For a long time, I would occasionally use my personal phone to check work email and Slack when I had to be out-of-office for an errand. They created a new policy last month that would force me to have a “work” profile on my phone if I wanted to continue using those apps. Fuck that. Instead I removed every work related app from my phone.

“Sorry boss, I can’t check my messages while waiting at my doctor’s office anymore.Why? Oh, because IT policies won’t let me.”

Not that I’m actually trying to defend MS/Teams (seriously, fuck ‘em both); but this is more due to IT Admin settings.

We have similar in our company, that’s in place because we handle PIR data regularly and it’s meant to be a speed bump rather than full roadblock.

Oooh, I hate it so bad…… I used to click “Save” and my word document would ask to save in the only folder I save ALL my documents in. Change the name, save, so easy!

Now it asks if I want to save to OneDrive… Fuck No Mr Paperclip! I want it in the folder I always use and don’t want to have to select “Other” then dig through screens to select the thing I use every time!

There shouldn’t be worms in the poop of a healthy dog. This analogy just keeps getting better and more accurate.

Onedrive is pretty ok, other than being annoying. A company I worked for was acquired by another company that had their own cloud storage product. After the acquisition, they forced us to migrate from onedrive to their product. It was so bad… Files would constantly corrupt and disappear, the speed was terrible, trying to share files didn’t work half the time, when sharing folders the people you shared with wouldn’t see all the files in the folder. They also limited our storage from 1TB to 25GB making it pretty useless for storing builds of our product or trying to share VMs.

And the worst part is that they also closed our SMB network share to force us to use that piece of shit.

After that experience, I will never complain about Onedrive again.

I hate teams and have to use it for work . They insist on having all the important documents I need accessed through teams instead of just putting them in a folder .

Slow, buggy, annoying interface, hogs extreme amounts of resources locally, can be used to spy on its users.

What’s not to like? It’s basically how Elon envisions X, an “everything app” that is actually good at nothing specific.

Agreed. It feels a bit janky here and there but otherwise works ok.

But don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t say I like it.

Now it was a few years ago I used it regularly last time, but moving to Slack was a huge relief.

One thing I remember with teams is that sending files was always a hassle. Sometimes files didn’t arrive. Files couldn’t have the same name as other previously sent files (because everything was in a onedrive folder).

Slack has much better search. It felt like I could finally find the messages I wanted to find. With teams it was a gamble.

And then there’s much better bot integration. At my work we have multiple bots that send messages when there’s e.g. production errors. We can then start thread discussions directly on that posts about the error, or link it to other channels to escalate the issue. And with a working search engine we can easily find the conversation again as a reference.

It got many small things that just adds value.

I haven’t used competing apps to know, but as a forced teams user it is very sluggish, seems to break other ms apps half the time and has some strange and persistent design choices that irk me. It also crashes on its own, when I’m not using it 2-3 times a day.

It has improved in terms of features lately, but still feels very bloated and WIP most of the time. It still won’t let me control where video windows are, and I’ll never understand this.

This is our replacement for Skype, which was obviously feature deficient and getting old, but does what it’s supposed to do and doesn’t cause problems.

Not sure if there’s a good competing app in terms of video and slack functionality, integration into outlook and onedrive (both of which also annoy me and seem to be performing worse-over-time, but are unavoidable and sometimes useful.)

fuxk yea I get like an extra 30 mins a day at leastttt

It temporarily deletes my meetings just before they happen, so that I don’t have to attend them!

Of course, when I open it later, the meetings are restored, with the original date, and no trace of the deletion. So not attending them is quite hard to explain to others. But it does save me from attending!

Hahaha!

Fuckin epic!

How the fuck did they let motherfucking Zoom take over. The video-call equivalent of “Googling” something was to “Skype.” When Covid hit, Microsoft screwed the pooch horribly.

My sister is super high ranking at Microsoft, and when she calls the family, she uses Zoom.

Well, I’m a unix guy for 30 years and hated M$ bill gates blablabla and forced to use windows at work etc. Teams was somewhat bad at the beginning, especially start of covid pandemic , I’m using Teams multiple times daily for ~5 years now. But since ~1 year it handles video call pretty nicely, 20+ feeds, share screens, whiteboard, etc. it’s pretty stable at least, don’t crash anymore, and we can have multiple accounts. It took times to reach this state I agree…

The core of what made Skype great was made by a team of engineers in Estonia. Once it got acquired most of those people left the company. Many of them ended up at Twilio.

I always say that the only reason they keep Skype alive is to make Teams appear good

Skype used to be peer to peer. Your call went from you to your friend (whomever). Microsoft decided that they couldn’t mitm that setup to scrape data; so, soon after they acquired Skype, they made all calls go through their servers.

Then they tried to make Skype make more money, since those servers aren’t free. Then they made teams and copied half the code into that, and cludged the rest to make it hold together.

I think I don’t like that Microsoft has access to stored chat messages between kids.