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
404’d documentation that points to non existent tools
By far the most annoying ‘feature’ of supporting Microsoft products.
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.
No problem, I’m not surprised that you blocked that train wreck from your memory.
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…
Actually we just finished our switch from Skype to Teams and honestly, as much as I love having GIFs to express my disdain for work, at least Skype could group chats, didn’t require all the RAM in the world, and automatically saved chats which, in a records management hellscape was an absolute lifesaver. Also my headphones would automatically answer a call when I put them on my head but I have a feeling that has more to do with the settings than anything else.
Also I’m tired of having to tell people “no we can’t do that because Microsoft hasn’t integrated that very valuable and highly requested feature you’re asking for”
Oh hell yeah, Teams is far from perfect, but it is still light years ahead of webex
Teams is miserable
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same.
It was kind of fun, because I joined the company as a part of acquihire and they came to my entire team to install MDM on our laptops. It turned out we were mostly running Linux, while their MDM was Windows and MacOS only. They left…
They came back 2 weeks later to tell us it would be best if we installed Windows. We told them “no, thank you” to which they responded with surprised pikachu, because they were used to their suggestions being treated as commands. So they left again.
A month later they came back to tell us we really should install Windows to which we responded that we’d have to rebuild out entire tooling and we’re on tight deadlines as-is. It’s important to note that their Windows setup didn’t allow VMs…
Some time later we got an email to let us know MDM vendor will soon have Linux beta. Does it support Arch and Nixos? They’ll get back to us on that. And we started researching how hard would it be to run BSD on a laptop ;-)
Ah, the confidence boost you get when you know your job is absolutely secure and the only reason you don’t quit is because of a retention bonus :D
deleted by creator
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.
Because the only 2FA allowed was onelogin push. Don’t ask me why.
They also used an “enterprise” VPN that was acquired by some larger company, was pretty much abandoned at that point and only worked with a proprietary client that took days to set up on Linux - this was fun for me and all my colleagues who ended at that sad company as a result of an acquihire and were 80% devs running linux.
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.
It is normally a security thing. Unless the company has managed mobile devices, you don’t want company data on a personal cell phone.
deleted by creator
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?
Yes. And it’s okay, but nothing to write home about.
I mean, it’s a messenger. Nothing more. Don’t overhype something that trivial.
Lol there’s a difference between overhyping and being upset that you were forced to move from a superior chat program to a slower, less efficient and more difficult to use program (Teams)
Edit: Found the Microsoft employee down voting me lmao
Found the Microsoft employee down voting me lmao
“Everyone who disagrees with me is a shill”
It’s just a joke, chill
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.
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 typically use the web version and multiple tabs, but it still doesn’t work. I think it might have something to do with my organization trying to force all the traffic through their own log in page and outlook having no idea what account to associate where.
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.
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.
Uhm… Have you considered that slack has cat picture plugins?
And meme plugins, and 30 other plugins that look for keywords then spam gifs for what you assume can only be an in joke before your time?
Oh, and one of the plugins actually creates tickets from chat, but jira is down and the guy who maintains it is busy writing a panda facts plug-in. So now it just vomits out an error message so everyone avoids the words “ticket”, “issue”, and “status”
“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?
The response was because tickets would cost money to the deparments! What the actual fuck?
1, that’s their problem, as well as whatever actual problem they have if there isn’t a ticket. No ticky, no worky; no ticket, no problem.
2, that’s ok, I’ll create a ticket for the work I choose to do for them so they get appropriately charged.
Yeah that would’ve probably got me in trouble in the best case…
I’m glad I’m not in that shit ass project anymore.
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
some foss projects actually do this and have support staff!
i think libreoffice did this in the past. so does proxmox.
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?
In Teams I can’t use my system volume to control Bluetooth headphones… drives me bananas. Especially because one of my coworkers has a loud mic
That’s the dumbest fucking part of teams, half of the problems that make people hate it are simple dumb shit like this that just prove they, like every other fucking company, prioritize business facing improvements, to the detriment of any user level improvement. IM LOOKING AT YOU AUTODESK!
I have so many issues using Teams with a normal headset. I went into sound settings, and turned off exclusive access to the device. I disabled communication devices. I turned off the sync buttons setting in Teams. Yet Teams still loves to randomly unmute my mic even when it’s muted from the PHYSICAL button. Makes no sense
You probably can. The issue is that most bt headsets mount themselves as a pair of stereo headphones, and a handsfree kit. And for some weird reason Teams will ONLY EVER broadcast audio to the handsfree kit. If you change the volume control to the handsfree kit, blam, you can change the volume.
It isn’t just teams. That’s how the hardware is implemented and it also means that you cannot have high quality audio and use the mic at the same time. It’s actually Windows, not the bt device or the app.
Legacy decisions that keep getting carried forward
I figured out you can disable Bluetooth telephony services if you navigate deep into the printers and other devices control panel. But this might also disable the mic. I’m not able to test it right now.
We use Slack for those of us on the IT team, but Teams for everyone else. I despise Teams.
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
Yesterday Teams decided I don’t need a microphone. It just mutes me after a few seconds. Only thing I can do is unmute myself every few seconds.
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💫
Teams communication is fine but that file “structure” is atrocious.
My favorite Teams feature is that when you share your screen, it puts some giant bar that can’t be hidden at the top of the screen that covers up your tabs.
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.
And they’re saying chat software is a headache lol
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 use Slack for personal projects and Teams for work. I think both are fine. The main reason it made sense to use Teams at work was because there were a number of products in use by different teams. IT had Slack and the rest had Zoom. Zoom was raising their costs and we already had Teams as part of 0365. So it was either buy Slack licenses for the entire company or just get everyone on Teams. It was kind of a no-brainer and it was hard to come up with a convincing argument to pay for Slack for everyone other than “Microsoft bad”.
It’s funny you mention that about teams and O365. Microsoft just announced O/M365 licenses will be sold without Teams now, in the US. Something something antitrust lawsuit.
