The Horror of Microsoft Teams

I use both daily.<p>I think the biggest problem with Teams can&#x27;t be discovered by feature comparisons and performance metrics.<p>Teams enables a company to &quot;secure&quot; the application in the same way other MS products can be. That makes the product easy to sell, but in practice, it prevents Teams from being an effective collaboration tool.<p>If I want to create a new channel, I need to get approval from IT. If I want to invite a vendor to participate, I need to convince IT that the benefit of adding this particular vendor to Teams outweighs a raft of vague &quot;security&quot; concerns. In the end, it&#x27;s not worth the trouble of asking and I end up setting up Slack channels instead.<p>By creating a product that can satisfy the IT policies of their enterprise customers, Microsoft has unwittingly created a platform completely unsuited to flexible and open collaboration.

&gt; &quot;This means that if someone does @${channel_name} you will get an alert. MS have not implemented muting as a feature. Secondly, for all those automatic&#x2F;admin channels, you can’t unsubscribe yourself (or at least not with the default policies). Brilliant, isn’t it? Unavoidable alerts that any idiot on any channel can annoy people with.&quot;<p>At my last job we figured out the fastest way to get your company off Teams: add the CEO to a chatty channel.

For extra fun, block access to the telemetry endpoint and watch Teams&#x27; memory footprint bloat to crazy levels as the data accumulates and re-attempts the sending.<p>There&#x27;s some fun inspecting this data, too..

The Teams client is built on Electron? Why?<p>Developers need to stop building slow applications. This is ridiculous. It&#x27;s 2019 and software is slower than it was in the 90s.<p>It must take an enormous number of CPU cycles to execute simple tasks in an Election-based app. It&#x27;s just incredibly inefficient. I heard similar things about Slack – that it was built on Node, maybe Electron, and was dog slow, especially to open. It&#x27;s frustrating that developers are bringing the slowness of the web to the desktop. Just build proper desktop applications using native desktop APIs.

I don&#x27;t know. A lot of these issues (and I must admit I totally lost interest at the point I got to the complaints about message threading, although I did skim to the end[1]) are really personal preference. Take message threading as an example: we use it all the time and it works well. I actually prefer it to Slack threads.<p>My main beefs with Teams are:<p>- Performance: it&#x27;s just far too damn slow to switch views.<p>- Awkward to switch back to a channel or another chat whilst on a Teams call.<p>- Connectivity: it&#x27;s better than it was at handling disconnection and reconnection but, overall, it&#x27;s still a ####ing moron and a timesink - you&#x27;re still forced to restart on occasion (which takes too damn long).<p>One thing I do like: when our company switched from Slack to Teams[2] what I very quickly noticed, and what has persisted over the last year(ish) that we&#x27;ve been using it, is the much higher SNR. Maybe it&#x27;s that Teams isn&#x27;t so fun to use but, whatever the reason, there&#x27;s just way less distracting guff being posted and, perhaps to my surprise, it turns out I&#x27;m quite happy with that.<p>Slack gives the appearance of productivity and collaboration without any of its substance. Teams, well, it&#x27;s still an IM system and therefore always going to be subject to some level of wrath from me, but for the most part it feels like it does what it does well enough and doesn&#x27;t try to be the centre of attention quite as much.<p><i>[1] Where I was mildly irked to read, &quot;Microsoft Teams is the solution that nobody asked for the problem that nobody had,&quot; in the conclusion. I mean, really, if you&#x27;re going to say that you ought to be honest enough to acknowledge that you could say the same about any current gen IM app. I certainly never asked for software that would make it even easier for people to keep disturbing me when I&#x27;m in the middle of something else, and I know more than a few people who feel similarly.</i><p><i>[2] Teams came with O365 and losing history with Slack was becoming a problem, but not one that felt like it was worth paying what Slack charge to solve: we felt like there were better ways to use that money, and overall - and after initial reticence - I&#x27;m happy with that decision.</i>

At my work, we use Teams a fair bit, and I&#x27;ll go out on the limb to defend it (a limb I&#x27;m quite familiar with at this point ;) ). Thinking of it as a Slack alternative is, IMO, the wrong starting point. We barely use it for chat (as we have Slack as well). Instead, we use it as a file share and central information home. Each group within a team has a channel and we use the tabs to track meeting notes, embed external calendars, and more.<p>And importantly, we use it for file sharing. Each channel is a root point for a team-specific folder. This is helpful because storing common docs there means they are perpetually available to collaborators, as opposed to OneDrive storage, which in my experience has been very hit or miss (sahre links expiring, etc. ). People can trust that team content is there.<p>There are downsides. It took me a few months to find my &#x27;optimal&#x27; usage pattern, I can&#x27;t have channel-specific sharing, and it takes me a while to explain the above to people on the team. It is far from perfect, but it is better than sharing a bunch of files in email threads or maintaining unofficial google docs in a Microsoft world.

We currently use Teams and everyone on the team absolutely hates it. I am actively looking at alternatives such as mattermost or slack to get us onto something that doesn&#x27;t run like complete garbage.<p>Also, why did this have to be developed using electron? If Teams were a native application, or even written using something on the .NET-side, we would probably have about 20% the complaints we do today. Watching an application that is more-or-less responsible for managing basic text and image data on a continuously-paginated basis occupy nearly a gigabyte of memory is simply intolerable.<p>Teams makes me want to write a clone just to prove how much better it could be. That is how bad Teams is. It makes me want to spend an entire month&#x27;s worth of weekends writing a native clone that no one will ever use.

It&#x27;s interesting that Teams is often compared to email or chat. It&#x27;s much more akin to a forum or bulletin board system. I&#x27;ve found this to be a pretty powerful thing to have at work. However, it does happen to fit my work groups use case very well. We work on lots of short term projects. Each of these we spin up a &quot;team&quot; for. These are 3D projects that require a lot of media sharing from a cross disciplinary which works fairly well in Teams. It&#x27;s been a pretty happy addition over Outlook (barf) and Skype for Business aka Lync.<p>Full disclosure, I work at MS. And I have never used Slack though would be glad to try it.

My team were using HipChat and had to find an alternative when they sold off to Slack. They actually offered a really good discount to move over. But as the company already recently moved to O365 and Teams is free within that, I thought I&#x27;d give it a try. My team hated it, I tolerated it. Until one day I&#x27;d just had enough of the UX that Teams brings. The biggest issue was the threading; it truly beggars belief. We ended up using multi user IM messages instead of channels. Moving (and paying) for Slack was the best decision I made.<p>That being said, the Teams UX will slowly and steadily improve. It will be interesting to see where we are in a few years. I hope to see both Teams and Slack support SIP, they surely must already be working on it.

I&#x27;m an admin of both Slack and Teams. Almost all of this is due to how his org configured Teams. While there&#x27;s some valid complaints, a lot of this comes down to IT not understanding the needs of their users or simply not caring about the needs of their users because of some stupid opaque management decisions. You can mute chats same as on Slack. You can be forced to autojoin same as in Slack. I have regular meetings with customers in Teams. While Slack is absolutely still better at what it does most of his horrible experience comes down to crappy settings by his IT. The mobile device integration is truly abysmal though. Hoping in apps requires you to install those apps as well to do simple things like project management. The whole point of hooking in an app is to not have to go directly to said app. We haven&#x27;t had a problem with notifications either. Most of what&#x27;s possible in locking down Teams is possible to do it Slack it&#x27;s just not default.

Interestingly we do not have issues like this within our company. Recently switched from emails to Ms team and have never used slack. We are pretty happy with ms team with for few reasons: screen share, seems video or audio call, great support on desktop and mobile app, connection with everything Microsoft like word, excel, onenote etc. we are greatly enjoying it.

I could add so much to this, and in fact, recently closed a text file enumerating issues I had with Teams because I felt it wasn&#x27;t a good use of my time, since I felt like I was the only one having problems with it.<p>A few more points, in case anybody in the Teams team is reading:<p>1. Implement filters. Filters for teams, filters for channels, filters for search results. I can&#x27;t filter my Files by file type, so it&#x27;s a mishmash of Word documents, OneNotes, Excel, Microsoft Project files, and PDFs. I can&#x27;t even filter by channel, or search within a specific channel.<p>2. Search results: Implement filters, as above, but add the ability to sort by anything other than Date Modified. Unless I know a good portion of the document name or it&#x27;s been modified recently, I&#x27;m forced to scroll through the list.<p>3. Skype integration: We already use Skype for Business. Why is Teams also reporting my missed Skype calls in addition to Outlook and Skype telling me the same?<p>4. Meetings: Is Outlook transitioning to an email-only client, or are we just going to have all functionality replicated across Teams&#x2F;Skype&#x2F;Outlook?<p>5. T-Bot: I&#x27;ve got this entity in my Chat sidebar; I guess it&#x27;s the Teams version of Slackbot? Anyway, it sits there saying &quot;What can I help you with today?&quot; Slackbot gives me an example question to begin interacting with it, but T-Bot has the entry window greyed out with the text &quot;Sending new messages to this bot has been disabled.&quot; It&#x27;s not clear whether that&#x27;s a Teams thing, or something my org did, but why is it even there if I can&#x27;t interact with it?<p>While we&#x27;re on Chat, there&#x27;s a bunch of people listed in here that I sent a couple one-off emails to. I talk to more people than this; where are those? Why aren&#x27;t they pulled from my Skype calls?<p>6. Calls: I see some contacts from one of my Skype groups, but it&#x27;s also got contacts who a) I&#x27;ve already removed from that list, and b) don&#x27;t even work at this company anymore. They&#x27;re still crowding out the people I actually interact with regularly.<p>7. API integrations: I&#x27;m not even sure where to begin. Teams uses the Microsoft Graph API, which requires use of the Azure portal, and if you&#x27;re already familiar with all that it might work for you. For the rest of us just trying to write a simple Python script integration (a la Slack webhook), it&#x27;s a bit much.<p>I&#x27;m sure I could think of more, but this non-blog-post is already long enough.

Microsoft ruins Skype, then tries making their own communication tool. Ugh.<p>What is it again that Microsoft is getting such accolades for? Visual Studio Code is fantastic. Github is great, but they bought that. Office 365? OneDrive? I&#x27;ll give you those. Hosted Exchange is a thorn in my side. Internet Explorer and Edge are (were?) both a joke.<p>I don&#x27;t have any experience with Azure. Xbox is great. Their server products have been fine since Windows 2000. Windows 10 is a joke. The Surface line isn&#x27;t anything special.

At my org, you&#x27;d never know that slack has muting as an option. @here in a nontrivial channel gets you public humiliation, every possible &quot;loud&quot; reaction thrown at you (to the point of hitting the slack limit on reactions) and people publicly scolding you that you just notified 500 people in 12 different time zones.

Main issue killing me with Teams is that the desktop client can&#x27;t be joined to two servers (at least, last time I checked). As a contractor, I have a Teams at my company and a Teams at my client, and I had to pick one, which is terrible.

I like Teams.<p>I picked it up really quickly. My team picked it up really quickly. The rest of the company started asking me for it, which was my plan. I like the Sharepoint integration, the Outlook meetings integration, the Planner integration. I like that it works with my mac users. Yes it could be a tad quicker...<p>If you are getting too many messages it is your organisation that is broken, not your IM app.<p>Most of the other complaints in this article are to do with the set up, which the writer mentions in some cases but not others. As a manager I am very happy that I can control who is added outside of the organisation, for instance.

I can believe they’re overtaking slack because they make Teams an aggressive default install with the Office 365 client, and it’s replacing Skype for Business.

I had the fun experience recently of having to rename a bunch of files that happened to have a # in the filename, since that character is forbidden in filenames that are uploaded into teams.<p>Additionally, you can&#x27;t seem to attach a .json file... though renaming it to .json.txt works. It&#x27;s frustrating for sure.<p>Thankfully they finally fixed some issues recently so I can copy chats out of Teams without running into too many problems.<p>The most frustrating and immediate drawback is the low information density. It&#x27;s gotten slightly better, but I can still see only about 20% of the information in a chat that I can with Slack.<p>Also the automatic conversion of things like ;) to animated emoji... please give me an option to turn this off. You have to ctrl+z afterwards to just use the text.

Teams does suck, but man... it&#x27;s marginally better than Skype for Business. Skype for Business was so bad, you could send a message on your phone and you&#x27;d never see it on your desktop, and vise versa. Or you&#x27;d get bombarded with notifications on your phone while you were typing on your desktop. Microsoft would point to your local IT team&#x27;s setup causing caching issues or what have you... and notifications were never in real-time, calls were impossible and would constantly drop people, and heaven help you if you ever changed your password; you&#x27;d sign in again only to find all of your messages had been erased and wouldn&#x27;t ever re-download from the server. It was such a productivity loss for everyone and I&#x27;m guessing the only people who ever had a complete and sequential chat history of my chats were probably NSA employees who couldn&#x27;t care less.<p>It&#x27;s absurd that Microsoft didn&#x27;t just buy Slack when they had the chance. Building this in-house has forced a lot of people to use some really shitty software.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;business-insider&#x2F;bill-gates-passed-on-slack-microsoft-now-developing-competing-team-tool.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;business-insider&#x2F;bill-gates-passed-on-sl...</a>

The worst thing about Teams for me is the god-awful file managing solution. Everything shared actually goes in to the SharePoint backend, but changes made in Teams don&#x27;t always carry over to SharePoint and vice versa.<p>In addition, moving folders and files is such a broken and unintuitive pain, there&#x27;s no way to do it inside Teams, you have to go to SharePoint in your browser.<p>I&#x27;m sure everyone who has had the displeasure of using it agrees with me.

I think it&#x27;s pretty, but it&#x27;s also very, very, very notification-happy. My icon in my taskbar is almost constantly flashing with stuff I don&#x27;t need to read, from teams I&#x27;m only remotely involved with. I just figured out I could turn the banners off last week, but still overall it&#x27;s a very....<i>loud</i> application. Wish I could write some kind of filtering rules.

My company rolled out teams but then did it in such a way or only the designated administrators can create channels... if you&#x27;re not a designated administrator you can only do multi-party dm to dm chat.<p>The effect was probably half intended which is to say only the various corp administrators actually used teams, the rest of us just ignore teams save for their randomly blasted &#x27;app is being updated guys!...guys?&#x27; and continue to use our half-baked email threads or GroupMe groups or other shadow IT solutions because the Enterprise solution is so painful &#x2F; pseudo insulting.<p>Conversations.im &#x2F; chatsecure &#x2F; gajim all with an ejabberd server and omemo style encryption works a treat. GroupMe for group chats from legacy groups from before the xmpp days which we plan to migrate to xmpp and yeah we have no need of teams.

How is it that businesses get sold on these poor groupware solutions when they can:<p>a. self-host open-source Zulip (or Matrix&#x2F;Riot, which is not that good compared to plain old The Lounge IRC) totally free<p>b. pay for hosted software that’s open-source so their information isn’t hostaged when they decide their solution is crap?<p>I see these kinds of poor choices made all the time. People usually don’t want to do the research or a salesman walks into the office and they get sold a contract.<p>It really bugs me because I think: these people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars for taking other smart people on a ride. Is making hundreds of thousands of dollars orthogonal to big picture thinking?<p>Is there a position where someone hires me to walk into their office and save them thousands of dollars on unnecessary SaaS contracts? I’d do that job with glee.

BTW, what happened to Outlook on iOS recently? Three months ago it was snappy, started immediately and notifications were cleared the moment messages were read; these days it takes ~5s to start, unread notifications stay for another ~5s after the message is read, confusing me about having new mail, and if the same mailbox is set up on two iOS devices, only one gets notifications. Is old Microsoft back?

Apart from the notification noise drowning out important messages I&#x27;d like the ability to select messages and copy them. Sadly if you drag and select you only get the bit of the Electron DOM that&#x27;s currently visible on the screen. Vote here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;microsoftteams.uservoice.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;555103-public&#x2F;suggestions&#x2F;31918531-allow-copying-whole-chat-conversations" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;microsoftteams.uservoice.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;555103-public&#x2F;su...</a>

And Microsoft thinks it&#x27;s a good idea to add an advert to use Teams into Windows (added to the autostarted program list, so you see the popup every time you restart Windows).<p>Just shows that the OS is for Microsoft&#x27;s benefit, not for your productivity.

I like it. The reason is that in my situation, large enterprise corporate setting, it&#x27;s the best I can get. Believe me it&#x27;s been a breath of fresh air.

My main frustration with Teams are:<p>- Caching + searching : Their caching and searching is just terrible. It&#x27;s surprising how hard it is to search older messages especially in a private group chat. scrolling up takes a long time. Images don&#x27;t show up in the desktop app, so I have to open web app all the time.<p>- Centralized control: I agree that Teams is designed for centralized control. some of it might be good, but its a communation software, and telling people how to communicate seems like it&#x27;d defeat the purpose.<p>- Not being able to add External people: Agree with the OP, this is a pain. People in my org did this well with slack, but once we were asked to move to teams, we weren&#x27;t collaborating with external folks the same way.<p>- Chat and Teams are two different windows. WHen I am in private chat area, I never see new messages in Teams area. Notifications for chat work fine when I am in teams area.<p>- Threading: I think threading is poorly implemented, since it collapses the thread when you reopen the app.<p>I feel like it would be an excellent improvement over email if this came out before slack. But slack has shown what a good chat software can do, and teams falls short in many ways.

We use it with some success on a medium team and it’s been pretty well received.<p>That said: what we came <i>from</i> was Skype. No not the business kind, the regular one with blinking ads.<p>Compared to that, Teams isn’t that bad. Nothing is.<p>We evaluated Slack and a few others but the cost difference to slack when you already have a huge tab at Microsoft for their tools is pretty substantial if I remember correctly.

I had the misfortune of renaming a file that was shared in Teams and we were chatting about. This completely broke it so if you click on it you can see the chat but it won&#x27;t open and has the error &quot;This item might not exist or is no longer available&quot;.<p>You can now only open it from Sharepoint and changing the name back didn&#x27;t fix anything. Thanks teams.

I think Teams is pretty good, but then again my company had been using Cisco Jabber prior to it.

Reading this thread [0] on their Uservoice shows that no progress has been done since August 2018 on notifications management for the end user. I&#x27;m sure they allow control when you create a channel but convincing the teammanager who very day pings the entire channel to say their work hours that day is impossible so that feature is more or less useless. The fact that you can praise coworkers with unicorns, being implemented before proper notifications, has made me go from believing in the future of Teams to now praising Slack. It is maddening.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;microsoftteams.uservoice.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;555103-public&#x2F;suggestions&#x2F;20592283-mute-a-channel-mute-chat-is-complete" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;microsoftteams.uservoice.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;555103-public&#x2F;su...</a>

My biggest grief with Teams is that it&#x27;s impossible to shut off notifications. With pretty much everything turned off in its settings and being in Do-Not-Disturb mode it still blinks the icon and shows number of unread notifications in the taskbar. Just. No.

Teams is horribly unintuitive to use. The UI is much worse than Slack.<p>Took me long to realise I was looking at the chat window and to follow along the threads..

Slack vs. Teams doesn&#x27;t interest me as much as Teams vs. Hangouts Chat. Anyone here use both and can compare?

We use it heavily but these aren&#x27;t the features I dislike. In function Teams is a workflow browser but compared to real browsers it is very low functioning. No good bookmark system and ugh, no tabs. Even the back arrow doesn&#x27;t scope properly, and anyway I find myself jumping around because I need multiple contexts. I find the meetings and phone to be fine. It does suck memory like a hog. Because it is a workflow browser I have to have the app open and also several browser accessed versions. That means my laptop slows down a lot.

I could pardon a lot of stuff early on, but what worries me is that _development_ of Teams is horribly slow. Given how basic it still is there&#x27;s almost no progress.<p>Probably the worst thing for me is that Teams seem to be able to hold like 6 chat messages in memory, if I scroll to the past it starts loading and it takes about 5+ seconds to load 6 more. If I go back it starts to load the messages I just seen again. Performance-wise it&#x27;s catastrophically bad

&gt; &quot;[caching&#x2F;searching] is awful on any platform. It’s not clear what the bounds are for any search and only a very brief history is cached locally. Everything else has to be fetched remotely so scrolling is painful and searching glacial.&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve felt this frustration with Teams and Slack. Effective search in any real-time messaging platform seems difficult to deliver. Has anyone else had this problem and found a good solution to it?

IMO, MS Teams works pretty well. Not as good as Slack, but not horrible.

We recently switched from being a small team piloting Mattermost to using Teams as it rolls out to the whole company. We sorely miss Mattermost. It&#x27;ll be nice to be able to reach more people in the company via chat than we could before, but everything about the UI is lacking, except maybe how replying works.

I&#x27;m not necessarily a fan of Teams but there&#x27;s an unofficial Linux client that I use almost daily. It has some issues but mostly works.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;IsmaelMartinez&#x2F;teams-for-linux" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;IsmaelMartinez&#x2F;teams-for-linux</a>

The problem for me is that people haven’t really clued into social norms for chat clients as it is, and poorly-implemented clients make this worse.<p>Some people honestly seem oblivious to any current chat status, launching into complex questions and expecting immediate replies just because you seem alive right now. I’m sorry but once I’m “in conference call” or otherwise really busy, you should get the hint. I shouldn’t need a chat client that lets me be virtually invisible just to get work done.<p>And generally, I hate chat for work. E-mail&#x2F;bug-track is enough. I want to deal with things when I actually have time to deal with them, not when someone else assumes I have infinite availability.

I&#x27;m sorry but you&#x27;ve got to at least spell check if you&#x27;re going to put something on the internet for others to read.<p>Regarding the content, &quot;It can take half a day because of all the fiddly little options that are so easily forgotten&quot;. What? If you&#x27;ve really been a &quot;long time&quot; Outlook user, then this is 10 minutes. Half hour tops. But a half day? This makes me not take anything you say after that statement seriously.<p>And your complaints about teams are related to admin policies. Believe it or not enterprises actually have admins and policies regarding their desktops and tools.<p>Unfortunately this represents what I&#x27;ve come to expect from medium content.

Teams is replacing &quot;Skype for Business&quot;, right? Horror must be relative. At least now with the Web clients MS-invested orgs might stop asking people to install virtual machines running Windows to videoconf &#x2F; chat with them.

I prefer Teams to slack. I haven&#x27;t used slack in a couple of years, so it may have improved since. For Teams, I like the built in screen sharing and the fact that you can share a window rather than a screen. I use 43&quot; monitors so sharing full screen is impractical for someone viewing on a laptop. The voice &#x2F; video &quot;Teams meetings&quot; are also pretty handy; we would do remote standup using that. I am also able to turn off audible notifications. I&#x27;m probably biased because I&#x27;ve been in Microsoft shops for years.

To me that sounds like a “agile” failure. They were to agile for a design, to collect user feedback or any variable input, to fix the known problems, and to try a realistic set up as the client does.

Disclosure: Microsoft employee. Using a throwaway. Satya, please don&#x27;t track me down and fire me.<p>I&#x27;ve never agreed so heavily with a headline and disagreed so vehemently with the actual content. Some of this is right, but a big chunk is wrong and I think misses some of the most egregious horrors of Teams.<p>I used Slack professionally before in a fairly large org (&gt;200).<p>Two things the author got wrong:<p>First - things the author got wrong. Notifications are absolutely configurable by Channel - at least with the bits I&#x27;m on and how the internal Microsoft tenant is configured.<p>Second, a huge portion of the things mentioned by the author are config switches that apparently his tenant admins decided to muck with (auto-adding to Teams, no outsiders, etc).<p>The biggest complaint I have about this piece is it doesn&#x27;t actually talk about some of the real, most egregious parts about Teams: Teams has atrocious search, performance (functionally and by footprint, and UI - which the author covered. On top of that, it seems clear that the Teams team didn&#x27;t have a coherent vision for the user&#x2F;grouping model, so channels are kinda treated like groups but so are channels? For instance, <i>you can mention a channel from another channel</i>. Wtf. This drives me insane on a daily basis.<p>The development story is a mess. Not going into details here but if folks in the comments care to peruse the docs, I&#x27;d love to hear other folks&#x27; perspective.<p>Other random complaints:<p>- The emoji story is hilarious. There&#x27;s a taskbar thing called &quot;emoji&quot; which are animated stickers (some of which are actually fantastic) but definitely aren&#x27;t emoji. You used to be able to shortcode emoji (ie :smile:) and get a thing that looked like an emoji but <i>still wasn&#x27;t unicode emoji. AND you could use the actually emoji keyboard on your device to actually type unicode. So, 3 ways to get 3 separate sets of glyphs, all referred to as &quot;emoji&quot;. Yes, I know this complaint is dumb but it shows a weird lack of attention to detail.<p>- The formatting story is the union of every formatting concept ever. Quasi-markdown is supported inline, but its essentially an editor trick that triggers (what I assume is) richtext formatting.<p>- This is ANOTHER thing trying to be </i>the* dashboard in Microsoft&#x27;s product suite. There are like... 7. PowerBI, Azure Devops, SharePoint... Teams... I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m forgetting some. Which leads me to...<p>- It was clear from early development that leadership wasn&#x27;t fixated on &quot;do one thing well&quot; and were trying to be the sum of all productivity goals. The result is chat sucks, feels halfassed and there&#x27;s a lot of stapled on shit that makes the experience gross.<p>There are a lot of smart people on this team but the folks at the helm set things on a terrible course that misses the fundamentals, which is super depressing.<p>As an aside, one thing I&#x27;m genuinely curious about from folks that use Slack in very large orgs (&gt;500), how does Slack&#x27;s usability scale?

Fortunately I live wo either of these im tools. I know I&#x27;d go crazy trying to live an &#x27;always on&#x27; life.<p>I doubt the numbers MS throws around though to show how they are succeeding. If they are bundling Teams with Windows or Office of giving it away for free with Office 365 or Outlook, they could claim every single Windows laptop and PC as an active user and soon be at 1B users. Technically correct but oh so wrong!

In my experience Teams is often used alongside other &#x27;channels of communication and collaboration&#x27; which makes it a burden more than anything else.<p>Ever since it was introduced it seems more like an unfinished tech experiment (but Slack felt the same to me). It seems to be designed with the aim of increasing productivity rather than making it easier to communicate with people.

Our Teams has Planner to do lists. Great, I thought, now our to dos are integrated into our chat platform. Then I tried to edit a comment I made on a card. Couldn&#x27;t figure out, contacted our vendor only to find out it&#x27;s NOT POSSIBLE! Googled it, tons of requests from years ago asking MS to implement edit and delete options for comments. Unbelievable.

As a long time hater and forced user of slack: how does Teams compare to slack? Should I be happy “that we at least have slack”?!

It’s astonishing how bad Microsoft seems to be at things like this. I don’t really understand what’s going on in there.

A Teams client for linux - meh. I mean, I guess I wouldn&#x27;t mind it I guess (assuming I don&#x27;t have to pay more for it per my office365 monthly fee), but i certainly don&#x27;t seek it. On linux, I&#x27;m perfectly happy with libreoffice. However, what I do want is a native onedrive client for linux.

My company is switching to Teams right now, because Slack “does not have active directory integration”.<p>I asked them if it wasn’t a better idea to just enable that then, but apparently the ability to actually use any corporate software is just not very high on their list...

Reminds me a lot of the horror show that is Amazon chime, Amazon&#x27;s alternative to slack.<p>That said it had some half implemented good ideas, but whenever you found a bug in it, its AWS-based team pretty much told you where to shove that bug report.

I am going to have to use Microsoft Teams next semester at my college for project management class. Not looking forward to it. Especially since there is no Linux version, and Linux is the only OS I enjoy using.

I just wish I could stop Teams from starting up every time I log in and without creating a Teams account. I looked up various solutions others have come up with and it is seemingly very convoluted.

This sounds like ad administrative issue with how Teams are built and organized within Teams. It can be clean, simple, and effective when managed properly but user training is important.

This thread should give some much needed perspective on all the people who assume MS is going to destroy slack. I bet slack destroys outlook before teams destroys slack.

Kind of related. I cannot login to Teams from home. Some sort of infinite redirect loop in both IE and Chrome on my home PC. It is pretty horrible.

Messages with a single emoji are displayed 4x the size, with animation that can&#x27;t be turned off.<p>Teams is just not a serious business tool...

Teams is like Sharepoint.<p>It compares with the competition really well on paper, but the details suck the life out of you.

The lack of muting&#x2F;do not disturb is why I just leave MS Teams off all the time.

another annoying bug is the &quot;John Doe is out of office and may not respond.&quot; message banner at chats which of course can&#x27;t be turned off

Am I the only one noting the irony of criticising a piece of software by writing a post on Medium?

I&#x27;ve been using IRC since the 90s and Teams is a regression, plain and simple. I agree with all the points made in the article. But hey, at least it has &quot;stickers&quot; for children.

Is there a reason that companies don&#x27;t just use discord?

&gt; I realise that WhatsApp doesn’t have a proper desktop client<p>That&#x27;s just not true. The Desktop app of Whatsapp is imo excellent.