Because its use is mandated by workplaces, schools, and lots of other entities & communities. I rather hate Teams, but suddenly I’m finding myself spending half my days with it.
At work we just transfered from zoom to google meet. We did this while everyone who expressed an opinion agreed that zoom is simply a superior product. And we did it because “we are already paying for it with our google docs subscription”.
It is just so anti-competitive I can’t even believe we collectively let this happen.
What I don't like the most of the teams app is, the freaking code editor. If I paste code in teams, it feels hard to read, in Slack it looks much better. Also, I hate it when on teams having some serious chat about prod issue and some in the group post a random message and whole thing just goes side ways. Lack of threads is bad experience for me. I can go on..
I could use the browser version for that.
Also, the browser version doesn’t have all the features of the native.
So if I’m in an interview, I want to make sure that as much as possible works. If I was just joining a conference call or something I would use the browser.
Has how we used these tools just changed? They are so janky in the first place that them being "down" is questionably different?
Just seems weird.
- Channels randomly taking several minutes to load or outright refusing to load? Normal
- Calls dropping on a fast, stable ethernet connection? Normal
- Messages not sending, or appearing to send but silently never arriving/being dropped upon arrival? Normal
- Messages double- and triple-sending? Normal
- Messages being sent out-of-order? Normal
- Messages sending extremely slowly? Normal
- Attachments not loading? Normal
- Teams deciding logging in is just too difficult and I have to restart it at least once? Normal
I remember when I got an email today about an apparently outage describing all of the above (minus the call instability), I was like "wait, it's not supposed to be like this?"
And now that I type this out, especially having used Slack in the past, I realize what an indictment of Teams that is. (But I've also worked at a place that used Lync/Skype for Business/whatever they're calling it now, and it still manages to be pleasant compared to that mess. Though I won't give MS any credit there; the bar was on the floor, and they managed to avoid tripping over it.)
I've seen townhall meetings where 200+ FTE where sitting around waiting for Teams to stop glitching for like 10 minutes. And after they go back to their desk for real work, the glitching continues.
"innovation"
It crashes randomly. It cuts off text when you start typing. It is terrible.
A sort of software Stockholm syndrome?
Teams is catching up in this respect, but fewer people rely on it beyond day-to-day communication. Not that it's not important, but maybe just not as critical to things beyond person-to-person comms.
If it weren't for MS being a monopoly I doubt we'd use it
I know in the orgs that I work with, everyone today blamed any problems on Teams being a crappy application. No one thought twice about it being something more than that.
I had a few symptoms:
First teams froze my entire computer when I started it when it couldn't connect.
Then it finally loaded and a message I sent would appear in the preview on the left but not actually in the chat window (the preview where it shows the name list of chats I have).
Then messages would just sit with that circle sending, but I would receive messages occasionally.
A simple "can't connect" would have gone a long way.
But yea, Teams is janky. I wish I could say it was the worst thing I experienced at work, but, alas, that remains a wish and a dream.
Now tech folks are more dispersed across several social media platforms so it’s harder to see trends.
I don't know if the speed of a technical status update is related to how much we pay to MS, but it definitely feels that way.
At the very least Microsoft could have given us some system-wide notification that there were problems...
Anyway, this is what status pages are for: https://admin.microsoft.com/servicestatus (currently showing a whole lotta information about problems with Microsoft Teams).
The implication is that the infra required to notify of an outage is lesser/different than what’s required to…run Teams. Publish it on DNS!
I'd also assume if you're using Microsoft Teams it's because someone else has determined that you shall use it. I expect that any semi-informed, mildly IT literate Microsoft Teams user has a starting position of 'low expectations'.
Anyway, parent was suggesting an in-app message to indicate some issues, so my initial question stands - how do you expediently send an instant message to a user to advise them that your instant messaging app is having a bad day?
To your specific suggestion, how do you identify if the messages arrived late because of a server-side issue, rather than a client-side, network disconnect, or some other non-infra issue?
Anyway, while I'm sure there's myriad ways that the authors of this app could have engineered it to be more resilient, self-reporting, etc - it's clear that they did not.
1:23 Coworker: Hello
1:24 Me: Hello
[20 minutes elapse]
1:44 Me: Did you need something?
[No notifications until leave for the day]
[Checks back hours later and the conversation appears as]
1:23 Coworker: Hello
1:24 Me: Hello
1:25 Coworker: Could you herp the derp?
1:30 Coworker: Nm got Mo to herp the derp.
1:44 Me: Did you need something?
1:45 Coworker: Nah I'm good.
Regularly disconnects Microsoft's own headsets and saturates CPU until the headset is unplugged and re-plugged, good job selling your products together without testing them.
Can't use triple backticks in messages for blocks of code anymore, it never works.
Can't always use single backtick either, unreliable at best.
Pasting will give crazy formatting sometimes and blocks of code sometimes, you can't choose when. Will regularly trim CRLFs, leaving you to input everything manually.
"Inserting" code (instead of pasting it like a normal person) makes the TITLE they force you to input take most of the space, it's like they thought long and hard about how to obfuscate useful information at every turn.
Switching tabs and conversations take a noticeable time, even on a decent beast (12th gen i7, rtx 3070ti, 64gb ddr4). Doing anything is sluggish in that app.
When on a call with somebody sharing their screen, can't hide the stupid vertical bar with names of other people taking 20% of the real estate.
Can't share more than one screen discord-style so half the time colleagues will be quickly shown something, and then have to be reminded to share their own screen again.
Link embeds are slow to parse, office embeds offer more options but are slow to open either in-app or in browser.
Speaking of links, any "copy link" is uncertain for users: sometimes it's a crappy useless popover, sometimes it's a link you don't realize the other user will need permission for, and sometimes it has copied without really notifying you. Awesome.
New teams is basically old teams but now your computer has twice the software and shortcuts.
Testing your sound setup requires a painfully slow call with the crappiest Skype-inspired bot, the test feedback itself being less than 30% of the entire time wasted
And the sound is just noticeably worse than literally every other service (Facebook messenger, Google calls, slack, discord..)
Once teams is on a computer, some magical shortcut (you will only ever press by mistake while doing other things) will pop up a window trying to get it integrated further into your O.S.
Searching for messages is extremely painful, there's no robust history in that bar at the top and you'll find yourself searching multiple times over sometimes, especially as you can't preview much so you try to find that one message from 6 months ago over and over again with new searches.
Setting appointments can't tweak the exact timing the way outlook's calendar does (down to 5min increments if wanted).
Can't pin more than a few teams. Good job making the tab that your app is named after the one people want to avoid the most.
I could go on but I'm not working today and already have enough sadness incurred by that horrible piece of junk 5 days a week..
I would have assumed this: https://status.office365.com/ but it shows nothing useful.
https://portal.office.com/servicestatus At least this one shows there's an issue.
Some users may experience multiple issues with their Microsoft Teams TM710344, Last updated: Jan 26, 2024, 6:00 PM GMT-3 Estimated start time: Jan 26, 2024, 12:37 PM GMT-3
User impact Users may experience multiple issues with their Microsoft Teams.
Title: Some users may experience multiple issues with their Microsoft Teams
User impact: Users may experience multiple issues with their Microsoft Teams.
More info: Affected scenarios include, but aren't limited to: - Users performing a cold boot may not able to log into teams and will see an "oops" page
- Users logging in or unlocking their devices after some time may see missing messages
- Users may fail to load messages in channels and chats
- Users are unable to view or download their media (images, videos, audio, call recordings, code snippets)
- Some messages may experience delays being sent
- Call Recordings might take longer to appear in user's OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online
- Users may be unable to load previous Copilot history, or new history is not written
- Bots may be unable to download attachments
- Sending and receiving read receipt notifications may be delayed
- Anonymous users may be unable to join meetings
- Teams connectors for Power Automate/Power Apps may experiencing errors
Current status: Our failover operation did not provide the immediate relief intended for end users in North and South America regions. However, we’re monitoring telemetry closely as we continue to optimize traffic patterns and apply configuration changes intended to reduce customer impact as quickly as possible. We understand the impact an issue like this can have on your organization, and we appreciate your partnership and patience as we work to remediate this issue.
Scope of impact: This issue can potentially impact any Microsoft Teams user in the scenarios outlined in the More info section.
Start time: Friday, January 26, 2024 at 11:55 AM GMT-3 .
Next update by: Friday, January 26, 2024 at 7:00 PM GMT-3
Weirdly, I am unable to hide an entire conversation, which is something I didn't think would require a round trip to the backend.
every time someone tries screensharing to me the call hangs up and I get "Uh oh, something went wrong!"
yeah something went wrong, someone decided to pay for Teams
That being said in regards to teams, it might literally be the worst software I’ve ever used. It’s a major thorn in the productivity not just of myself, but everyone including the entire org of my client who mandates it. Like not a day goes by it doesn’t impact one or more meetings. It’s bizzare how tolerated it is when everyone involved has issues that leads to them disliking it.
My main gripe is the “teams” chats having aggressively terrible UI in ways that make my work-life worse. Most of my complaints would go away if they let me make a teams chat that was a normal chat room.
Could it be lighter weight? Yeah for sure. But I am definitely not running into the same issues that some people are seeing on this thread.
What I have recognized is that if you don't have teams installed and have to join a teams meeting via your browser, it might work like 10% of the time.
Not sure if it is related, but in the same time period, Microsoft Family Safety has been flaky. My son will request more Xbox / PC time, I’ll get the notification, but inside the app there is no request to approve. Or I’ll get another notification hours later.
May this outage be perpetual and signal the demise of the enshittification of messaging platforms like teams.
