No one would use Teams if it wasn’t bundled together with other stuff.
I absolutely agree : our company used slack, Google docs, and self-hosted exchange.
Eventually, MS forced us to replace our self-hosted exchange for MS’ cloud solution. This was basically a ramrod for shoveling O365 and having it replace Slack with Teams and Google Docs with O365.
The migration was painful… going from “I have the exact tools I need for the job” to “jebus, this is the best MS has? On Teams I can only see 4 people at the same time? What was MS thinking”.
Not sure why yours doesn’t let you see more than 4 people. I’m in a call with 12 and I see them all. That being said, Google docs, etc. beats Word and Excel hands down in the area of collaboration and a few other minor points. I hate being stuck in one ecosystem that way.
Wow, 12 - you’re living the dream ;)
Could you share your setup? I’m on Linux, but I’ve tried both Edge and Brave. Both only show 4 people.
When a 5th person joins, I need to switch to the “group view” (?), which has a auditorium background and crude attempts by Teams to “crop” people from their background.
It’s such a perfect summary of my Teams experience : you want something simple (ie: see 5+ people) and MS delivers the most useless feature… I cannot even call it half passed, cause I’m certain the “group view” took far more engineering effort than it would have taken to just show 5 or more people on the screen.
Serious question, I don’t get the “forced” part. Could you clarify this for me?
Microsoft has been making hostile moves on licensing for on-prem/non subscription products for a while now. They want you to give up on local resources. Of course you could go to a competitor, but the only large competitor in the US is basically Google, and their offerings are not well tailored to business.
Basically, my company is tightly wed to using outlook and exchange.
We would have liked to have kept all this “on-prem”. Meaning, we have physical machines running in our company network that has paid licenses for exchange.
The “force” that Microsoft has applied, is that we will not be allowed to purchase licenses for exchange (disclaimer: I don’t know if the licenses are not available/discontinued or if it’s not cost effective - I wasn’t involved in those conversations). Long story short: If we want Outlook/Exchange we must use MS Cloud solution. Depending on your organization’s size - this cost us an ungodly amount of money but (and here is where the anti-trust is) you get Office 356, Teams, and the rest of the MS eccosystem “for free” (or at a deep, deep discount).
This means the cost of Cloud Exchange (which includes Teams, O365, etc) . Was about the same (maybe a little less) than what we paid for “on-prem” exchange, plus Google docs, plus slack, plus Zoom. However, since “on-prem” exchange isn’t available - our only other option would be to ditch exchange for Google (which costs a lot more) or some open-source solution (which probably won’t integrate seamlessly into outlook).
My company only uses Teams and it works fine from what I can tell, what’s so bad about it?
Lots of weird polish issues in my opinion… One that really peeved me was (for a while at least) you could search for a message, but there was no way to jump to that message from the search results. So you couldn’t read the context unless you scroll all the way back up.
But primarily it’s that the mechanics are different from things like Slack and Discord in ways that are just less intuitive.
Channels function more like announcements + comments rather than a chat—you are really shoehorned into posting a “Topic” and discussing it in the replies. There’s no way to carry a linear conversation in a channel otherwise. And to load replies you have to keep clicking “see more” as if this is a social media site, so it’s very annoying when your 800+ comment critical discussion happens there. Not to mention notification settings aren’t granular enough, so you either get hammered by all activity, or remain oblivious to discussions which may have popped up in an older Post.
What tends to happen in my experience is small working groups spawn off a group chats because the flow is better for daily conversation there than in Channels. Which, of course hides this activity from anyone not in the chat. And group chat’s are entirely linear in Teams—you don’t have threads the way you do in Slack, so chat history tends to get messy quick.
The channel-then-thread organization Slack uses is much more natural for the teams I tend to work on, because you just have the one main discussion which can be segmented into threads as needed.
I find it disorganized, poorly designed and buggy.
To test your quality, you need to make a test call, where it dials, rings, and connects. Then it plays a little message and you record after the beep, then it plays it back. For every other program I’ve used, you hit test, talk, then it plays it back. The Teams methods takes at least three times longer, incredibly annoying when trouble shooting.
If you start a test call, and hang up before it connects, it will ring on your computer forever.
There’s a keypad where you dial numbers. When you connect and need to press numbers in an automated menu, you can’t use that key pad. There’s a different keypad behind a pop-up menu.
Some companies use letters in their phone numbers, like 1-800-AWESOME. It doesn’t sort that out for you. If you type letters it tries to call then immediately hangs up without explanation.
These are all pretty small things, but there’s already better things out there that don’t have these problems. It’s also almost unbelievable that it’s like this. Teams is at least version 3 of MS’s foray into telecommunications software, and it’s developed by a team of career professionals. It’s absurd that it’s so unpolished.
It is a nightmare for us consults that is added as guest so we can join the calls and groups… You need to jump between tenants and many have problems with seeing stuff or even be able to join a group. The preview is a bit better, I still need to jump between my customers tenants but now I at least get a notification if they write to me (have missed so many calls and messages…)
Edit: spelling
Let me disagree. My workplace is deep in ms “stuff” - dotnet development + other windows only stuff. Honestly, I got to use a lot of sw for online meetings due to c-19. Well, teams is as shitty as the others. Or good as the others. Depends on what you like to hear. I got used to it, and it does what it must almost always; very often what it should do. I’ve to say something more, but I don’t want to look like a fanboy or similar.
I can understand Teams in Office, particularly O365 for organizations… what I don’t get is Teams being mandatory in Windows 11…
Seriously you can’t have windows without having teams now?
I have a feeling when I finish rebuilding my gaming PC I’m not going to be a fan of using windows again…
A lot of us use Linux for gaming now. Supports almost all games. But for God’s sake, pick a amd graphics card if you plan to do Linux gaming. Nvidia is buggy as hell.
Ugh. I’ve been wanting to switch for a while but that’s a bummer to hear. I might just have to bite the bullet and deal with buggy drivers. Back when I got my monitors like 6 years ago there wasn’t a ton of options for sub-5ms IPS displays with adaptive sync technology so I had to go with Acer Predators and G-Sync but now I’m kinda stuck with NVIDIA. I’m sure there’s more options for monitors now but I’m not dropping that kind of money on monitors again.
Unless something has changed? Is GSync still proprietary? (Edit: looks like G-Sync does work on AMD cards now but only for newer monitors, dang.)
Ironically, I remember not long ago it was AMD that used to have the crap Linux drivers.
I have been using windows exclusively for 20 years now but just made the switch to Linux (EndeavourOS - an arch distro) 1 week ago and I couldn’t be happier!
99% of all applications that I use work just as well (including games) and for the very very few that won’t work (like Valorant) I am using a dual boot setup. The reason that I made the switch was that I got anxious with W10 EOL approaching since I would rather stop using windows altogether than using W11.
When can I get an iPhone without iMessage being preinstalled? Microsoft is, if anything, late to the party on this kind of anti-user BS.
Or any of the i shit on there. And can you still not even change the default app for some things?
iPhone without iMessage being preinstalled?
Someone wants a choice, yet chooses platform that does not provide a choice? Wondering if there is any other platform that allows you to customize your phone. Hmmm. 🤔🤔🤔
Seriously you can’t have windows without having teams now?
you can just uninstall it
Or install some alternative OS that don’t have bloatware & ads out of the box!
I personally do a ton of game streaming to my Steam Deck which is my main driver for using Windows as it works better with NVIDIA Shield + Moonlight, but I highly recommend you give Pop!OS a try. I’m very pro-linux, but for the longest time it just wasn’t there for gaming and I didn’t recommend it. With Valve going full steam ahead for the Steam Deck, Proton has gotten so good that for 95% of games things just work out of the box without any issue. Wine even has support for Easy Anti Cheat now and more features are coming every week.
Ugh. I’ve been wanting to switch for a while but that’s a bummer to hear. I might just have to bite the bullet and deal with buggy drivers. Back when I got my monitors like 5 years ago there wasn’t a ton of options for sub-ms IPS displays with sync technology so I had to go with Acer Predators and GSync but now I’m kinda stuck with NVIDIA. I’m sure there’s alternatives now but I’m not dropping that kind of money on monitors again.
Ironically, I remember not long ago it was AMD that used to have the crap Linux drivers.
If they would also investigate Apple for forcing Safari on iOS
They already have: https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/26/apple_ios_browser/
I’m not an expert on EU antitrust but these things seem like they naturally go together. After all, Outlook comes with Office, right? Is that not a communication and collaboration tool?
Well… that depends on who you ask. Some say that Teams being a part of the bundle is anti competitive (which it is). Outlook used to be only a mail client, so it made sense when it was part of the Office package, as one thing that an Office user needs, is an email client. Exchange servers had to be hosted by the company. However nowadays, you get the client and the infra for a subscription based model so it was kind of grandfathered in, I guess. If I as a company say I’m not interested in Teams and want to not pay for it as I do not plan to use it, msft will tell me it’s not possible. Therefore, businesses like Slack can never succeed because I as a company will never look at alternatives if I already get a messaging app built into my Office suite.
I dunno, I’m just mumbo jumbing really and not a lawyer (or an EU citizen, for that matter). I just hate Teams.
>Therefore, businesses like Slack can never succeed because I as a company will never look at alternatives if I already get a messaging app built into my Office suite.
I’d like to see evidence of this, because I don’t really believe it in practice. In my experience Office is always installed, but that doesn’t stop companies from also using Google sheets and docs as well, shit I worked somewhere that used Lotus Notes too. Multiple video call services were used at my last job, Zoom and Workplace. I’ve got multiple types of SQL databases that I use daily, SQL Server, Postgres, Oracle, and even sometimes Access which is included in the Office suite. Companies love redundancy.
Not sure exactly what evidence I can show you other then myself being a sysadmin for companies who used the M365 suite and refused to use anything other then teams for communication. Anytime we brought up an alternative (even Zoom) it was always shot down by finance who said “we already have Teams”. Same thing for Slack.
That’s kinda what I’m thinking. It’s just a new app that is part of Microsoft Office but also available standalone. Pretty sure you can also just… not install it during Office install, just like all of the other apps. They all work independently of each other.
Except Outlook only lets you add Teams meetings to appointments, not Zoom, for example. Teams is prioritised in several other parts of MS Office suite
I’m no big fan of MS. And even if I were, using Teams would make that praise fall in the shitter
But I’m tired of these groups arguing that something should be less complete as a good thing
Why doesn’t Yamaha sue Honda for including their own radio in the car? And surely customers would be irritated that they had to go and get another fucking radio
If I buy “Office Suite” I want it to have all the products included. If I think teams sucks I can get something else
If they make it difficult for that, like they did with IE, that’s a different story. But merely including it? Come on
They tried that shit with antivirus. I’m GLAD MS includes defender. If I had to get all that shit separately, I’d be irritated. And if I don’t like defender, I’m free to get something else
I use a lot of MS products. But when they try to trick me into using their browser every time I update, I have to dig through settings to remove Teams,and I have to install a third party app to choose the browser and search engine used from search bar, it’s clear they’re running amok
Well that’s the kind of shit I was talking about with actual issues. It’s annoying
Same in edge where it keeps trying to enable recommendations and other trash. Even now on my phone it keeps trying to send notifications to get me to use bing chat gpt. You’re a glorified wallpaper rotation, gtfo
I keep edge as my default for work. It’s just easier with the typical shitty intranet that breaks down if you use a different browser
First, it’s not a very good analogy. Second, you can put a different radio in your car; you can’t remove Teams without removing all of Office. Third, people would be pretty mad at Honda if their cars shipped with a piece of shit radio instead of something at least nice.
Edit: I take back the part about uninstalling Teams. You can do that. I was thinking of Skype for Business.