π―
Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
Microsoft spent billions acquiring Skype only for us to be left with Teams
It's like a graveyard of companies that Microsoft has acquired over the years. Sharing files is one brand name (Sharepoint if i recall), making video calls is another name, planned events is another - every function has a brand name to it, which made me feel like these were the last remaining trace of long-absorbed companies.
But that's just my recollection, i haven't touched Teams since Covid
Isnβt Teams just Microsoftβs attempt to reinvent Skype for Business as a Slack clone? I didnβt think theyβd acquired it (other than acquiring Skype and fucking that up, too).
We user / have used Slack, Zoom, Meet/Gchat and a VERY brief trial of teams.
We have O365 AND Google Workspaces so we get teams and meet for free.
Zoom is the best to host a large meeting with a split presence. It's the best at dealing with variably poor connections. It shines on being able to share any specific app and sound control.
Meet is the best for small, low-friction meetings. However, it is hampered by its inability to share anything but browser tabs with sound, poor camera control, and poor user display.
Slack is a fantastic, too-flexible chat system with organizational issues. When it works, it works pretty well. However, it has intermittent video and mic problems on many systems. It is not good on poor connections and occasionally not good on fast connections.
Teams is bloated, many systems run it poorly, and there is an unacceptable amount of server-imposed downtime/issues.
I've personally never had an issue with Slack, mic/video included. My connection has always been solid, though. Never tried on a shit connection.
I chalk most of the shit that makes teams horrible, is closely related to electron and their whole web app as a desktop app bullshit.
Buckle up, because they're doing that same enshittification to outlook next. It's already begun. There's a "new" Outlook. FML.
Next you'll tell me the sky is blue.
If we were on Teams right now I may not have received this snarky message.
The only thing it does better than Slack: A list of all my chats, most recent at the top, without any disappearing or grouped in some weird way. Slack annoys me.
I got slack for my college course, I left the group. I have no fucking idea what is going on on that app it was insanity. Seemed like 12 different groups of the same people and sometimes you got notifications sometimes you did not.
It was just a really bad UI and UX.
Ah, they're all crap.
Came to Teams from Slack, some upsides, some downsides. It's a corporate communication tool, I don't use it because I think it's beautiful and elegant, I use it because I get paid money to use it.
What's wrong with slack?
I've had limited experience with slack, but the whole way conversations map to workspaces at least got to be confusing to me, and I would have liked an experience based on me as a user, rather than having my user span workspaces and have to juggle them to figure out how to talk to whoever I'm supposed to talk to at the time.
The biggest mistake was to make it a "hub" for all sorts of other uses in my opinion. It shouldn't be browser based, it should be native and just focus on chatting and calls, that's it. It could be so much faster and intuitive.
You mean like Skype for Business?
You mean Lync?
You dare speak the name of the accursed one??
Iβm annoyed you still canβt do annotations with Teams.
Haha be thankful for what you have. I work at a pretty large financial institution and we still use Skype for Business. There is another messaging app we use but not everyone is granted access to it so I have to use both apps daily.
You're using teams. Modern teams is built on Skype, which is why it's shit.
Unpopular opinion: I actually like MS Teams
Look, I know this might get downvoted, but Teams is... actually fine? Yeah, it's not perfect, but it just works. The best part is that everyone and their grandma knows how to use it because it's the corporate standard around here.
I can't tell you how much time I've saved not having to do the whole "can you hear me? let me try reconnecting... oh wait try updating your browser" dance that happens with other platforms. My company recently switched to Google Meet and honestly? It's been a downgrade. Teams might not be the coolest kid on the block, but at least I'm not spending half my meetings troubleshooting audio and video issues.
For me "it just works" doesn't ring true. Generally at least once a day, I join a call and it won't let me unmute, and I have to restart Teams.
Scrolling through history is obnoxiously slow.
The activity feed is mostly useless, spammed with stuff that isn't important and it's the only place that vaguely tries to keep track of 'Teams' conversations.
In my company, I've been added to about 70 Teams and it's pretty much impossible to interact with them, so as a result no one does, they all just start ad-hoc chats, since that's the only thing that vaguely gets managed in a way people can follow.
When going cross-organization, it's a crap shoot whether or not we can use text, voice, and screen share/remote control. I know this is generally due to obnoxious company 'security' policies and other solutions have it, but it is a frustration. One recent call with a particularly screwed up company had us on two different meeting platforms at once as well as on an old fashioned conference call, because text was only allowed on one platform, screen share on another, and no audio was allowed on either (despite both supporting all three).
Sure, Teams suffers, in part, because like all corporate tools it connects you to generally dysfunctional work communities. However it broadly does have it's own annoyances.
I hate teams because it consistently doesn't just work
missed notifications, screensharing
i have little use of it and it constantly breaks
I haven't really used any other platforms so I can't really compare but I have encountered enough audio issues too. Especially with new Teams and bluetooth devices.
Same, Teams is terrible in terms of getting audio to work properly, our meetings still start with "can you hear me?" And often at least one person has to rejoin after pairing their bt headset again. But honestly everything else I've come across is even worse.
The fact that me and a coworker can't both share our screens at the same time is absolutely batshit. 1x1 collaboration isn't even reasonable, nevermind anything more
Try sharing anything except excel and enjoy your 3fps. Being a game dev and wanting to show videos or share my screen while playing is a no-go.
I work in IT. I think it's popular because it's "free".
With that said, I put up a picture on the office wall of a Swiss army knife with features like syringe, fire extinguisher, axe, etc and have it labeled Microsoft Teams. Yes, it can do 100 different tasks, fucking poorly.
three trillion dollars
It's the Sharepoint of chat.
Ironically enough it creates Sharepoints for each of your groups.
It's SharePoint all the way down
I fucking hate SharePoint. Excel performance is A G O N Y. pros: cloud backup & comments Cons: slow. As. Shit.
"Your organization has blocked this action"
I mean this is my work phone, and I'm trying to copy a customer's phone number from a spreadsheet to the dialer, but thanks man.
For a long time, I would occasionally use my personal phone to check work email and Slack when I had to be out-of-office for an errand. They created a new policy last month that would force me to have a "work" profile on my phone if I wanted to continue using those apps. Fuck that. Instead I removed every work related app from my phone.
"Sorry boss, I can't check my messages while waiting at my doctor's office anymore.Why? Oh, because IT policies won't let me."
that is because theyre selling it to the business, not the end user. They dont give 2 fucks about your experience
As with all things in business, good enough is king
I actually don't mind it being web based, there are a lot of web based tools that run perfectly fine and don't use that much resource
Teams is generally stable for me running the pwa in Microsoft edge nowadays too