VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

1) Have you ever been exposed to alternative communicators?

2) What features do you enjoy about teams

3) What platform are you using it from (Windows Desktop / Laptop? What spec)

4) Have you ever written a bot or integration?

5) Can you take me through a very brief working day for you, with a focus on collaborating with others.. (file sharing, online chats, IRL chats, meetings?)

1) WebEx and the open source chat that Oracle appropriated. Fortunately Zoom came and went too quickly.

2) Searching the Exchange corporate directory. BASIC features: status, embedding pictures, attaching files that Outlook would block. Sharing links that aren't obfuscated.

3) Can you even run Teams from Apple / Linux?

4) Ha! Imagine the nightmares for the person linking Atlassian and Teams.

5) Group texts, file shares, voice calls, recorded meetings. Meetings with groups from other companies is almost painless.

Ok, then I can see why Teams ranks among them. I would invite you to try something like Zulip or Mattermost but I think ignorance is bliss and you should avoid knowing about anything that could be better. Your mind might do this for you (rejection) but best not to tempt fate.

> 2) Searching the Exchange corporate directory. BASIC features: status, embedding pictures, attaching files that Outlook would block. Sharing links that aren't obfuscated.

Appreciate the list, the only one of these that's Teams specific is searching a corp directory. Do you use the "Teams" functionality, or do you use the chat exclusively?

> 3) Can you even run Teams from Apple / Linux?

Yes, it's very slow. It's also very slow from laptops, the best "Teams experience" I've ever seen has been in GameDev where we all ran Windows 7 on dodecacore CPUs with 128-256G of DDR4.

It was still slower than Slack on my macbook air though.

> 4) Ha! Imagine the nightmares for the person linking Atlassian and Teams.

Yeah, people do. People also use Excel from within Teams.

Writing bots for Teams is a special nightmare, but webhooks can work.

> 5) Group texts, file shares, voice calls, recorded meetings. Meetings with groups from other companies is almost painless.

Do you spend a lot of your day face-to-face or more of your day in Teams?

Do you find yourself arranging meetings to sync rather than using the chat functionality?

Do you find that people have to ask around a lot to get an answer and then ask again later when it's forgotten, or can they find their answer in history?

Unfortunately. Teams is just as performant on MacOS/iOS as it is on Windows.

Guess this means I wont' get to run Teams in the company I'm joining, which is doing all its security attestation via Microsoft;

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32678839

My preference is text chat but we do a lot of unscheduled voice chats when screen-sharing is involved. In-person meetings are nice when possible, it's been easy enough to connect a Teams meeting from a conference room phone.

Before Teams I set up a Mattermost instance, and I think RocketChat integrated to GitLab? Nobody used those. As we all know the value in these things comes from network effects; with Teams corporate IT can set Teams as a startup app by Domain policy, now everyone in your company has to be online. That's the real killer feature.

That's how I run it.

Yet more vendor lock-in.

I've used both Teams and Zoom (and others). Honestly, I'd rather use Zoom instead of Teams.

> BASIC features: status, embedding pictures, attaching files that Outlook would block. Sharing links that aren't obfuscated.

Status is settable by just about any competitor to Teams. Slack and Zoom both can set your current status.

Embedding pictures and files is also not unique to Teams.

Obfuscated links? Just a matter of time before Microsoft changes that to some microsoft link for a "vulnerability scanner" and then charges the company for the privilege to block random things it doesn't understand how to scan.

> Can you even run Teams from Apple / Linux?

Yes / technically yes (not supported any more)

> Group texts, file shares, voice calls, recorded meetings. Meetings with groups from other companies is almost painless.

Slack and Zoom are better at all of these.

We already have to bite the bullet and pay for office, at least we get free chat

I wish Teams integrated better with Github Issues/PR, but it works well as a company-wide chat

If cost is your concern: SaaS Zulip is free.

Poor mac users.

> I think ignorance is bliss and you should avoid knowing about anything that could be better. Your mind might do this for you (rejection) but best not to tempt fate.

There’s nothing intellectual about fake curiosity, passive aggressive remarks, or insistently pushing your opinion just for the sake of sounding smarter than the next guy.

I can tell you I've successfully been in Teams video conferences from my Linux desktop, in the browser. I was surprised too.

To me, what I really don't like is that you can present the files and wiki via network file share, but the format of the wiki is read-only in that mode... it would be significantly better as user editable markdown with front-matter. It's some strange quasi-html extensions that you aren't going to be able to really even use.

I don't like that they separated the chat channels out... you now have unread, channels, chats, meeting chats... going between them is now a mess as I'm usually in a combination of meeting chats and 1:1 chats mostly.

While I do appreciate the integration of outlook's calendar, I really don't want meeting notifications for anything more than a couple days out... it can wait until I check my mail.

The real time video chat is okay... I think Zoom and Slack both have lightly better video quality and features though. I don't like Zoom's chat/discussion features nearly as much... I like Slack overall slightly better, but don't think some of the externalized integrations are as good as Teams.

Overall, it's "okay"... I don't love it as I think it's gotten worse over time while Slack is getting better, slowly. I'm not vocal enough to raise hell one way or another for/against it. I've used it on Linux without much issue... so it works well enough.

But you blanket claimed its fine, its not fine.

I won’t work in a company that forces me to use Teams- its a good proxy for how they think about internal communications and how they feel about staff.

You can claim what you want, I was curious, but don’t come in here telling people its ok to use teams- we’ve established that his options were fucking WebEx- which is also not fine.

Last time I checked Zoom was a pig on resources and required a weird background worker- and you couldn't even send files.

You’re talking to different people and didn’t even care. This is not fine.

> which is also not fine

You act like your word is law. Which is also not fine. You shouldn’t need someone on the internet reminding you of this.

That is an important consideration to have if you’re going to be telling people that its fine to inflict it on your workforce. You used cost as a reason but:

1) Teams is a seperate paid license now (since it was anti-competitive- the only way they could have grown such a market share with such a terrible product).

2) There are superior free alternatives.

Don’t come up in here, (in a thread where I am asking, genuinely, about what makes Teams a viable and active preference for people) saying its fine without any fucking follow up on why and then get bent out of shape when challenged.

Teams is not fine, if you’re working on the product or you have inflicted it on your workforce you should be better- I won’t pretend its ok so that you feel better.