Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought that has rough edges and inconsistent reliability.
The recent changes to end webhook support, kill Linux desktop support and do yet another rewrite are inane. Don't expect features you use today in Teams to work in 2 years...
You could do it with other software hosted outside the office though. There are definitely options here.
Like everything Microsoft it was shit for the first few years, they slowly sorted it out, and now it's fine. Most non-tech-bro businesses successfully run the majority of their comms through it.
The main problem now is that it works fine, and the project managers on Teams need to create work for themselves, so just mess around with stuff that wasn't broken.
Except from:
* notifications for channels
* search
* using more than one org (needs app restart!) although screen sharing between 'classic' and 'web' editions works only if sender's and receiver's graphic cards share a hw-accelerated video format blessed by teams. Not, it's not easy to check what edition you are running and you can't change it without poking js variables by hand
* inconsistent read statuses between devices
* 'incoming call not shown at all' bug (but you get a missed call notification)
* can't join two video calls even in two separate windows
* random audio device switching on every morning (even if you don't close the app and computer for the night)
Let applications do a thing. The more we duplicate the crappier the original and the duplicate get.
Yeah great for in person and email companies.
Slack should be emails that have been arranged into different folders - it just doesn't vibe with me for much otherwise (oo look you have 200 channels on unread - or, if you are the reverse, ooo look 200 channels with people chatting and I have to check every single one of them :(
Slack started with an aggressive "bottom up" approach, they made something actually good and got to worrying about the sales part later. You don't need sales as much when companies come to you, begging you for an actual contract that fulfills their enterprise requirements, knowing that rooting you out is almost impossible.
Teams went the other way, in typical Microsoft style. Microsoft sells it bundled with all the other Microsoft things it sells. Most companies want a Microsoft contract anyway, and have an established sales relationship with MS, so adopting Teams is a lot less compliance, integration and procurement work than adopting anything else. You don't need good UI if your sales strategy isn't predicated on users choosing you for UI.
And then there's Discord, which really isn't a bad work comms app if you're small enough not to need the compliance stuff. It gives you almost everything the big apps do for free, including unlimited calls, an advanced RBAC system, as many channels / messages as you want, a decent bot API (including media streaming), good notification management, multi-server / cross-organization support etc. They're actively disinterested in selling to businesses (which is what makes them so good, the features they paywall are the features needed by gamers, not serious professionals), but that also means you'll need to eventually migrate off of it when compliance requirements set in.
Business instant messaging is electric shoulder tapping and that makes me want to punch people.
I literally feel Slack drains me every day.
Slack is easy to replace with something cheaper and better on a product or technical level. The network effects are strong of course, but they won't sustain it forever
They did: Google Chat. It’s bundled with Google Workspace.
It works well and there’s nothing I can think of that I want in it. It’s just a video and chat app.
On basic chat: it will sometimes scroll up when I get a new message, while I'm actively participating in that chat, so I need to scroll back down to read the new messages. Occasionally it flickers, for bonus points. It will not mark the chat as read if I'm on it without clicking on a different chat and coming back. It's the only software I use that, for some reason, has an effect on my typing accuracy. Don't even get me started on its handling of copy/paste. I'm also pretty sure there's some joke I just don't get around the search function.
For calls: it refuses to pick the correct microphone, and will sometimes mute it completely somehow (I lose the feedback in the headphones – I have a jabra headset that does this). This will even happen when I hang up a call and start another one right away. Other times it works well. My default mic is always my wired, always connected, headset mic. I don't use BT headsets that switch from music to communications or whatever depending on what I do, which could confuse the available / selected mics.
It drains my laptop's and iphone's battery like no tomorrow, even if I turn off video and only do voice chat, even if nobody has the camera on or shares a screen. Also, on Windows, for some reason it doesn't use the native notifications, but implements its own crappy ones – but this isn't that big of an issue, since I mostly disable them anyway.
All this is happening on both the "heavy" (heh) Windows client, and on chrome on Linux, both running on a fairly beefy new PC with gobs of RAM. Fun fact: the experience was exactly the same on my 5-year-old laptop with a U-series Intel CPU, so I don't think it's a resources problem.
Use Teams in Firefox with ublock for battery issues, somehow it consumes much less.
> It's the only software I use that, for some reason, has an effect on my typing accuracy.
That's because the typed letters appear with a large (often even ~1 s) delay. Close your eyes while typing and you'll be back on you track.
For example, Teams likes to control system-wide audio settings instead of acting like any other application. I had to disable the “allow applications to have dedicated hardware access” feature in my sound card driver to stop it screwing around with my settings. I’ve never had to do this for any other app.
It also likes to “edit” system controls like right-click menus on the task bar. This not only breaks muscle memory, but they also put in a gap so that if you move the mouse onto the menu… it closes.
I really try to stick to the web-based Office suite and Apple Pages/Numbers/etc. to avoid dealing with this.
Does this matter? Yes, I think so for a chat first culture.