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Comment by Al-Khwarizmi | Hacker News Reader

Clearly understandable? Every time someone tells me on Teams about "the file they shared last week", I struggle to find out if I need to go to Onedrive, SharePoint, the Teams channel "files", the Teams channel "documents", etc. It's the most confusing piece of software I'm forced to use...

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Teams is the most loathsome piece of collaboration software I have ever used. When it comes to finding basic things, the UX is so far from intuitive that it makes you wonder if they're just trolling us with these awful designs. I remember being excited about a Slack competitor when it first came out, but the same issues it had back then still exist to this day. I wish they would just pull the plug on that piece of crap.

I still don't understand why Ctrl plus shift plus C starts a call on teams when V pastes text unformatted and it is right next to it. At least let me reassign this shortcut...

And the New Teams removed the ability to copy formatted chat logs with timestamps! I used that every single day

So I'm NOT crazy for remembering that being a feature in old Teams! Thanks for confirming!

It's not a Slack competitor if it comes free with your current Microsoft licence. It's just a takeover. If it were any good it would've steamrollered Slack, not competed with it.

And if you're a consultant and need to move between the multiple Teams instances that your clients use... it is so very painful.

Fun fact if you want to change your office hours timezone to something other than the US default in Teams, you can't do it from Teams, you can't do it from Outlook, you can ONLY do it from the settings in the Outlook web app. Absolutely bizarre and broken situation

I don't like Teams, but personal preference aside, I hate how in most companies I've worked at, there's multiple communications channels. 365 should be a one stop solution for this, emails, calendars, meetings, files, and chat, but in practice a lot of IT organizations also use Slack alongside it. Where I work now there's a split between IT and the rest because the rest uses Teams while IT uses Slack, causing the barrier between the two to increase, especially since designers - who should work closely with development - are on the Teams side of the fence.

You're not wrong.

In our org, at least, it's also the latest example of MSFT winning partly by being everpresent and partly by stumbles from competitors.

We are 100% work from home -- the company has no offices anywhere. Consequently, we do a lot of online meetings, with an emphasis on screensharing. (I don't think we've ever turned on cameras.) Our standard for a LONG time was GoToMeeting, because while it was more expensive, it WORKED every time, including and especially when we used it with customers.

But GTM got sloppy, and Teams was suddenly everywhere, and then GTM messed up their easy Outlook integration, and all of a sudden we were using Teams.

This reminds me of a very old e-mail from bill gates to his direct reports about the poor usability of windows (xp?)

This one? https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-mov...

Slash-Dot chortled at that mail but I yearned to work for a software company where the CEO would spend their after-hours time actually eating some dog food & providing feedback (at the time I worked for a mobile phone company and all the mails from the C-suite to the world at large ended with "sent from my (competitor device)" because they preferred to use them and seemingly didn't care to drive improvements to their own products.)

Rereading that makes me shake my head. Things didn't get that bad overnight. The fact that so many UX crimes were allowed to fester is proof that Microsoft doesn't care about or understand UX.

That is (was?) the problem, it reads like a dozen different teams were involved in that whole process and they all talked past each other, or there was no unified vision, or no process manager involved. But keeping oversight and ensuring a single view of a whole set of products like that is difficult. Of course, Microsoft didn't make it easy for themselves either, at the time having Windows Update via a website and no "app store" equivalent.

That said, the current state isn't that much better; they do have an app store at the moment, but all the alternatives are still there as well. Developer tools you install via nuget or chocolatey or whatever, games via Steam, Epic, or each individual developer's launcher, loads of stuff you just get via a download off a website, etc.

Every task I do in teams feels compromised as far as UX goes.

I loathe using that app.

But with Copilot you can now ask it to find the file for you. Isn’t AI amazing?

I work in IT support helping customers with this type of thing and this specific problem you just described still trips me up regularly.

And it's been like that at at least 3 or 4 companies I've worked at so it's not just this specific organisation.

You aren't wrong - however GP didn't use the terms "Teams" and "SharePoint". Those terms should never be used next to "understandable" unless properly negated or followed by "/s".

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