesn't let you dock the Taskbar to the side of the screen. I usually use two monitor setup for working and I demand the right to lock the Taskbar on the border between my two screens.
Also, they're bundling AI slop into everyone and nobody likes any of it.
Compared to skype, irc, slack, xmpp, and any other chat/phone software I've used its unreliable spyware.
Spyware in that it's used to force idle status used by middle managers to make assumptions about when and how you work.
Unreliable in that it stops showing system tray message status when it updates without alert, using vdi/Bluetooth headsets are a crap shoot if audio will work or not, and destroys history by allowing corpo policy to remove messages after X days.
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.
My company dropped Slack for Teams, because it’s free with the Office subscription, so I guess they put a price on collaboration and culture. Weeks on none of the bots and integrations work properly because there’s no time to fix shit that was already working.
Today, this morning:
It wouldn't let me into my morning meeting, it glitched out with jumping ellipses. I quit the program then when I tried to relaunch it went into a cycle of starting then immediately crash. This went on for two minutes before I restarted the computer. After restarting the computer then relaunched Teams it proceeded to crash/start four times before loading so I can attend my meeting.
This kind of stuff is habitual. I now set alarms five minutes before meetings so I have enough time to press a button.
Bad UI/UX.
When I screenshare code with my colleages, the 1 fps can be irritating. You miss subtle editing, scrolling, etc in those 1 s.
I can ignore most other things. We only use it for online meetings and screen sharing.
Which makes the new apparent calendar and appointment integration somewhat irritating. Microsoft loves to push their shit.
1fps?
It defaults to 30fps, so if you're getting 1fps there's a different problem going on like a lack of internet bandwidth or a slow computer. This is not a fault of teams.
I deliver day-long training sessions via screenshare all the time and have no issues with people not being able to see my screen and my cursor moving around just fine.
You're right, it can't be 1 fps. Maybe 10? I'll have to check next time.
Because in terms of features/usability it was a downgrade from Skype for Business for my usage.
Sorting the contacts was better in Skype and I was able to have the window as a narrow strip on the leftmost screen, for showing the status of all team members. Teams doesn't allow resizing freely.
When watching a screen share of somebody, Teams has a lot of unnecessary unhidable UI elements that just take up space. For the ones that you can hide there is no setting to have it that way by default, and there are also no shortcuts for them.
Also screen sharing was quite laggy right after switching from Skype, but that might have been an internal IT problem, not sure. But it didn't help make Teams more popular anyhow.
Screen sharing is still shitty.
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!
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!
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
Microsoft doesn't ACTUALLY care about teams so it's a nonstop bad UX, then they try to fix it, then they go a different direction, and so on. To Microsoft, its an add on that they mostly use to keep people away from Slack. When they spend time on it, all they are doing is enough to keep people away from Slack.
Its been like, what, 2 years there they've shipped a "new" client seperate from the existing client (at least on macOS)? People are constantly using the wrong one or switching when one breaks, and Microsoft constantly breaks the new one.
On windows the existence of the built-in "Teams" App is constantly confusing when people are trying to sign into a work account, which requires a different client. This is because the "Teams" App in Windows is just a rebadged Skype.
Before 2022 when I used it for some meetings (we used slack in our unit since we had some of our own budget, but the wider corp was on teams) it was a daily toss up as to whether video calls would work on macos or linux.
Most of my frustrations come from having to develop some integrations with teams:
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Right now there's a massive bug for the templating language to render cards in the UI and Microsoft's answer has largely been a big shoulder shrug.
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There are several really easy ways an admin can break a custom integration via azure. Obviously an app-based integration is better, but it's also really common in b2b to have more ad-hoc setups to send some data to teams. Even better, lots of small/medium companies have been convinced that they don't need IT people to help them with their Azure configuration, so no one ever knows how to solve any problems they create (this also applies to email fwiw... Unbelievable how many small/medium O365 customers have very broken email servers)
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Microsoft's implementation of federation between O365 users is a mess of tiered settings, and figuring our if rhe issue is on the business side or your side is a sysiphean task. If you are in an org which doesn't have a domain hooked up to your setup (as in you use
[email protected]) there is a very specific sign in page you have to use or it'll blow up on you. And it's not the generic sign in page you get when going to teams or O364's web site.
Tl:dr; Teams is a hacked together mess of bubble gum and toothpicks masquerading as a chat app. Its a miracle ir works as well as it does for "normal" usage, but it's a joke compared to Slack in every other way and quickly becomes a nightmare if you are working on integrations with it.
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It demands too much screen space. you can't rum less than full screen without losing important things. Even full screen I often can' see the presentation clearly because it shrunk the presentation in favor of avitars / videos of other people.
now that I'm old I cannot see tiny text like I used to. I thus get really mad at useless spate while I'm strurgling to read the presentation. you will understand when you turn 45 too.
Can I tack on that whoever decided that minimizing teams should make it into a tiny fucking window with a confusingly labeled button to make it big again should fucking die? I loathe apps that minimize to tray or minimize to some bullshit always on top pop-up (unless there's a clear setting to control that behavior - then whatever, we have different preferences but it's fine).
This is actually a problem with a lack of presenter training, not technology.
When presenting slides, text should be formatted for mild vision impairment. When screen sharing, you should either lower the resolution of your screen, or share only a single app and make it not take up your full monitor, or boost your text size.
In your case, even if Teams allowed it go properly full screen it may be enough for your needs, but there are people who it would not be. There are people who operate "zoomed in" all the time on a PC due to their vision impairments. Catering to these people makes content accessible to everyone.
The other big part of this is colour/contrast choices, since those are also common vision impairments.
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!
To me Teams pretty much represents one of Microsoft's aggravating mortal sins.
Teams got popular. More due to the circumstances than the inherent quality of the app. And once entrenched, Microsoft did what they always do in situations like this. Jack squat.
This could have been a start of a beautiful new era! Strike the iron while it's hot! Show what the money, resources and the technical know-how at Microsoft's disposal could do! Fix all of the failings of Skype tech, and really polish up the app! Did Microsoft do that? Naaah. It's a mediocre app with brand new jank! That's its destiny now.
Yeah, when they rolled it out, I thought they decided to ship an alpha build, to get ahead of COVID, and they'd finish implementing it over the next half year. Then they just didn't.
I also remember like a year ago or so, they made a big fuzz about rolling out Teams v2, with a button to go back to v1 and all that. And I still remember when it loaded into v2 the first time, it threw up a loading screen and then... it looked exactly the same as before.
Well, except for that loading screen, that now shows up every time you refresh.
I’m going to come from a different angle.
I spent 20 years in IT before Teams and now work for a government agency in health care.
My IT side says that teams is just OK like its competitors. It’s not great, but it’s not horrible either. It does the job and some of the annoyances are probably due to the demographic using it - people who don’t care for tech nor the meeting.
My employee side doesn’t see a technical deficit in Teams that isn’t in Zoom or whatever, but holy shit does M$ turn their product to shit by buzzword. Teams this. Teams that. Hit me on Teams.
So yeah. IMHO Teams is bad for the same reason Office is bad. Technically OK, bloated, and catering to the managers.
Sysadmin for a living here - Teams breaks constantly in our office. Multiple people report issues with Teams not starting or not functioning properly on a weekly basis.
This is true for Windows 11 as a whole, truthfully. Windows 11 can eat my ass for many reasons.
To me, Microsoft's entire transition to web technologies is a self inflicted wound. Going native is a massive performance win. They already had that, and went the other way. Just, Why!? Now, Microsoft software is all big, bloated, and slow as fuck. Even the OS. They were literally bragging about a 9 second start up time after some optimizations to Teams. They don't even know what efficiency is anymore. We all essentially have super computers, now, but sure, congrats on your 9 second load time for a fuckin chat program.
microsoft publisher used to open faster than that on my 1995 pentium, on spinning rust of the time...
The first time I saw excel open in a web browser, I was impressed that they managed to get it running in a web browser but also appalled that they wanted to get it running in a web browser for actually using it in a web browser instead of just for the novelty, like running doom on anything with a cpu and display.
First thing I do whenever a document opens on the browser version is click the buttons to open it in the native app if I intend to edit it.
They made it shitty to try to justify making it a subscription.
Because it's run by Microsoft, which is now a Big Data player. They use Teams to "monetize" your company's data and train their AI on it without your company's consent. They use Teams to collect data on employees who don't have a choice because they need a job to put food on the table, like real name, photo and phone number.
If you don't want to give any data to Microsoft, too bad: your employer forces it on you. Don't like it? Your only option is to resign. That's the most egregious aspect of Teams - and Office 365, and all business-oriented Microsoft data honeypots: they use employers to collect data on employees who don't have any say about it.
Anything you do at work while being paid isn't yours, you're being paid for your time and effort and the company owns that. Any data collected isn't really about "you" as a person, so it's irrelevant to you in the long-term.
My identify, my photo, my address are mine. I never wanted to share any of that with Microsoft. Thanks to my employer, I have to.
Likewise, I don't want to Microsoft to know my salary, or how many sick days I take due to my disability. Thanks to my employer, Microsoft knows all about me, and I don't want Microsoft to know anything about me.
The work data I produce at work belongs to my employer. If my employer is foolish enough to share it with Microsoft, it's their problem - although arguably, if that ever jeopardizes my company's ability to win contracts on the markets it operates in because Microsoft has insider knowledge and undercuts it, and my company does less well as a result, then it becomes my problem. But I'm forced to share my personal data because my employer decided without my consent to share it with Microsoft.
Lets see, half my team randomly doesent recieve notifications/get notification audio at times. Sometimes youll get a notification that theres a new message in a channel but it doesent show up until you restart teams. Today specifically my mute button was desynced with the application mute and inverted. Sometimes audio devices wont work at all first time you join a meeting until you replug the audio devices (not an os wide issue) the status icon has a mind of its own and will say people are away or completely not available even when they are actively using the computer theres also no way AS ADMINISTRATOR to change how the icon behaves. Only Microsoft is allowed to dictate that. Not nearly enough controls as admin to define visibility in things like timeoff requests, shifts, etc. Instead of having a simple notes tab you have to use some form of OneNote shoved into the software which slows it down, overcomplicates it and sometimes wont even sync changes. Theres more thats just off the top of my head
About 30% of the time I simply cannot transfer calls, the dialog bugs out and either won't allow me to type or won't accept the number. Not reliably able to be reproduced and restarting Teams fixes it. Done all the troubleshooting including device resets and no permanent fix found yet.
This sort of random unreliability seems extremely prevalent among all of Microsoft's products. Hell just today we couldn't do email remediation through the MS Security portal, had to do an old school investigation. 'The actions failed. Please try again later.' No details or explanation and they didn't show in the action logs either.
Microsoft products are hell to work with on an organization level.
Mobile notifications are a joke. When I’m not working I want to hear from one single emergency channel, it’s my time, not work’s. But even with all itifs but that one channel set I get pinged for every single reply in every team
Fucking this so much.
There’s an outage but it’s not my week. How about I only get notified if someone tags me instead of getting 50 notifications in the middle of the night that have nothing to do with me??
Recently, it seems that whenever I go on lunch, that is when people decide to start spamming the group chats. Really fun trying to watch a video or listen to music on my phone and have to be spammed with those notifications.
And the best I can do, as far as I know on my iPhone, is to swipe the notification and block for an hour or block for the day. But there lies the problem…if someone needs to ping me, then I miss out on that notification..
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.
Every day it fucks my login token. Takes a while to load, then shows me my DMs but with a little "login problem sign in again" at the top (WHILE LOOKING AT MY DMS)
So I click sign in in the toast. It takes forever. I'm now 1 minute late for standup.
I do not have to log in. I do not have to reauthenticate or MFA. I just click the button and it logs me in again.
WHICH IT COULD HAVE JUST DONE ON PAGE LOAD FOR FUCKS SAKE.
The behind the scenes logic must be atrocious.
I have a similar issue, I think it has to do with the location my computer is during the night.
I have a work laptop, when I leave the office I disconnect it from my dock and put it in my bag, it is already closed so I can just put it in my bag.
To me disconnecting the dock from a closed computer should make it go into sleep mode quickly.
But I have noticed that around 22-23 I tend to get a single MFA notification on my work phone and when I get to the office the MFA login prompt is active.
So somehow, during the night when my computer should be sleeping it is trying to login to office resources which triggers the MFA since it detects a login from a new IP/location.
Now that I write it down, I wonder if it is Windows Update that wakes my computer up and messes with everything...
Mine just sits there overnight, plugged in, connected, moisturised, worry free
Mostly tiny irksome things that cause me to have to set up for calls 10 minutes early because I’m not sure if it’s going to behave and I can’t be “late.” The latest is the window not opening on startup even though it’s running on (MacOS). Restarting resolves. Sometimes it doesn’t do it. No idea why.
Also, minor quibble but I don’t personally like that it seems to follow that annoying UI/UX “we know what’s best for you” philosophy as Gnome does where it only shows you what you “need” to see. I get it, but I’m sorta set in my ways in how I expect UIs to act. If you’re new to it, it’s especially aggravating until you’ve used it for a while.
- I have a Linux laptop that Microsoft apps seem to hate. Both Skype and teams refuse to let me share my screen (both app and web version)
- The teams app kept putting itself on startup and I had to change folder permissions to make it stop
- The whole click on link to open app thing that doesn't always work
- I'm current having issues with showing calendars but that could be on me
I know we like to hate on Google here but Google Meet is much better imo.
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
Real talk? Because it's forced on people at work and it's made by Microsoft. It certainly has its flaws but it's not the worst software in the world.
It's a mess for my team in terms of:
- someone's video isn't showing for anyone else
- someone can't see anyone else's video
- it resets my camera settings every time I restart it
- microphone settings seem to randomly break, so we always have people running off to grab backup headsets.
- it's missing thread features (like in slack) so branching discussions are a fucking mess.
- most of my team uses Linux and the screen-sharing as well as file/picture sharing rarely works right.
Before we used a combination of Slack (for text communication) and Google Meet (for video) which was much more reliable a day functional.
The screen sharing is also missing basic features every other video conferencing app has. A huge one is being able to share part of your screen. You can either share a window or an entire screen, but often I want to show multiple windows. I have a 21:9 5k2k screen, if I share my entire screen no one who is working from a laptop can see what I’m doing. Just let me share an area of the screen to share.
It has some kind of Threads, but those don't work for normal chats. It's a different kind of chat. Not a great solution by teams imo
One I'd throw in:
On Mac, it creates its own audio driver and hijacks the audio feed. That makes it hell to jump between teams and Google meets or zoom as they are constantly fighting.
From the IT side, I personally hate that 80% of the random teams issues our users have, clearing the apps cache is the only solution. An average user shouldn't need to dig around in unfamiliar directories and clear out this cache to get teams working again. From my experience, most users won't do this bc they're afraid of causing more damage (imo a smart hesitation.)
If the app can update itself can it not also refresh that cache more often? Can a button in settings not be given to users the flush cache and restart the app? (This can currently be done in Windows by going to Settings > Apps and resetting the app from the Installed Apps list, but there is no such option on Macs. It's an OS agnostic issue, we should have an OS agnostic solution.) There's got to be better ways to resolve these issues that all require the removal/refreshing of a folder's contents. I can only imagine how much of a nightmare this is to resolve within companies that don't have dedicated IT or tech savvy users to dig up these resolutions and fix the problem, especially given the often inadequate and outdated documentation Microsoft provides.
Want to use a Bluetooth headset? Roll the dice on if it will work at any point in time. 3 back to back meetings? Load the 4th and it's reset your audio to laptop speakers, or now your webcam won't work.
Teams for chat and video is generally OK but when managers start trying to do scheduling, task lists, and kanbans in it it becomes annoying in my experience. A software should have a definitive scope and not try to be an everything tool. If you want that interconnectivity then it's better to implement a standard which works with another tool that is designed for that purpose instead of tacking on a bunch of shit.
Otherwise, I end up wondering "Ok where the fuck is that scheduled meeting? Was in in outlook? Was it in the teams calendar? Was it in the teams Kanban? Was it a task list item in Teams? Was it in slack? Was it in google calendar? Oh, no, it was in ZOOM! Oh wait, fuck, I actually have a meeting with this client through SKYPE FOR BUSINESS at the same time the zoom meeting starts.... Shit."
Current pet peeve: I'm in a meeting, and I click to switch to another app to check something, then I click the Teams icon to switch back to Teams. Clearly, in this case, I want to get back to the meeting.
Instead, it shows me the calendar view. WTF, Microsoft?
Classic teams had a high contrast mode that worked very well. The background was dark and the text was bright yellow. The new version of teams also has high contrast but now the text and background are both shades of gray.
Grey on grey.
I want to meet the idiot who thought that was a good idea. Then kick ‘em in the nuts
IMHO it just tries to do everything and fails at that. It's not horrible, but not great either.
Chat and calls should be the focus, but even that is buggy. In the "teams" feature I personally have zero overview and I miss a lot of stuff. But that might be user error
It's the entitlement. On Linux, it would startup on boot, and wasn't in the settings panel that disables start on boot apps. Even Discord respects that setting, but Teams had its own startup system that I had to go purge by hand.
Startup on boot:
In Windows: cool and normal
In Linux: who the hell do you think you are?!
And I love it. Going Linux helps to focus on what you actually need, and adds so much to the peace of mind.
I've never thought about that but you're right. I basically never have anything launch at boot. I reboot my system so seldom that who cares, but I mean.
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.
I'm a Slack guy, when forced to use Teams it just always tried to get in the way of anything I wanted to do and Slack would get out of the way.
Sadly Slack are busy trying to make Slack as obnoxious as Teams.
For a counterpoint, my wife loves Teams. She uses it all day every day, and only has good things to say about it.
Despite the Hype, Slack and Teams are not direct replacements for each other.
Teams is meant to be a Communications AND Collaboration platform. Slack is meant to be a Communications platform.
I suspect your wife takes advantage of those collaboration features, and therefore finds teams to be helpful in her job. Your role may not require collaboration in the same way, or maybe you other 3rd party tools for that type of collaboration and teams is just getting in your way by duplicating things you already have a process for.
I just want to point out that you've huffed a little too much product marketing bullshit. Sure, different platforms have different capabilities but what the fuck is a collaboration platform that isn't a communication platform.
Hell, I consider github/labs/etc to mostly just be a communication platform, most of what you're doing is just ticket focused.
So, I really don't like Teams. What follows is basically an unedited stream-of-consciousness that came out of me after reading the question. I've reread it and now realize that it comes across as extremely angry and dramatic. I would not put Teams in the top 50 difficulties of my life, but I do not have much patience for incompetent software. I'm also just in a bad mood and decided to swing at Teams.
Fuck Teams' stupid fucking pseudo-markdown WYSIWYG editor. Either be markdown or don't, you fucking useless cretinous moron! If you're going to automatically insert an interactive code block when I enter a triple-backtick, then you should god damned well do the same fucking thing when I paste in a fully formed code block. (edit here) I do not want to see triple backticks, a new line, my code in a stupid non-monospace font, and then another triple backticks. I wanted a code block which is why I indicated my intention for it to be rendered as one by using the triple fucking backticks that you recognize(end edit). This is just one example, and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time I use that piece of shit chatbox.
I use Linux, which means I use Teams exclusively through the browser (they used to have an electron app for Linux but they got tired of dealing with it and deprecated it). I'd be fine with the browser thing were it not for the fact that when I type in the Teams URI, there's a 50/50 chance that I'll be sent to Teams V1 versus Teams V2. Like, why the fuck are you like this, Teams? I have clicked the god damned "take me to V2" button so many times! I think there's like, an option or something for it that I've also clicked. (edit here) I have cleared my cookies and browser data for Teams, I have completely nuked
~/.{config,cache}/google-chromefor Teams, I have installed Chrome Beta for Teams, and still the issue persists (end edit). I do not want to wait 30 fucking seconds for the V2 version of the page to load when I already waited 10-15 seconds. Don't get me started on how broken the "install this as an app" bullshit is, ugh fuck I hate it.Finally, Teams has been really great at not fucking reading my auth cookie recently. My company uses Okta for SSO, and like, fuck man, most shitty web apps seem to get it. My browser stores a JWT, it sends that shit in a cookie, some magic crypto shit happens, and boom I'm authorized. Teams is just fucking deaf to this though, and it makes me click a "sign in again" button or some shit, which then has a chance to proc the V1 vs V2 UI issue. Like, come the fuck on bro I SEE the cookie when I look at my network requests, just put the fries in the bag and stop making my life that little bit more irritating.
I hate how if you gotta work on something in an app in Teams, you can't have the chats open. Excel in Teams lacks a lot of features, though luckily you can launch in native app, but then co-operating is out the window.
Teams is an abomination of Skype for business, lynx, and SharePoint. If you have ever used any of those then you know how bad that is.
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.
Let me check that picture that my colleague sent me. Hmm alright, let's close that. Aaaand I closed Teams. Shit.
Default opening Office documents in Teams is also a pain. "Oh wait no! Don't open it in Teams!" Here you go 2 minutes wasted waiting for the doc to open so that you can close it.
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.
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.
Why does ux layout eat so much screen space? We have a channel for the team to say hello at the start of shift, the lunch/goodnight.
The UX lets you see maybe 3-4 total posts at once. That is one example, but it takes so much effort of scrolling to be sure you’ve seen everything
I hate that it doesn't have some key features, like the ability to easily annotate on the screen as a viewer. The presenter (host?) must allow it first, which for me often results in frustration as I try to guide them to the top tool bar to find it.
They also don't have custom emojis like my beloved Slack. And dear god Teams sends you a desktop notification every time someone reacts with an emoji, I disabled that quick.
I also hated how they did groups/channels, also called Teams, a name I hate (why have a feature with the same name as your product?). It was like a shitty forum board, where someone would post a topic and everyone commented underneath it, made it impossible to scroll through. They changed it recently though for a much more user friendly UI.
My favorite Teams feature is that I can mute other participants on a meeting. I can feel the Thrill course through me every time.
Can't change the main photo for a group, which is a huge oversight to me. Minor league shit.
I just want a compact contact list with status icons. Pining conversations is a shitty solution. Just give me back icq/aim/yahoo/etc
The touch UI design language is a curse on modern computers.
Teams is a webapp, just make a desktop CSS and allow us to choose.
Right click open....
In browser?
In Teams?
...
Using a kettle full of live mice?
In app (the program you installed in your computer specifically for opening these documents)?
Oh why not meet about the document from yesterday? Nah, not that one, do a search!... Okay never mind! Their search is junk. Ah well let's meet to talk about it! I can't read, can you maximize your screen so we can see and follow? Just double click here, right click here, scroll down! Push it, twist it, pull it, pipit!!!! Oh hey! We can't hear you! Can you check yorvmike"
When I first got to try it the chat didn't work. But it had a meme generator built in. So that's what I had to use for a while to send chat messages
I suspect the answer by a great many people will boil down to "because I used it [and it's shit]"
The amount of employer tracking that’s possible there makes me always feel that I’m being watched and metric’ed on my ‘productivity’
It starts using an entire core for UI work when I move my mouse (Roccat Cone Pure 2017), and becomes unresponsive. Had to get a different mouse just for this shit. At least I got my workplace to pay for it.
Support did not even try to replicate the issue, instead they wanted me to upgrade to the "New" Teams when I explicitly told them that I didn't have that option in my org.
I don't know if I hate it but it's annoying how opening links inside Teams tends to open in Teams instead of the real expected app.
It's like they want a whole OS inside of Teams.
Besides that: slack just feels better and less clunky for text chats.
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:
-
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.
-
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
-
Doubt they have fixed the issues, even if they have, don't tell me because I don't care, I will still hate them.
Because clicking on a link on mobile does not always work for whatever reason so I have to manually type in the stuff.
Because it does not work on my computer.
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...
Lately the reason that I hate it is that when I click on the channel and start typing, it starts browsing through the channel link instead of putting what I type into the channel. And it's intermittent, so much more infuriating.
I’ve only used it for a couple of interviews…it’s dead clunky and awkward to use. To be honest I thought it was a me thing.
Teams insists on reordering the sidebar based on activity — it breaks my mental focus on work tasks when I’m ALWAYS looking for the chat thread I know is there, freaking somewhere, I was reading it just 10 minutes ago
No push to talk aside from some crappy implementation that requires window focus and can't be bound to a different key. Runs like absolute ass on their own hardware which I'm required to use at work
Compared to slack’s remind me later feature Teams pretty much doesn’t have one, and the half assed one is too noisy and is hard to use
Laggy on osx
They gave us Teams at work, and somehow despite me being logged into everything else Microsoft via Citrix, it decided I couldn't use it anymore. But it adds you to meetings you don't need to be in.
I'm a loner, Dottie. A rebel.
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.
I want to use free open source software, and if I were a business customer I would certainly want my business to use free open source software when reasonable.
If all we're doing is sharing files and messaging each other, I don't know why we would need Teams. There are so many other options that work quite well.
I don't hate it, but I don't think it would typically solve my problems in ways that other software doesn't already do better.
I think it's because it's work. Its hard to have any positive feelings toward a tool used primarily to talk to annoying coworkers and bosses. It doesn't matter how good it bad it is.
I have never used teams but it's a microsoft product so it has to be bad. That's the universal constant.
I don't hate or despise teams. It's far more useful in most normal office environments to have your communication and your collaboration occur in one tool.
I think most of the people that hate it are trying to only use it for communication, usually because they received no training on how to use the collaboration parts or an unwillingness by the organization to change the way they are doing things when they got M365 licenses.
If you still have a shared network drive while you're using Teams, your organization is doing it wrong.
If you are sending attachments in e-mails while you're using Teams, your organization is doing it wrong.
If you are sending e-mails to get things approved while you're using Teams, your organization is doing it wrong.
If you aren't using planner to co-ordinate tasks for small groups of people while you're using Teams, your organization is doing it wrong.
If your organization is paying for m365 licenses just for you to have e-mail and the desktop office suite, they're doing it wrong.
Get TRAINING
So basically Microsoft demands using their whole ecosystem if you want their services to actually be useful?
Eh, no, we have to have a shared network drive because we are not allowed to upload things with eg personal information to Microsoft
If you have a m365 account, what data are you not allowed to upload that isn't already found in your e-mails? Are you not allowed to talk about that information in e-mails either? At that point, why bother having m365 at all?
This is one of the stupidest security takes that I've seen organizations take, pretending like some data is more secure on their own servers than in the M365 cloud.
People love to hate Teams but I also think it’s more maligned than it deserves.
It’s mostly fine for me most of the time. It could be that I just haven’t had the pleasure of using better options so I don’t know what I’m missing? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I do have to say it’s infinitely better in my experience than Zoom. Whenever I have a Zoom meeting the experience for me is so bad I am essentially unable to participate in the meeting.