Ngl teams is trash. Especially when IT keeps messing with settings they don’t understand.
Easily the worst popular messaging app out there. Even on windows the thing barely ever worked for me and hogged a bunch of system resources to boot
As with many messaging apps only thing keeping it alive is the network effect (and integration with 365)
You moved your mouse near the calendar? LET ME CREATE A MEETING FOR YOU!
You opened up a card from a planning board? LET ME TRUNCATE THE TITLE SO YOU CAN’T READ IT!
You opened a document? HAHA CAN’T DO THAT FROM YOUR IP BUT YOU WON’T GET AN ERROR MESSAGE JUST AN INFINITELY SPINNING DOODAD!
I wish they just copied better apps like the Microsoft of old did.
Oh you want to use the default audio devices on your system? What default audio devices I’m going to use this random loopback device and your monitor with no speakers!
And tomorrow, I’ll randomly select something else
I have had to help so many end users with that it pains me.
“How can I stop this from happening again?”
Well, we can disable.other audio devices, but seeing as it’s Windows 11 they may just re-enable good luck!
I ran into a user who’s noise cancellation stopped working upon the rollout of “New” Teams. Tried diagnosing the microphone array, settings updates, firmware. No luck.
Know what worked? Both versions of browser based Teams!!! Ihatethemihatethemihatethem
Never heard of any Windows re-enabling disabled audio devices.
Deleted devices sure, because it automatically installs drivers of “new” devices so they automatically work for even technologically incapable users.
Did you run the Windows troubleshooter for that New Teams bug? Contrary to popular believe in the Sysadmin circles, those actually work pretty well.
Not the windows troubleshooter, as the mic was otherwise fine. There was nothing I could find in any Teams settings, and the admin panel showed all of the telemetry as being fine.
It’s a stupid solution, but have the user download voicemod, then use voicemod as the default microphone in teams. It’s stupid, but it solves all these problems.
This is a good one to keep in mind, tyvm!
“New” Teams and “New” Outlook are a “Nightmare”
Is Teams a messaging app? 😮💨 Then please give me a way to sort and group my chats.
As someone near in the administration of it, Microsoft are at fault, they permanently make breaking changes for no obvious reason
My boss has gotten to the point of “As Ashe would say, fucking Microsoft”
Let’s not forget the endless name changes, 404’d documentation that points to non existent tools all of the time, the GUI that barely works. Always an adventure
IT enforced background blur for GDPR reasons. You simply couldn’t turn it off, so everybody was blurred during the daily standup.
The sound of thousands of underpowered integrated graphics processors, their fans screaming in agony.
Most people have workstation laptops with Nvidia Quadro’s so that’s not really an issue.
Sounds like a win to me.
We don’t even use Cameras anymore for anything except explicitly scheduled one-on-one meetings like Quarterly Review.
I despise these blurred backgrounds. I understand if you use it when working from home and don’t have a dedicated office, but so many people do it even when they’re at the corporate office. The flickering is just super annoying.
My old place had something screwed up where I lost audio after about 30 seconds into a meeting on teams. Constantly using my phone for audio sucked.
Beats WebEx. I contracted at Cisco after they had bought WebEx and the dev teams had to stagger their scrums in the morning because WebEx infra couldn’t support all the meetings at once.
Beats Skype for Business too, which was Microsoft’s previous offering. And it was BAD.
What? Skype was waay better than Teams! It only started turning into dogshit when Microsoft acquired it.
**Edit: Skype, not “Skype For Business”, as others pointed out.
Skype for Business was not Skype. It was the rebranded Office Communicator, which Microsoft started calling Skype for Business after acquiring Skype.
It was basically a bad clone of MSN Messenger.
Yep, you’re right. I remember now.
It only started turning into dogshit when Microsoft acquired it.
You mean in 2011?
Skype was only good for its time.
Compared to Teams now, it is sorely lacking
Imagine if it had actively been developed this whole time rather than snatched up and shuttered to further anti-competitive practices…
Oh hell yeah, Teams is far from perfect, but it is still light years ahead of webex
Teams is miserable
Fuck Slack, Google Chat and Workplace.
Companies abuse it’s use instead of using emails and tickets, it’s fucking chaos.
Yeah let’s make people contact us through this public chat, all at once, I’m sure it won’t be a fucking mess.
You can write to me by chat but no ticket no help
Yeah, channel management is super important. It’s useful to have a full featured chat client that can integrate into other systems, but it’s important to know what the limitations are. We use Slack for internal chat only (no customers) and it works pretty well for our use case but with all the integrations available it could easily get out of hand if we let more people manage it.
In a previous job I was before we were pretty clear about our channels, and WE (3 people) were the Service Desk.
But after that I worked in a specific area of the IT of a multinational DIY stores chain and what a fucking mess.
Yeah im at a fairly small company with a boss that cares about that kinda stuff more than me so its not very hard to enforce
Ah, the digital Neighbor to: You can stand by my desk but no ticket no help
Not going to let people cut in line in front of the people who do follow the procedures correctly.
IMHO, you need to know how to admin a good slack workplace. Properly setup workflows, bots and plugins can proactively funnel a lot of people toward the correct intake and resolution systems. You also need to train people on best practices, and revisit that training so bad habits don’t set in.
Training + automation are kind of required to make any communication platform effective.
“I am very busy and have my work day planned to work efficiently, so I won’t be handling your request immediately. This means things can slip through cracks if there is no ticked describing the task created - create one if what you are asking for is of any importance.”
Followed by not doing anything that doesn’t have a ticket and didn’t come directly from people you report to.
Also I have notifications disabled and only check slack between tasks or if I take a breather from a task - on average 4-5 times a day. I also check email as the first and last thing in a workday only
Yeah… in this DIY company I complained to my manager why other deparments didn’t create a ticket for requests/incidents for us.
The response was because tickets would cost money to the deparments! What the actual fuck?
I don’t particularly like the UI, but I haven’t had any Issue with teams ever tbh. It even worked on Firefox with uBlock, NoScript (ofc allowing like one or two domains for it) and VPN. For me, Office in general just works most of the time. I would never use it for private stuff, let alone pay hundreds for it, but for work it’s more than fine.
Except Outlook. Holy fuck, how is such a central application such a pile of steaming garbage? It has the worst UI/UX I have ever seen in any mail client by far.
Same. Teams isn’t exactly good, but it works pretty okayish most of the time. I absolutely don’t get the love for slack, it seems to be more like an “I use Arch, BTW” thing.
Have you used Slack?
I’m forced to have two separate Outlook accounts, I quite literally can not use both accounts on the same computer without getting stuck in a neigh inescapable login loop from hell.
If your job has Office365 access, use the web version of Outlook. You can open multiple accounts in separate tabs and the interface isn’t from 1995. I have multiple boxes I have to run and this saved me from having to constantly log in and log out of Outlook.
I’m a software consultant and juggle multiple accounts without issue in Outlook. Whenever the authentication expires I have to sign in again in a bunch of places, but that only happens once a month.
Outlook is a fucking mess. I wanted to search for a keyword in a long-ass email yesterday, so of course I did ^F, like a normal person would. That opened the dialog to write and send a reply??? Why???
And web browser outlook having no keyboard shortcuts whatsoever is fucking criminal.
Just transitioned from a Google + slack company to a Microsoft account company.
I asked if we put our email accounts on our phones to be able to answer after hours, my supervisor said very few people are given access to emails on their phones.
I am fine with the switch, I used to get 40-60 emails to sort through a day. Now I will be doing maybe 5-10 a day and only 3 or 4 might actually be for me and I only have an 8 hour day with no after hours meetings.
I’ve had a company require employees to install MDM on personal phones (remote control/management) to be allowed to use them for 2fa app or email access… there was a surprised Pikachu when I refused. Eventually they issued me a company phone, because it was impossible to do most tasks without 2fa. That device was on 9 to 5 only.
What the fuck? Are there really people who allow that?
Over 98% did. My job was security adjacent so I’ve had some insight into those metrics
I work in IT and endpoint management is among my tasks. Knowing the things we can do to smartphones that are controlled by our mdm is enough to where I would never agree to having thatopn my personal device. I even refused to get a company provided smartphone.
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Remote control of your personal phone for work? That sounds dodgey, I would definitely refuse. Would anyone actually accept that?
Also, 2fa is a really shit excuse for that.
Less than 2% of workforce got issued a company phone for that reason.
Any device required MDM installed to get access to VPN that got you to company network, to get 2fa app, SSO or email.
Sounds like they’re respecting work life balance in a round-about way.
No Boss, I didn’t get that email sent at 11 PM last night. I don’t sit in front of my PC at all hours of the day.
But why would anyone?
I have an MDM on my work phone and I can’t even access PlayStore anymore. It only allows Company Allowed Apps which is to say nothing. YouTube is broken because MDM somehow controls my DNS records. Firefox cannot be installed so Ads everywhere. Chrome only and it can only go to approved websites because Yahoo is safe but Ars Technica is not???
Why would anyone want that on a device they pay for?
Is my MDM different from their MDM?
MDM can be configured in 2 modes, one with company owned devices and one with bring your own device. But there are lots of settings that can be done, usually it is configured with work and personal profiles and the work one has all the restrictions in place and the personal has no limits. Maybe just some device features can be also enforced, like forbid the OEM unlock and ADB.
Why not just a physical TOTP token? There’s ones that do 100 Tokens, probably won’t need more than that. Smartphone for 2fa seems overkill.
Sounds like a pretty big win to me? Who answers emails after hours, yuck
I’m going from a 24/6 bigger city operation to a mon-fri 7-430 operation in a small town. It is a huge win for me.
Congrats! That sounds like a great change.
They must have some intense data retention policies. You can configure compliance levels to allow anyone into their Outlook acct using the app without any special permissions pretty easily.
Good on them to cut down access like that
Now I wonder if there’s a correlation between companies using Microsoft package being companies less obsessed with crunch culture…
But … why?
Outlook on phones works well enough. Was it some security measurement or something?
My particular company emails contain privilege information and there is absolutely zero trust in letting smart phones aka roaming data leaks anywhere near that.
I mean it doesn’t matter to me, I don’t want to take my work home with me and I’m close to the computer while I’m at work.
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I tried to get our team to move to Matrix when COVID hit and there was no infrastructure for remote work.
It was such a shame that it was that exact time Jitsi had issues with Firefox (which most of us use), so we couldn’t videochat.
If Jitsi had that resolved immediately, we perhaps could have used something open for at least couple of years. Maybe others would follow suit.
Oh well. Teams it is.
thats probably my biggest issue with open alternatives.
they always fail to take advantage of those opportunities and things stay broken until its way too late.
But I also harp a lot to my superiors about donating to open-source projects we utilize, make loads of money thanks to them, yet never give anything back.
I kinda get that some projects with limited backing can’t “get their shit together”, when successful users don’t give them anything. It’s a stupid pattern, and I hope we can break it.
i think we could bake some form of “free for personal use, paid for corporate use” clause in our foss licenses tbh
That’s not a terrible idea as long as it’s significantly cheaper than the closed alternatives. I think the biggest issue would be that orgs that pay would expect a certain level of service that a community project might not be able to deliver on.
Most of the small to mid size companies that I have worked for would choose a larger more established system that costs more even if it offers less over a self-hosted one that they had to pay some sort of fee for.
Is like this weird idea in the business world that if you’re using Foss systems that it must be completely free, and that the reason why you are using it is because you are broke or cheap.
That’s kind of what I was getting at. Medium to large organizations usually require a certain level of reliability that closed software companies usually guarantee with dedicated support staff and SLAs. An open source project developed by the community with no dedicated support is risky from that perspective.
If someone with the technical know-how and ability to maintain those systems offered support (red hat for example) for a lower price, many small and medium sized companies would get on board. That could also just look like a company hiring a small team to implement and maintain their own systems while contributing back to the community project.
It’s just a much harder sell to non-technical leaders. They just want uptime guarantees and fixed costs.
My guess is that if you’re going to start a MSP you can do that with Foss and probably have a lot of success as long as you’ve got the sales chops to get the contracts.
Then you can funnel some of your customers money to foss well also increasing awareness and adoption of the better free and open source software programs
I don’t think that is necessary, as some companies do actually help, either with money or even dedicated staff, which can be as good or better.
We should push for developers to promote the idea of more help towards FOSS projects, maybe find some hours a month, or send any money saved from not paying for licenses.
on the other hand we get situations where we have a single dev maintaining some essential part of tge stack, for free.
i think pushing for more help is just a piece of this puzzle.
Lose the critical part of your business, see how fast you can move around it.
The xkcd random dude in Nebraska
You mean like WinRAR?
We use Slack for those of us on the IT team, but Teams for everyone else. I despise Teams.
We have Skype + Mattermost (without gifs) + Rainbow. Give me Teams if you want, but please, stop adding tools.
Mattermost has voice chat now so you can ditch Skype
Either our mattermost is not up to date, or it has been disabled by the administrators. In any case, I have no power to do anything
IMO Teams is better than Slack
Sometimes people have wrong opinions, don’t worry it happens to the best of us (/s)
Hey, at least Teams has better surveillance than Slack!
oh wait that’s bad
What kind of surveillance? I remember 6 years ago an admin of a paid org on Slack could download all conversations, including private.
Any work tool is like that, including slack and teams. If you’re using a corporate device or tool paid for/managed by your employer, you have no privacy whatsoever. If you’re using the internet at work, IT knows at least which sites you visit
Usually the logs/conversations don’t get read, they just have words that get flagged (from swear words to drugs to who knows what else), the rest is mainly in case something happens they can look into it more and maybe cover their ass.
That said, I bet more data goes to microsoft from teams than goes to slack from slack, so in that case I bet slack is a bit better
Most work/ school comms software is, and anyway if it isn’t encrypted they can just ask for it and Microsoft will probably give it to them
I don’t know if I could deal with this bullshit. I work at such a small office we don’t do anything but calls, faxes, and shitloads of emails. The odd side text sometimes. Adding a whole chat space thing where I’m constantly on the hook for a reply would do my head in.
Faxes? Really? Is someone still using fax? Why?!
The medium is the mess.
Microsoft actively hates its users. Why are all of the keyboard shortcuts in the most inconvenient place possible? Why does Outlook not mark mail as read/unread in an intuitive way? Why does Teams schedule send require one tap on mobile but two clicks on desktop? Also this isn’t even the thread to get into whatever tf is going on with LinkedIn. Planting seeds and harvesting crops was a mistake.
Did you know windows has a dedicated keyboard shortcut for launching linkedin, teams, and all the main Microsoft office products?
Why did you make me learn this?
The more you know💫
Google + Slack is pure unadulterated garbage. Gotta wonder what Teams is like if you suddenly develop nostalgy for a flaming dumpster.
Teams just doesn’t work
I went from an MS+Teams org to a Google+Slack org. The latter is way better, Teams is a steaming pile of wank.
I have a lot of grudges with Google and slack, but I have tried Teams exactly once and I never want to have to deal with this software again
Teams communication is fine but that file “structure” is atrocious.
Microsoft’s O365 stack and Teams aren’t great, my friend, but they’re light years ahead of anything Google and Slack offer. Especially when any sort of collaboration is involved.
It’s weird that there’s people that believe this…
There is no way you’re using either on a constant basis. He is right. It’s not a great setup, but it beats the brakes off of workspace+slack.
The collaboration features in 365 fuck up and get in the way a lot more often than they work correctly WITH ONLY TWO CONCURRENT USERS. Conversely, I’ve seen entire classrooms in Google Docs working together like it wasn’t even a thing.
I don’t have a lot of love for any of these companies, but what you are saying is objectively false.
Completely wrong. The Microsoft word collaboration is completly Terrible, constantly locks other people from editing even if they are on another part of the page. It really doesn’t work for more than 2 people, while you can have like 30 people on a google doc with no issues (probably more, haven’t tried more).
Also, I blocked beehaw, why can I see your comment
Because blocking an instance only blocks their communities from showing up in your All feed, it doesn’t block comments.
I can’t dispute that. I’m not a Word person. I live in Excel and often have half a dozen people working in the same file without issue, but that’s much more logically structured than a Word document. Google’s team sites are also disjointed and janky af compared to Sharepoint.
Excel is far superior to google sheets, you can’t go past z on google, while on excel you can go to like zzz or something.
Word however, simply doesn’t work with multiple people in a usable way.
