Installed Teams because I have an interview later today:
Sign into Teams.
New browser window opens.
Sign into Office.
New Teams window opens.
Sign into Teams.
"This version of Teams won't work with your account, click here to use a different version."
New browser window opens.
Sign into Office.....
HOW IS THIS THE FUCKING DEFAULT EVERYONE REACHES FOR?!?!?!
@nuintari It is the worst thing ever, UNLESS you are in a castle on a hill with a moat. If you have an Exchange server, and everyone you ever talk to is on that exchange server, it is really very good software.
If your use case happens to be in the 99.7543% of cases that do NOT meet that criteria, you are fucked.
@Sempf
.. that is the case for me (Teams is the mandatory default for anything at my workplace), and it:
Fucking confuses me, like crazy. "I put that document on Teams" - "where on Teams?" - "The group folder" - "*which* group folder?" - "..." - ... and you can't just send people the path of the team/channel/directory/whatnot. How much nicer would it be if there was a network drive which mirrored the data structure, and I did not have to [click through endless teams/grous/channels - select - yes, download - open local download folder fish it out - finally do something] With any file that can't be edited in MS office?
Also, it insist on confusing my audio/video devices, even on directly consecutive video calls.
I used Mattemost for a few things, 3 years ago -- no comparison.
@Mr_Teatime @Sempf Oh lord, don't get me started on the mess that is the Office/Teams/Sharepoint land where documents go to be copied dozens of times creating an endless mess of improper versions being used.
Yes, I run a Mattermost server for friends, it is great.
@Mr_Teatime @Sempf @nuintari sad as it sounds, adding shortcuts to my most used Teams channels to OneDrive has been a life saver. OMG just a regular Windows Explorer window you can open multiple of, and drag drop files between, instead of LotusNotes-esque “everything must be one window, please navigate back and forth a million clicks”.
That doesn’t solve for the “that file is in the chat from that one meeting 2 months ago, remember?” situation, but it eases the pain of everyone moving from CIFS shares to SPO.
That could work if I used OneDrive, but I won't because I use Linux as my main OS (at least that's still permitted!l,l) and because we have this very nice thing called SURFdrive, which is an OwnCloud instance available to all Dutch Universities and research institutions -- so that (and my local machines, of course) is where my data goes. Also: we were given explicit warnings against putting data on OneDrive because MS has access (combined with implicit expectations to ignore those warnings, naturally, because IT won't even mention the existence of SURFdrive)
@nuintari it works perfectly if you are in the Managed Enterprise(tm).
Except for all the bugs, of course.
@redpenguin
Just like MS office, it is the perfect thing f9r anyone who never new about the alternatives.
That has been MS' strategy for a long time. Make it available to the uninformed masses in such a way that it gets introduced as the default. Intentionally or not, MS profited like crazy from the fact that nobody in the 90s paid for private use of MS/DOS, Windows, Word, Excel... Had their copy protection worked better, people would have looked for alternatives and found plenty of them.
@nuintari
I used it in 2018 or -19 for the first time and thought: "oh, somebody has read about ICQ and Slack, and they tried to make something similar but had no idea what's important."
...and this after almost 15 years of telking people we should have some sort of instant messaging system at work, after successfully using Jabber with a few colleagues (okay, that did get awkward when using multiple devices), years after all my multi-protocol IM clients became useless because IM platforms decided to lock their users in. And now people tell me I need to move with the times, and Teams was the future.
Nope. Teams exists only because IT managers have never seen anything else and are afraid to look.
@Mr_Teatime Yup, couldn't agree more.
Last good job I had was a Slack+Zoom shop, until we hired a consultant who decided that saving $5000/year on those fees was his A Number One priority. Never mind that we were failing to make sales numbers consistently every quarter, we gotta save that $5000!
It killed productivity, not to mention morale.
@nuintari
Okay, Zoom is ... also not my favourite. I love how Mattermost simply has a Jitsi plugin and that's it, p2p video calls, done. Secure, even!
In the meantime, there's a story in German news how Gmail is delivering e-mails with modified content (weird words substituted, sometimes also confusing Israel and Russia), and they're "working on solving the issue". Yes, how do you keep computers from randomly changing stuff in data? I bet if anyone can solve that problem, it'll be the Google Engineers!
(what's happening: Their machine tries to auto-translate e-mails, by default and without telling anyone, and because HTML uses english words, it likes to mis-identify all HTML-mail as English, and then translates it back to the recipients' language ... yay!)
@Mr_Teatime Oh, Zoom sucks too, but at least it actually works.
I'd rather use Mattermost, I'd rather self host, both are hard sells in corporate land.
Thank you so much for confirming...
Teams notifications are entirely pointless. I usually see them between my e-mails (should I say "m-mails"? because they're MS Exchange messages, not e-mails, given that Exchange does not speak SMTP, POP or IMAP), at random intervals, notifying me of old messages that are either irrelevant by then or that I've reacted to already.
And the Teams GUI acts like a browser before the invention of browser tabs. I can't even create a calendar item and look at the calendar at the same time.
@nuintari $$$
Slack is better
@nuintari Why so complicated? No need to install Teams, you can use it via browser.
@paco Funny you should say that:
@nuintari My work tried to get everyone to use Teams but it's just so bad it never caught on.
During the pandemic people were starting to use it because of WFH, then Microsoft started the "This version of Teams isn't the real Teams anymore you need the other Teams". Everyone just gave up on it after that.
@nuintari knowledge.
I loathe Teams.
@liberloebi Hard to not use Teams when the employer says you have to.
I'd rather use anything else, but it isn't my call.
@nuintari I perfectly understand that. It is hard. For me, it was easy, I just told my students to use BigBlueButton if they wanted to see me. But that is a pretty priviledged situation.
Edit: Typo
@litchralee_v6 Ennnh.
As even @nuintari (😉) acknowledges, Microsoft is pretty deeply embedded in many organizations, and (IMO) contrary to the desires of open source hardliners (as I was for years!), wishful thinking alone isn't going to change that.
(There's an "I used to be an anti-Microsoft zealot like you" joke to be made, but my heart's not in it today. Been a weird, weird career.)
@jima @nuintari I think my biggest gripe isn't even rooted in not being open-source. But rather, the mediocrity of what Microsoft publishes. Were some parts of the Office or SharePoint suite not bundled together for large corporations, things like Teams would either have been left in the dust or forced to actually fix their issues.
Even if Microsoft has an incumbent position, that doesn't make them immune to having their problems perpetually pointed out, at least in my book.
@litchralee_v6 Dropping nuintari since this is getting into the weeds. 😛
As an enterprise Lync/Skype for Business customer, we got an early (NDA-encumbered!) preview of Teams, long before it went GA. I will fully acknowledge that my first impression was "what the fuck Slack-wannabe bullshit is this?" (Possibly a verbatim quote, it's been a while.) Alas, despite our misgivings with losing the on-prem server option, it...wasn't as bad as we expected. Some elements were, dare I say, *good?* Wild.
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