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”.
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.
Hmm ok I guess those are valid points.
My company doesn’t use Teams for anything else besides meetings or as s chat app.
There’s no actual work being done through it
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…)
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.
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.
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”.
Serious question, I don’t get the “forced” part. Could you clarify this for me?
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.
Hmm ok I guess those are valid points. My company doesn’t use Teams for anything else besides meetings or as s chat app. There’s no actual work being done through it
No company will ever use Discord as a replacement for Teams. It’s not nearly secure enough
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
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.