If I ever work at a company that uses Teams again, I will quit that company. How much I hate Teams can in no way be overstated. For a chat program it shouldn't cause so much anger, but its so bad at everything it does.
I’m eagerly anticipating our company moving to Teams.
Right now, the only approved chat solution is Skype for Business (with only plaintext messaging - rich text, files and images have been disabled for security reasons).
Other chat and social media sites are blocked at a firewall level (including Slack, Discord, Facebook, etc.).
I’ve heard bad things about Teams, but it’s surely better than the current solution we use with its lack of persistence and plain text limitation.
Oh man, I actually prefer the Linux version to the Windows one. The interface is a bit more usable, in that all the controls are grouped in the same place. On Windows, the bar is split along the top and right sides of the screen, and you can't set the incoming video to take the whole screen. Even "focus on content" still leaves a bunch of stuff hanging around.
The only thing I prefer on Windows is that it uses native notifications. Other than that, it's the same laggy, broken piece of crap on all platforms.
When I was still using a Mac, teams there seemed similar to Linux.
I just use the web version which works well enough on chrome, but is annoying. But luckily we also have slack and that's where most of data science/software collaboration happens
At my last production plant, we used internal IRC server for the factory floor (export controlled) to cut/paste between test stations, cant use most cloud chat for export controlled data.
Also another internal IRC for the NOC and systems admins, mostly since its been up for a decade+.
See, the problem with working for Slack/Microsoft/Google (which is also hilariously a cellphone company)/other provider of messaging services, is if you're on the network ops team, what do you do when your service is down?
Deep in the playbooks there's still an IRC fallback.
Zulip has a brilliant threading model (ability to move messages between threads after the fact) but the UI is not something you could recommend to a non-technical user.. yet. I really hope they improve it.
> the UI is not something you could recommend to a non-technical user..
+1
This is Zulip biggest downfall. I’ve participated over the past 2 years in chat.zulip.org activately advocating for better UI design, even multiple times mocking up what an improved UI would look like and there’s so much stubborness to change it frustrating.
I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing more than small tweaks will every change regarding the UI, which is unfortunate.
I’m fully aware. But the changes still don’t address the core problem which is that the UI looks like something from the 1990s.
I’m not meaning to hate in it. I actually love Zulip which is why I spent the time and effort mocking up ways to improve it. But the core developers don’t like change.
Discord is honestly great for work, especially if you're organizing contractors using their roles system.
The problem is that it's also the chat system a lot of my friends and hobbies use, so it really messes with my work/life balance. If I do ever use Discord for work again, I'm going to have to make a separate account.
We use Guilded at Guilded. Corporate use is not our intended use case and I wouldn’t recommend Guilded for enterprise concerns, but as a startup, I can’t imagine not having this tool. All of our chat, docs, calendars, tasks, meetings, etc are in one place and easily cross-referenceable. More importantly, we have groups which are like mini-servers inside your server. Your whole company can be in one server, while each team can have their own space with their own channels and permissions.
Hard to tell since the site doesn't offer much info and pushes users to download right away, but are the calendar and docs self contained in the app or do they interface with outside services and pull data in?
It's actually better than it was 5 years ago. I worked at a company 2017-18 that used slack, changed jobs to a company that didn't use slack 2018-21 and now work at another company that uses Slack. I find that the product is much better today at basic things (performance, search etc) than it was in 2017.
Weird, my experience has been the opposite. Started using it in 2014, it was great for a few years and then started gradually going downhill in terms of performance, bugs, (desirable) feature additions, etc. I have constant problems with syncing and notification-clearing, and somehow Discord (?) got syntax highlighting for various programming languages in code blocks and Slack still doesn't have that
The problem with Teams is it has a ton of badly implemented functionality destroying what it does well on a straightforward basis - simple chat. For that use case, it is as good as anything else out there and I don’t know why people complain.
If you start using things like actual “Teams” it starts getting troublesome. We use it like a Facebook wall. Individual vertical heads will post information or call to action from time to time but it is largely static while we chat with each other all day outside it.
This is bad but what pisses off tech illiterate people even more is they have an entire share point built for the fucking software. Most tech illiterate people cannot understand how to use it and keep switching between that and chat and losing their work. If you need to use a file heavily while chatting, you need to open it on the desktop version or the entire experience will suck donkey nuts. If you need to constantly use that particular share point file system for daily tasks, then you’re an idiot if you can’t figure out or ask IT for the easier solution of just syncing it to your file explorer and never touching the Teams app.
The app sucks major balls but a lot of it is because it caters to a non tech savvy crowd and they’re constantly trying to walk a fine line between being functional graphically and also allowing power users to just get super access and get on with their day.
> For [the chat] use case, it is as good as anything else out there and I don’t know why people complain.
What kind of computer are you running this on? In my case, I have a Zen 3 laptop and Teams can't keep up with my typing. It's the only app where this happens. And I only type with basically 2.5 fingers per hand, I'm not some kind of typing Olympics title-holder.
It also somehow manages to be the only program where I often type my letters out of order.
If god forbid I want to scroll back up in the chat to see what was said a few days ago, it's an absolutely horrible experience. The chat jumps all over the place, loading messages is laggy, and occasionally, it downright doesn't work (the bubbles stay blank). I need to go to a different chat, come back, and try to go back up the history again.
Don't even get me started on search, which, if it works, won't give you any context.
I think the reason people complain is that we're in 2022, running ridiculously powerful computers, and this crap still manages to be an all-round inferior experience than MS's own MSN messenger 20 years ago.
Yeah, I know it's "more than a chat app", but as you put it, it does it terribly.
So if the chat part sucks, the "more than chat part" sucks, what's left to not complain about?
I am running this on a fairly powerful machine, yes. I forgot to mention that part. It’s a laptop with i7 10th gen and 32 GB of RAM. And you’re absolutely right in how much Teams hogs memory because my org basically expanded their IT budget by many multiples during the pandemic and upgraded folks from 8 to 16 GB laptops / desktops before they realized that Teams and another software we generally run all day cannot manage with 16 gigs.
Maybe all these troubles go away with more memory but just to be clear, I face almost none of the issues you’re talking about except for the truly crappy search which has only marginally improved this year but is still very, very bad.
I agree on that front. I’m also a power user of most software so I keep a mental note of nifty tricks that normal people cannot be expected to maintain. Even the IT folks didn’t know Teams had inbuilt functionality to mount individual sharepoints separately in file explorer (which just plugs into OneDrive for sync functionality) and they were trying to connect to it using some crazy network tricks until one of them saw how I mounted it and told me to show him how to do it.
This is far and above what a normal user is expected to have discovered, but I just needed to point out that complaining on it on this forum is a bit hypocritical considering the vast majority of us are certainly top 0.1% on the tech literacy spectrum and most likely have access to very powerful systems that the typical user does not.
We use Google because a VP has a hardon for Google. It’s not good. Threading is garbage, there are limited text formatting options, and some of them don’t work right all the time (code blocks don’t work if you’re copy/pasting text that has a format applied, like bold or colored text, for instance). I like the Google video calls for the simple interface, but I dislike that the chat doesn’t save.
very cool to hear of Dendrite being used in the wild like this; it's still beta so we definitely don't make guarantees about it being bug-free yet. that said, would be interested to hear what weird bugs you hit (in #dendrite:matrix.org perhaps) so we can get more real-life datapoints on how it's behaving. Also, very glad to hear that Element is feeling snappy.
Yeah, we were aware that it is beta (I host a private server as well.), but decided that Dendrite probably is the best way to future-proof the solution.
Most of the quirks I have seen seems to be with federation, but since we don't federate the company server, that is not an issue.
There have been some avatars missing in the contact list, notification indicator when there aren't any new notifications and other small stuff. Nothing major really, works great!
Especially since you have weekly releases with plenty of fixes.
I'll keep an eye open for bugs and drop by #dendrite!
Awesome job with the software, looking forward to the coming releases!
The small agency I work with has used keybase in the past but it’s been degrading ever since zoom bought it. It was such a good platform on the way up.
