I am forced to use it (work) and it is missing really basic features that messenger software had in the 1990s like Push-To-Talk, real multi-window (even with the recent "pop-out" functionality), and its UI is all the worst modern trends. You cannot extend it or fix these issues (e.g. plugins, custom CSS styles, etc).
Plus it is buggy, I keep not getting calls/messages/etc, and every time my computer sleeps/wakes it sits in offline until you open the main window from the system tray. Those are year+ old bugs.
While it is often updated[0], the Team's priorities leave a lot to be desired. Adding new gimmicks and tie-ins while ignoring the dilapidated state of the core software itself for two+ years now.
[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-new-in-mic...
A UX that encourages replying out of thread because it's too darn confusing.
Unable to quote messages on desktop, but you can on mobile.
Unable to be signed into more than one Team. Have they never heard of consultants? At one point last year I had 4 separate Teams I needed to be signed into. Microsoft's solution have different Chrome profiles (Yep, Chrome, not Edge) for each one. My laptop only has 16GB of ram, so that didn't last long...
Super unclear UX around document viewing. I open a file in Teams and if I have write access I am instantly saving all changes. So many times I've shared a document for feedback and then had to recover the original version from Sharepoint because people changed a lot of things without Track changes on.
Based on Sharepoint. 'nuff said.
My favourite file access "feature" of Teams (I verified it was in fact working as intended, at least until the pandemic and the warts started getting more obvious) was that class teams had read/write access by default for all files in a team. This meant every student in a class team could modify what you uploaded by default. Of course fixing this required opening up the team in Sharepoint and fiddling with permissions, totally something every teacher is expected to figure out right?
Not really a software feature, but their update rollout style is awful as well. Announce features 4-8 weeks in advance of rolling out patches. Inconsistent rollouts, so my home desktop might have the latest feature patch, but my work laptop won't (I was around 4 weeks out of sync at one point). Manual checking for updates won't apply the latest patches. Meanwhile their consultants in education are crowing about all the new features or bug fixes.
I actually like some of the feature set, and it's very useful in an educational setting now they've brought some of the new features online (3 months later than would have been useful for the pandemic lockdown in my part of the world, but oh well), but enough frustrating elements that I'm constantly supporting workmates in its use.
Wait, what? Do threads move when they get replies or something?
Leaves a LOT to be desired.
1. The UI took the fun out of well, whatever, Slack was/is. For some of the common interest channels at work, I see less people going to them.
2. I'm in a group where we frequently need to share images (mostly plots) among the members. Sometimes they just disappear. Yes. You upload an image during a conversation, come back to it a few min later, its not there, and the person at the either end of the chat hasn't seen it either. Guess what OS I'm on: Windows 10 Pro.
Because of this I've resorted to using the web version of teams occasionally, which doesn't seem to suffer from this issue.
3. This one is actually baffling: when I try to upload an image in 2 different conversations (one after another), the second one complains the file already exists. This is during upload.
4. Inconsistent UI: did you know you could reply to individual messages from the Android app for Teams? Doesn't work on web or the windows desktop client. So when I am catching up on a conversation, I occasionally switch to the mobile app to reply to specific messages.
So that's my workflow: the Teams website opened on my laptop browser for most of the messaging, Teams running on mobile, in case I need to reply to specific messages, and Teams running as an application on my laptop for video/screen sharing calls.
5. You cannot specify a Download folder. Yes that's a thing in 2020. [1]
But, yeah, "costs". I miss Slack.
[1] https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
That's because, bafflingly, it uses a local directory-cache for files. Think of it as the "Downloads" folder for a browser. Any time you upload, Teams will try to save it to your local cache first; if it finds the old file, it will whine like that.
Any time you want to upload a file, you should really not do in Chats but in Channels, which have a separate area for each Channel (backed by Sharepoint). Except in some companies (like where I'm now) people for some reason use Chats almost exclusively instead of Channels, so the whole thing becomes awkward: go to the channel, upload, get the link, paste the link in chat.
I guess it could be worse, it could be AOL.
If anything, this points to poor use-case study and/or execution. There is a case for channels and for individual chats: details of how files upload happen should be dealt with under the hood.
Frankly, it feels odd even talking about this issue; we are discussing file uploads, worth a few kBs, in a messenger. This really, really, shouldn't be a problem :-)
people for some reason use Chats almost exclusively instead of Channels
The fact that there even needs to be such a distinction is itself a problem. They're both conversations, except with some slight differences? That's just asking for confusion.
Considering that browsers have also adopted this "modern stupidity" for a while, I'm not so surprised, but the lack of a "Save As" option definitely perplexed me the first few times I've tried to download something --- clicking Download and expecting at least a choice, but seeing "download complete" makes me think where did it go!?!?
The response to that feedback item is baffling, but it's definitely not an uncommon thing for a big bureaucracy like MS. The actual code change probably takes minutes, but the mound of process associated with it causes these sorts of anti-decisions to occur.
As you said too, the whole thing is buggy. Sometimes screen sharing doesn't work unless you reopen the app, for example.
The wiki feature is crap (at least the web version, I haven't tried the desktop version of the wiki) - formatting is a mess, markdown support is practically non-existent, it's buggy as hell, and so unbelievably slow.
If they had a feature freeze and concentrated on overhauling the UI and fixing the bugs, it could actually be a great product... but as it is, it's loathsome.
That said, apart from the shitty embedding support and their channel management, I REALLY like Stream and using it for a video lesson platform. The captioning is quite good even for my fast talking, Aussie accent and jargon.
That said, beyond novelty I'm not sure how useful a CC feature is.
The plugin will try to hide this behind a "Join Teams Meeting" hyperlink, but on more than one occasion I've had the link converted to plaintext, leaving the recipient with no idea what they're supposed to do. So every time before sending a teams meeting from Outlook I have to extract the mess of a URL and manually paste into the location field.
Microsoft is pretty cool with training though. During the training they said this wasn’t an issue because the url gets converted to the file name on display. And we’d only ever want to paste urls into outlook or teams, nowhere else.
I would turn these banners off, but as far as I can tell, there is no way to get badges to show up on the icon (only other cue to remind me people want to talk to me) without these banners.
I really wish there was a 3rd party client that was all native that I could use. Teams is definitely the worst part of my software stack.
But yeah, notification management is basically a pain in Teams. Not sure if it's still the case, but even on Windows 10 it would use its own notification window instead of the system one...
Infuriating.
Terrible audio focus on a single speaker, it really forces you to speak like on these old CB radios where you had to say "over" every time you were done talking.
The single window UI follows the mobile-first trend but is awfully inefficient on my three monitor setup, even more so with screen sharing.
Plus, our admins lock the whole MS Office 365 down so that there are no APIs or third-party plugins allowed. Data in it is just trapped.
Such a waste of human potential.
To be fair, that's a feature from team's perspective. If your admins are worried about sensitive data leaking out at all, and refuse to have a whitelist of approved 3rd party integrations, then that's on them. Imo it's a good thing to allow admins to do.
It's so infuriating.
Mind boggling that continues to make it past UAT.
The killer feature really is that it is a dream to deploy for admins who already had AD. I pushed it by group policy and sent an email telling people to log in with their existing Office credentials. I can't remember what I did with macs, I think I may have just told users to grab it from the appstore.
Think of all the admins faced with having to move their whole company to home working with no notice for Covid-19, you can see why Teams is an app that has found it's moment. Teams has been the saviour of many companies during the crisis. I'm sorry but minor UI niggles (which I personally don't find problematic) just pale into insignificance.
>The killer feature really is that it is a dream to deploy for admins who already had AD.
For instance, on the Windows desktop app, the word "I've" gets marked as incorrectly spelled. When you click on it to see the spelling suggestions, it suggests "I've". Clicking on the suggestion does nothing and it continues to flag it. This has been an issue in the app for over a year and I refuse to believe that the developers are unaware of it. It's a very common word to be typing.
Another problem is sending files or images. You have to wait for it to finish uploading before it will let you send the message. Not only is it pretty slow (I would estimate 1MB/s, whereas Discord uploads at my full 12MB/s), but sometimes it won't let you send for a couple seconds even after it finishes uploading.
A couple months ago Teams added read receipts, which is really nice, but they don't always work. My work has them globally enabled and everyone is on the latest client, yet each person only sees them for certain other people. I don't see them for anyone, but my coworker sees them for about 50% of our staff.
Notifications are also buggy. Teams will just randomly decide to not give you notifications for messages or calls. I've missed multiple messages in Teams for days because it never alerted me. I had to actually open the specific chat with that person before I saw the message. I've gotten into the habit of checking Teams every 15 minutes because of this. Teams for Android also seems to send notifications a good 30 seconds before the desktop app does, so I usually keep my phone on my desk solely for Teams notifications.
I would also like to point out that Microsoft built a general-purpose notification system into Windows, yet Teams uses a completely custom notification system. This completely baffles me as they aren't even following their own company's best practices.
The spelling situation gets better than this. You're actually forced to use the Teams one. For example, on MacOS, text fields get "free" spelling and grammar by the OS, which honour whatever settings you've configured. Of course, Teams doesn't use MacOS text fields, so they're on their own.
I live in France and so use French in Teams, but I absolutely hate having programs in several languages so all my programs are in US English. If I set Teams to use English for the interface, guess what language it uses for spelling? I'm still looking for a way to tell it in which language to check spelling, but we'll have probably switched to the next shiny thing until this happens...
Apps are not allowed in my corporate deployment.
I’d settle for “save to PDF”.
This is on Windows computer too, like, how do you guys not know how to detect an Internet connection on your own operating system?
Generally I don't have much time to mutter about Teams because some Atlassian monstrosity is busting my balls.
Everything from WhatsApp to SMS to Slack has a unified list of chats. Teams does not.
Teams is wrong.
Search is broken in it and if you scroll back a few days on a conversation it just stops loading messages...
It's just awful.
I use the Linux one and it actually works surprisingly well. Video calls, screen sharing, etc.
However, for some reason, if when you start Teams the mic is unplugged, it will never detect it if plugged in afterwards. I often use it on a desktop pc without a built-in mic, and I only plug my headphones in case of a call. 100% of the time I have to restart Teams.
Oh, and as others have said elsewhere, it's painfully slow. There's a constant sort of lag about it. For example the highlights changing in the chats list when moving the mouse on top of them...
It's probably possible to mod it, given that it's Electron, and definitely easier than doing same to a native application, but the relative lack of configurability is certainly irritating.
The amount of RAM and CPU it uses is also ridiculous even in comparison to Slack, which was already pretty bloated.
(I wonder if any thirdparty clients have been created --- at least two exist for Slack, but I haven't looked for Teams.)
I've also been forced to use it, and have considered doing some RE and writing a Win32 native one to show MS what it should've done --- if anything I expect they should have plenty of Win32 programmers who know how to do it --- but like many others, have too many things to fix and not enough time for them...
At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, these Microsoft Teams meetings never seem to have a dial-in number (my laptop microphone is horrible). If I try to use my computer's microphone to speak, it asks for camera permission at the same time. I don't want everyone to see me in briefs, just listen to my voice. So it's apparently either share my video and audio, or just be silent. I've been choosing to be silent.
I've spent the majority of my only two Teams meetings trying to figure out these issues. I never had a problem with other apps like GotoMeeting, Zoom, or Discord, or even Skype (also owned by Microsoft)
Maybe in the past, or on some clients only. On the Windows client you can currently operate camera and mic independently and choose how to respond to each calls (with video or audio only).
It'll have a little text prompt at the top with a Sign In link.
But if I join a meeting, and I'm signed out, I just get a generic error message. It's like they didn't even code to check that I'm signed in when trying to join a meeting and advise me. Sometimes I have to restart the app after signing in to make the meeting link work again. Just feels janky.
I also had to mute it because on my budget work-provided laptop the Windows 10 notifications for every one line message take up a few inches of my screen which is pretty annoying when I'm working.
They also adopted the seeming good policy to ask users to vote for future bug fix/feature requirement, which of course leads to more feature release than bug fixing. But then this is the norm of software development nowadays so I really don't think anyone can change it.
1. There is whitespace between messages
2. My replies are a different color and right justified
Audio is frequently bad too when people speak alternatingly. The new speaker has 2-3 seconds of muffled audio until they're clear again. Especially annoying when speakers rapidly change and all you get is semi muffled audio all the way.
Also the inability to respond to a specific message on desktop has baffled me. It seems like a basic functionality in chat software these days but teams only decided to give it to mobile? Just... Why?
And many emoticons have been renamed or simply removed. Why reinvent the wheel ?
Tries to be a central repo for all of your business docs.
Chews RAM like it’s its prime directive.
Can’t actually find the centralized doc unless you magically remember the channel or team where it was originally shared.
UX is actively hostile and so inefficient.
I have an issue where if there's any sound in my room in a meeting, it reduces the volume of someone else talking to me even if my mic is muted. My workaround is to only keep one earbud in and constantly listen for cars driving past outside so I can crank up the volume in advance. So Teams is literally painful to my ears.
Oh and the most insulting part is how they treat its users like children. You can use giphy to embed a gif but if you search for any “bad” words it says no results. Search for fuck, and it hides them. Everyone using it is an adult, why apply this conservative boomer “nO sWeARIng alLOweD”?
To top it off if you instead copy paste a giphy url it doesn’t embed that properly either!
It's the primary platform for entire schools, now. Whoopee. So you're going to get lots of new child protection features (that fail at their intended purpose) added.
It's horrible.