I use teams. I don’t understand why people hate it… it’s not terrible I think. I don’t have it on my phone though since everyone wants the required Microsoft program thst I can’t think of the name that sllows companies to delete your phone remotely.
In addition to what others say, for me the biggest sin is just how maddeningly slow it is. Trying to scroll a conversation back in time is just miserable. Coming from approaches where scrolling arbitrarily back in history has felt pretty much instant for over 20 years, it just feels horribly backwards. The reasons for that sluggishness is that it’s just a terrible design vaguely wearing a passable layer of paint to make it look approachable.
The user workflow aggressively tries to prevent users from multitasking, despite many jobs requiring this.
Product design is a shining example of the greater Microsoft philosophy of forcing customers to adapt their business to Microsoft’s technology instead of having technology flexible enough to adapt to a customer’s business needs.
From an admin standpoint it has numerous questionable design decisions surrounding UC. For example, you can register non-Teams SIP phones to it, but you can’t see the IP addresses of these registered devices(?!). In general, from a telephony standpoint, Teams is good at providing dial tone and some very basic telephony features, enough to make senior leadership think that it does everything, but if you need UC functionality for more than users who sit at a desk all day it falls apart quickly.
My conversations with representatives from the product team at Microsoft suggests they are out of touch with how businesses use telephones.
To add to 2, it’s kind of like a chat platform built atop SharePoint. It’s so bizarre to try to dig into it from a bot/automation perspective. It’s like everyone complained how crappy it was trying to build business applications on to of SharePoint and felt compelled to prove those folks wrong even though they are pretty much right
And you didn’t even go into the network side of things, where Microsoft nearly forces you whitelist everything on the firewall, since they change like weekly, which IPs or URLs they want whitelisted, sometimes even going through third-party datacenters. And of course their documentation only gets irregular updates and can’t be easily parsed.
As an illustration of number 4:
When “upgrading” from on-site Sharepoint/Exchange to 365 it moves all group e-mail mailboxes to Teams accounts which makes it so group members can no longer send emails from that group’s address unless you restore the old method through a powershell command.
It’s way too slow for what it does. IRC clients from 20 years ago were able to switch between chats instantly. The user status (online, offline, etc.) is so inaccurate it might as well be random.
It’s malware and spyware masquerading as a communications app
Set your status to busy while reading an article or reference doc or talking to a colleague on your phone? Now you’re idle so middle managers can make incorrect assumptions about your work habits.
It takes 3-4 times the resources of Skype that it replaced with no benefit to individual users, it’s just a monopoly killing competition that did the job better.
Teams takes over the sound so you can’t adjust the volume in a meeting by clicking the taskbar and changing volume. If anyone sets their status to away or sick or vacation or whatever there’s a notification about that over the chat and you can’t dismiss it. It’s slow to load, uses a ton of resources (just get a new laptop!) and generally sucks.
On windows 11: Teams does not take over my audio in a call, taskbar button works fine. And say what you will about status messages but I’d rather they be overly annoying than ignored completely. Also way better than auto-reply emails.
It’s not perfect but I’ve worked on teams with it and without it and so far I’ve preferred having it.
Everything past making a call is awful, and those aren’t as good as zoom or most other video conferencing/calling apps. Teams is like the instant ramen version of what it is trying to be.
Now that making calls is the one thing that teams kind of does “directly”, everything else is just manipulating a backing SharePoint… which is pretty much why it’s terrible.
Making a call doesn’t work on a random browser selection that changes every time the thing is updated. It also takes about half a minute to complete a call. And the audio quality is significantly worse than in meetings.
And the most interesting, the brokeness doesn’t apply to attending meetings. Those have completely independent broken cases.
Honestly, there isn’t any single thing in Teams that just works properly.
Don’t forget you can only share 1 screen, not like I might want to show someone both a UI and the diagnostic text at the same time. And God forbid that you and the person you are talking to have wildly different screen sizes… Sure I’m on my 15 in laptop, why not go ahead and share what is on your 35in 8k monitor, im sure teams will work it out.
It randomly closes on me, it is very slow often, sometimes for no reason there is not audio even though everything is configured correctly and I need to restart the computer a few times.
I use teams. I don’t understand why people hate it… it’s not terrible I think. I don’t have it on my phone though since everyone wants the required Microsoft program thst I can’t think of the name that sllows companies to delete your phone remotely.
Intune?
In addition to what others say, for me the biggest sin is just how maddeningly slow it is. Trying to scroll a conversation back in time is just miserable. Coming from approaches where scrolling arbitrarily back in history has felt pretty much instant for over 20 years, it just feels horribly backwards. The reasons for that sluggishness is that it’s just a terrible design vaguely wearing a passable layer of paint to make it look approachable.
I could go on…
I work with Teams as an admin.
To add to 2, it’s kind of like a chat platform built atop SharePoint. It’s so bizarre to try to dig into it from a bot/automation perspective. It’s like everyone complained how crappy it was trying to build business applications on to of SharePoint and felt compelled to prove those folks wrong even though they are pretty much right
And you didn’t even go into the network side of things, where Microsoft nearly forces you whitelist everything on the firewall, since they change like weekly, which IPs or URLs they want whitelisted, sometimes even going through third-party datacenters. And of course their documentation only gets irregular updates and can’t be easily parsed.
Oh gods, I had forgotten what a pain in the ass that setup was and how it would just randomly stop working when they changed something on their side.
We had to change customer contracts to get this done, since the process for firewall changes was too slow…
As an illustration of number 4: When “upgrading” from on-site Sharepoint/Exchange to 365 it moves all group e-mail mailboxes to Teams accounts which makes it so group members can no longer send emails from that group’s address unless you restore the old method through a powershell command.
It’s way too slow for what it does. IRC clients from 20 years ago were able to switch between chats instantly. The user status (online, offline, etc.) is so inaccurate it might as well be random.
Not only that the user status is horribly inaccurate but too many people use it to decide if you are currently working or not.
It’s malware and spyware masquerading as a communications app
Set your status to busy while reading an article or reference doc or talking to a colleague on your phone? Now you’re idle so middle managers can make incorrect assumptions about your work habits.
It takes 3-4 times the resources of Skype that it replaced with no benefit to individual users, it’s just a monopoly killing competition that did the job better.
Teams takes over the sound so you can’t adjust the volume in a meeting by clicking the taskbar and changing volume. If anyone sets their status to away or sick or vacation or whatever there’s a notification about that over the chat and you can’t dismiss it. It’s slow to load, uses a ton of resources (just get a new laptop!) and generally sucks.
On windows 11: Teams does not take over my audio in a call, taskbar button works fine. And say what you will about status messages but I’d rather they be overly annoying than ignored completely. Also way better than auto-reply emails.
It’s not perfect but I’ve worked on teams with it and without it and so far I’ve preferred having it.
Everything past making a call is awful, and those aren’t as good as zoom or most other video conferencing/calling apps. Teams is like the instant ramen version of what it is trying to be.
Now that making calls is the one thing that teams kind of does “directly”, everything else is just manipulating a backing SharePoint… which is pretty much why it’s terrible.
Making a call doesn’t work on a random browser selection that changes every time the thing is updated. It also takes about half a minute to complete a call. And the audio quality is significantly worse than in meetings.
And the most interesting, the brokeness doesn’t apply to attending meetings. Those have completely independent broken cases.
Honestly, there isn’t any single thing in Teams that just works properly.
Just to add to the bitching:
How is it possible that 2 people can’t both share their screens with each other simultaneously? It’s the worst collaboration tool ever
Don’t forget you can only share 1 screen, not like I might want to show someone both a UI and the diagnostic text at the same time. And God forbid that you and the person you are talking to have wildly different screen sizes… Sure I’m on my 15 in laptop, why not go ahead and share what is on your 35in 8k monitor, im sure teams will work it out.
It randomly closes on me, it is very slow often, sometimes for no reason there is not audio even though everything is configured correctly and I need to restart the computer a few times.