Microsoft Teams is a red flag

bix6

I love when people shit on teams and provide no basis for why it’s so much worse than all the other chat offerings other than it being teams.

pluc

What I conclude from an organization using Teams is that they're running Microsoft stack, which affects my opinion far more negatively. Microsoft sales are powerful. If you use Teams, there's a chance that: - You use Windows for OS - You use Sharepoint for documentation - You use Outlook for Mail - You use OneDrive for storage - You use Azure for hosting - You use Copilot for LLM - You use GitHub for scm - etc all of those are things I actively want to avoid. they're all sub-par, they're all managed by button-clicking pseudo-sysadmins, they're all red flags.

awencasa

The usability in Teams always feels bad to me, like it was designed and developed by someone trying to be fancy without being usable.. Text content in chats is in a strange light gray color, messages are collapsed by default so you have to expand them to read anything longer than a few words, then requiring a "title" for every message.. Slack just feels more natural to me, more thought-out..

u0124309

Of course it is. And from a user's perspective, I often hear people saying they are 'forced' to use it because their employers want them to, otherwise they risk being fired, but I have never understood how that behavior is considered legal, since it's literally coercing somebody to accept Microsoft's abusive privacy and service policies that explicitly state that unless agreed, their products can't be used. I have never used Zoom or Teams in my life since I never agreed with their ToS&PP, and I've never been in a situation where my career would depend on it (I'm self-employed). When somebody asks me to join these, I nicely respond with that exact reason why I can't use them and propose using Jitsi Meet instead, and I have never experienced anybody rejecting it yet.

SvenL

I’m not quite sure, but the reasoning that some technology is frustrating users and therefore is not calculated in when optimizing cost per seat could apply to every software. In a large enough company there will be always people complaining about this and that. If you google you will also find people complaining about Slack. I like Teams. Especially the Meeting feature. I like that I can join with multiple devices in a meeting. Sharing stuff in a meeting is also pretty cool and easy. I also like the integration into other products. The only thing which could be better is performance - even the new WebView2 thing is not enough. But this is sadly common for most tools like this.

dirtikiti

Snap opinion made by a software dev who thinks the entire world revolves around software development and this dev's workflow. There's any number of reasons an org would choose teams over slack, or any Microsoft product over an alternative, even your example of the cost shows a clear lack of knowledge of information outside your narrow scope. How do you know your org is paying the price you found on a website? You realize there are other vendors people pay infrastructure contracts through who bundle Microsoft products in their contract? Stay in your lane.

nelsonfigueroa

1000000% agree. I'm currently interviewing for new jobs and when I hear that they use Microsoft Teams it's always a red flag. Not a deal breaker, but a red flag nonetheless. It is truly awful.

mlsu

There are plenty of serious businesses doing serious things, complex things, that use microsoft teams for chat. My work uses it, it kinda sucks, but honestly there's way more things to bikeshed than chat apps. You can send text messages and make video calls and do presentations in microsoft teams.

esperent

My company is using Teams. I chose it, and I do regret it but we're not using anything else from Microsoft and I've gradually reduced the surface to where we are just using it for messaging/large file storage, both of which it does fine actually. My reasons: - critical reason: it was half the price of anything else which was important when we were starting, less so now - probably much less than half the price when factoring in storage allowances actually - critical reason: it has built in translation without extra charge - the only real alternative close to the price and with translation was Google workspace and I've had such bad experiences with Google that I'm still glad I didn't choose that - inexperience: it was sold to me as a messaging and storage app that also came with a suite of other apps (which have ALL turned out to be useless) and I didn't know I was inheriting a heaving mutated behemoth built on the stinking undead corpses of SharePoint and AD. So yeah, wish I'd had more info at the time. But at this point now that I've limited the surface we're using and it's all settled in, the only real problems we have are the tedious 2fa issues that crop up whenever a new person joins.

rayiner

Why can’t they rewrite Teams as native apps using AI? How in the world of AI can Teams still be such a total shit memory/CPU hog product?

ramesh31

Written by someone who's never seen a major enterprise Slack bill

kstrauser

I documented a recent experience joining another company's Teams instance: --- To log into the Teams website on my Mac: * Use Passwords to log into Okta. * Use Okta Verify + Touch ID for MFA. * Log into Teams with Okta. * Install Microsoft Authenticator on my phone because Okta’s SSO isn’t enough for MS. * Log into my work account in Microsoft Authenticator. (Bonus: typing an Okta password into some random app’s webview gives me the warm fuzzies!) * Bounce to Okta Verify + Face ID on my phone for MFA. * Scan the QR code on my Mac with my phone. * Enter the 2 digit code shown on my Mac to double-plus authenticate with Microsoft Authenticator. As punishment for doing all this correctly, finally have to use Teams. --- This is 100% accurate. Halfway through the hoopjumping, I realized it was ridiculous and started over from scratch so I could record each step of it. I'm certain some step in there is necessary to support Outlook Express, and they can't clean up the process without annoying some bank paying for enterprise support of their Windows Server 2003 setup. These are the downsides of eternal backward compatibility.

pxx

Is Teams actually worse than Slack? Slack can't even reliably deliver messages. I've had instances on all tiers of Slack plans on all clients where messages just disappear for days at a time and then come back to gaslight you. ed: I tried to see if this is fixed and it doesn't look like it. Your IT team might have to write "help" articles like this one. Note that I've had this experience on other platforms. https://teamdynamix.umich.edu/TDClient/30/Portal/KB/Article/...