this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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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.
Yeah, I have a similar experience, but it certainly lacks in features compared to other messengers. For example:
I like the integration w/ Outlook because we're basically forced to use it at work, but Slack is way better for almost everything that doesn't interact directly w/ Outlook. So if it's not a scheduled meeting, I and my team much prefer Slack.
Gotta say, formatting of text isn't a high priority for me... I'm pinging someone about a thing, I'm not writing a presentation. Adding emojis is about as much as I need 🤔
And - to me - adding people to an adhoc group call / chat is straight forwards - and finding those conversations later is too
But, I believe that there's a few Corp IT settings that can be adjusted (we've recently lost the ability to add gifs for example), so maybe that's what's going wrong.
But we're a long way from AOL IM 😉
I send code snippets, quote sections of linked documents, and provide in-line links pretty often, kind of like here on Lemmy. Slack isn't as nice as Markdown, but it's good enough, whereas Teams is a complete pain in in the butt and it completely butchers code blocks. That said, I'm a team lead, so I fairly frequently post about recent releases, security issues, or give cliff notes of recent meetings, so formatting for me matters quite a bit.
And for calls, we have multiple logical groups of people, such as:
And we have ad-hoc group chats where just a handful of people need to be involved, but they don't fit cleanly into one of the established groups above (e.g. project manager wants to know a rough estimate for an upcoming project).
Teams works fine, but I find it annoying to use.
Have you used teams for sending code recently?
I tested it last week and it worked pretty well and even featured syntax highlighting. From the very limited one time test I actually prefer the way teams handle code since it doesn't force you to use some kind of snippet.
Teams is also supposed to get better formatting and chats fairly soon. I will continue to use slack because I prefer it but it's nice that teams is at least getting better.
Yeah, it has gotten better since a year or so ago, but it still falls quite a bit short of Slack. Slack can do snippets or not, it's up to you.
And yeah, it's nice that it's getting better, especially since I'm forced to use it for work (and interviews, where bad code handling sucks).
You can do regular code blocks in Slack? I thought you only could do inline or in snippets.
We luckily use both at work.
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.
With how much goddamn investor money they got it should be as close to perfect as possible, IMHO. We've had like 2 decades to perfect interacting online, I don't think its a technical challenge anymore.
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.
I went from teams/ms at another business to google at my current one. If they changed to Microsoft anything I'd burn the place down.
I went from outlook and office to Google suite (Gmail and Google docs). So, so much better. Maybe excel has more bells and whistles, but Google docs has everything I need and works so well everywhere. I would consider quitting if they dared to change to Microsoft.
Regarding communication, we use Slack for text and zoom for video, and it's fine. I also have installed teams and Webex (for customers) and they are all okay-ish. Once I used bluejeans and audio quality was impressively better, but no one seems ot use it.