Microsoft Teams is a red flag
blog.raed.dev
blog.raed.dev
- You use Windows for OS
- You use Sharepoint for documentation
- You use Outlook for Mail
- You use OneDrive for storage
- You use Azure for hosting
- You use Copilot for LLM
- You use GitHub for scm
- etc
all of those are things I actively want to avoid. they're all sub-par, they're all managed by button-clicking pseudo-sysadmins, they're all red flags.
I work in a MS stack and most of your list is untrue for my case. We use slack for messaging, Confluence, Wikimedia, and GDrive for documentation, Google Mail for email, I develop primarily dotnet/C# apps on a MacBook pro M5, have access to all major LLM providers and primarily use Claude and antigravity.
There only thing that checks of your list is Azure hosting.
On a personal note, it has been by far one of the best place I've worked at. The dotnet ecosystem is so well developed and rich, I expect to be paid a huge premium if I ever have to deal with Java again.
This is like saying Facebook is the alternative to http.
The only thing that was not really worse was email, we came from lotus notes which was a crashy piece of shit.
But our messaging, storage etc solutions all were a big step back when we went to Microsoft.
in a DeLorean?
We used it until about 2019 :S
The reason was that during the years a lot of people had been 'creative' and built tools in its database/scripting language. Many of these tools had been abandoned but still had wormed their way into critical business processes. It took us years to decommission most of them and in some cases rebuild them with modern tech.
I really miss Lotus Sametime though. It had so many features that Teams doesn't.
- Show my online presence status to everyone except person X
- Send me a popup when person X comes online
- Disable message read receipts for person X
- Custom emoji
Well lots of stuff like that. Really handy in avoiding toxic colleagues if you're neurospicy :) Or to catch them first thing when they came online because you need something from them. It was also much more fun in sametime than Teams.
Teams also keeps a 100% persistent record of everything you say even if you delete it. In Microsoft Purview. It's definitely your enemy.
But it was damn handy sometimes. Teams doesn't have this feature.
What was more of a lifesaver was the not showing status to some people though. There was one guy who would consider me his personal support person and this was really annoying. I know it's not normally considerd a good thing to solve a human problem by technical means. But for me it works just fine and much better than taking it up with the person themselves.
Security-wise most of our data is with our customers on european servers (Word/etc. are not linked to OneDrive), except billing.
Network shares aren't bad per se, but they encourage people to place multiple files with the same name and then a V4, V5, V6 etc suffix. People have to download or check out the Excel files if they want to work with them, delete their local copies when they are done, and make sure they always check out the most recent version. If multiple people have to edit an Excel file, they have to synchronize so they don't override each other's files. So yeah, network shares aren't bad per se, but they aren't ideal either. SharePoint has a clear advantage here.
I'm not usually someone who advocates for Microsoft, on the contrary actually, but in this case I don't see a really good alternative.
If you have a better workflow, please explain it to me.
What’s the big difference between Excel and Sheets?
Last time i looked, ability to handle more than a couple of thousand cells.
So if you can’t tell the difference between those products how can you tell the difference between Excel and Sheet?
They KNOW excel, they know where which buttons are, and the business logic and price calc are done in excel. These people aren't mentally challenged as you seem to think, they will know if their excel suddenly looks differently, offered by Google instead of Microsoft and in a browser instead of a native windows app.
So if you have nothing to contribute except power user arrogance, I will no longer interact with you.
Lol. You answer rude and get a rude response and then give up.
> They KNOW excel, they know where which buttons are
That’s not knowing excel though.
You’re not making the claim that people writing complex formulas with named ranges have an equation that doesn’t work in Sheet.
Sure, not specializing in computers doesn’t make you mentally challenged but it doesn’t make you proficient in it. If the reason somebody can’t use something is cause it “looks different” how have they survived the last 2 decades of Microsoft changes?
But the excel-boundedness is exactly my point. Several sheets are so large they have been split into three files, referencing each other or external sources via power query. I'm not even saying it's good like it is, but it's just the status quo. I don't see any viable way to turn away from Excel in the short term, which is why I seek solutions.
And knowing where which function or button is in Excel IS knowing Excel, and programming formulas, VB macros and power queries is knowing Excel too. It has been a cornerstone in this company for the past 20 years. These people aren't IT people, Their core skills and how they bring value to the company lie somewhere else, and that's perfectly fine too. but I cannot expect them to just change the software they're been relying on for years just because I say so.
- You use Azure DevOps for SCM
Personally I run linux but most of the company is on Windows, sure
- You use Sharepoint for documentation
No, we use Nextcloud for docs and most storage
- You use Outlook for Mail
No, Mxroute. Which actually caused quite a bit of problems with Teams original because it REALLY expects you to use exchange
- You use OneDrive for storage
For large files only, or files that are shared in chat
- You use Azure for hosting
Nope, Hetzner
- You use Copilot for LLM
Come on, not even Microsoft uses that
- You use GitHub for scm
Yep and for all the complaining here, I've literally never had any noticeable downtime or issues. I don't use it for CI though
I know people love Excel and Word, but I just don’t get it. What even is Word? The web thing? Teams Word? The app?
Whichever Word last touched it, formatted it. This breaks it in the other versions.
How is this is a thing? It’s so awful.
I've never met anyone who was a die-hard for Word, I'm sure they exist but they can't be a large contingent of users.
Excel is a lot like Photoshop. Everyone hates the parent companies, but there just aren't good alternatives for either one.
Them: Are you a Mac or Windows shop?
Me: 100% Mac, except for the Finance team...
Them: sigh Yeah, same here.
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To log into the Teams website on my Mac:
* Use Passwords to log into Okta.
* Use Okta Verify + Touch ID for MFA.
* Log into Teams with Okta.
* Install Microsoft Authenticator on my phone because Okta’s SSO isn’t enough for MS.
* Log into my work account in Microsoft Authenticator. (Bonus: typing an Okta password into some random app’s webview gives me the warm fuzzies!)
* Bounce to Okta Verify + Face ID on my phone for MFA.
* Scan the QR code on my Mac with my phone.
* Enter the 2 digit code shown on my Mac to double-plus authenticate with Microsoft Authenticator.
As punishment for doing all this correctly, finally have to use Teams.
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This is 100% accurate. Halfway through the hoopjumping, I realized it was ridiculous and started over from scratch so I could record each step of it.
I'm certain some step in there is necessary to support Outlook Express, and they can't clean up the process without annoying some bank paying for enterprise support of their Windows Server 2003 setup. These are the downsides of eternal backward compatibility.
- The loss of institutional knowledge was absolutely punishing and costly. Overnight, we lost access to an easily searchable knowledge base. A solution was available, but the search was awful and you had to know what you were looking for. While this isn’t really a fault of Teams and the vendor lock-in trap was unavoidable, the sheer monetary amount in wasted effort must have been massive. Additionally, many teams began to default to closed channels. Even future info was difficult or impossible to search.
- The loss of community was palpable. This was mid-pandemic and the formerly in-person work environment was all online. The Slack UI lends itself much more towards “casual” conversations in general chat rooms. It’s a bit difficult to put into words, but posting a funny link or a picture of your cat in Slack feels personable, while doing the same in Teams’ threaded UI feels one step away from writing an email. Even the reaction emojis were bland. It’s difficult to keep people engaged and sticking around if they don’t feel part of a team or community.
I see chats purely as an ephemeral way of coordination.
Search in Teams is like a really bad joke, practically non-existent.
Op was talking about both: private chats at first and then Team group posts on the titles part..
I can also validate those grievances.
My reasons:
- critical reason: it was half the price of anything else which was important when we were starting, less so now
- probably much less than half the price when factoring in storage allowances actually
- critical reason: it has built in translation without extra charge
- the only real alternative close to the price and with translation was Google workspace and I've had such bad experiences with Google that I'm still glad I didn't choose that
- inexperience: it was sold to me as a messaging and storage app that also came with a suite of other apps (which have ALL turned out to be useless) and I didn't know I was inheriting a heaving mutated behemoth built on the stinking undead corpses of SharePoint and AD.
So yeah, wish I'd had more info at the time. But at this point now that I've limited the surface we're using and it's all settled in, the only real problems we have are the tedious 2fa issues that crop up whenever a new person joins.
Personally, I am not a big fan of Microsoft, but in this case, my company is so entrenched in Excel that I don't see any alternative.
I have never used Zoom or Teams in my life since I never agreed with their ToS&PP, and I've never been in a situation where my career would depend on it (I'm self-employed). When somebody asks me to join these, I nicely respond with that exact reason why I can't use them and propose using Jitsi Meet instead, and I have never experienced anybody rejecting it yet.
As an employee, the company sets the conditions and tools to work there.
If communication is to happen on Microsoft Teams, and you refuse to use it, your future employment with them seems difficult. Same as if you refused to show up to meetings, or kept sound isolation headphones on at all times, including when your boss wanted to speak with you. Or you would never use a telephone.
When using enterprise tools, I expect the employer to have accepted the terms of use; most employees can't bind the employer.
I certainly prefer to avoid Microsoft communications tools, but if the work is interesting enough, I guess it's fine.
Sure, but the privacy and service policies are only applicable to your employer's data, it was never your data in the first place.
> I have never understood how that behavior is considered legal
You can't give employees veto power over software choices, an employer that can't choose which software platforms its employees use is not going to be viable.
I like Teams. Especially the Meeting feature. I like that I can join with multiple devices in a meeting. Sharing stuff in a meeting is also pretty cool and easy. I also like the integration into other products.
The only thing which could be better is performance - even the new WebView2 thing is not enough. But this is sadly common for most tools like this.
In fact I lost real any desire to "work in chat", its never been a good experience its just a place to hide from email. Waste time in chat, make jokes in Chat, bitch to my manager in chat ok. Work in chat? F-that.
The only way you can get work done in a place that uses (abuses) Slack is to turn off notifications and forget it. Its a distraction app and nothing more.
People who have wired in their CI and AWS Alarms and metrics, I feel sorry for you. You took the bait.
So yes teams is a red flag. Slack is a flag of a different color. When you take a companies stack in as a whole, it will (no matter where you are) remind you of how TRULY SHITTY software products are. And that should humble you so you dont go add to the pile.
I could see the keywords right there in the chat, enter them into the search bar, and get back 'no results found'.
(This was across at least a period of months too, not just an intermittent bug)
The good part is that it's a very good tool for that. Meeting quality is usually good to excellent. Screen sharing works, as well as whiteboards. In case there is disruption or vandalism there are readily available controls to quickly secure the meeting room. Audio quality is good, video too.
Moreover, I use Linux, and I intend to implement the whole MS groupware client-side in my desktop applications, such as Kontact/KMail. Teams is covered by a good webapp wrapper done by Ismael Martínez that behaves like a normal desktop app, with system tray capability included (https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux).
But the really bad part is that this is... a Microsoft product requiring authentication mediated by Microsoft. And (speaking from my particular situation, that is, from Asunción, Paraguay) it's a stinking mess. There are ISPs that fail to authenticate due to an unexplained error (they don't even offer those awful hexadecimal error codes). Some ISP can authenticate using their mobile networks, but residential ones fail. And even when authentication supposedly works, switching from consumer (private) Outlook to corporate Outlook is fraught with various failure points.
Teams works well... once you managed to login. I will never forget that I had to give a substitute class for someone and getting access to that specific classroom took me over 90 minutes between retries, delays, silent fails, etc. The stuff of nightmares.
Another really bad part of Teams is that usability and UX are also nightmarish. You open the app and it is not apparent at all how to create an instant meeting. There is the functionality, but it's not easily discoverable at all. How do you manage the access of people to chat, for example? Some people can use the chat, while others can't access to it. And how to fix that, is by no means apparent. So Teams, while being the sensible solution here and even from a Linux user standpoint is reasonably nice, can be quite painful to use.
Now, about what TFA said, about Teams or Slack costing a tiny fraction of what an engineer earns... let me tell you that in our neck of the woods salaries are really low. If you can manage USD 1K/month, you are quite fortunate. So any "fraction of the cost" taken by either Teams or Slack, is not that tiny. Moreover, at least in educational contexts, Slack is not that well-known (to be honest, it's practically unknown here), so Slack does not have the mindshare that Teams has here.
So, about Teams: the product is there and is reasonably good in its foundations. If Microsoft only could set its mind to smooth the rough edges it could have been a real winner.
I've had instances on all tiers of Slack plans on all clients where messages just disappear for days at a time and then come back to gaslight you.
ed: I tried to see if this is fixed and it doesn't look like it. Your IT team might have to write "help" articles like this one. Note that I've had this experience on other platforms.
https://teamdynamix.umich.edu/TDClient/30/Portal/KB/Article/...
Try get transcription to work. What the hell is all that about?
And these are things that happen once you have got the call going. Half of all calls start with a debrief on WTF happened this time we tried to talk.
And then there is the document structure. Try adding a long file name, or dealing with the random upload fails.
* Too much resource usage.
* Chat UX is not good. The team/channel concept makes sense, but threaded (and nonthreaded) chats really just have a bad UI, so everyone at my company just uses multi-person chats, which are terrible for managing access, history, etc.
* For the past while I get some extra prompt about "improving my security" every time I punch in my 2FA info that I have to decline on a daily basis.
A meeting where 2 people somehow weren't able to join. Even after "restarting". One dialed in by phone, the other gave up.
It chose I guess a dock's microphone over a headset mic. Honestly having some kind of tiny local speech recognition model that would say "get you're really quiet/far away/muffled" would be a godsend. That's user error but still. They have the technology.
There's also the problem that it doesn't remember layout preferences so every meeting I have to focus the content, which still doesn't show it full screen.
And unlike discord there's no option for smooth video so good luck.
Also they removed the Linux native app.
- On macOS, I regularly (~once a week) end up in different broken sync states, where message histories for all chats are missing messages from the last few month. The only way to reliably fix this is to remove the whole cache, causing it to resync after a app restart. Due to this, I run a whole Windows VPS, just to be able to "reliably" receive Teams messages from customers.
- In multi-tenant usage, it's incredibly slow to switch between different tenants. If you are semi-actively chatting with users from 2-3 tenants its a big PITA
- If you are an external user to a organization, the default settings are that your Teams session will last ~24h, after which you have to re-authenticate. Teams doesn't give you any good indication that you have been logged out, unless you actively check, in which case you might be shown a warning banner after ~a minute delay (if you are lucky).
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I'm usually one the more defensive side of cargo cult hate against software (e.g. I think a lot of people dislike JIRA to an unjustified degree, and mostly due to badly hosted or configured instances), but Teams is one of the few where it's absolutely deserved. I think it's a prime example of how Microsoft as an organization has forgotten how to build good desktop software.
Only upside is that it's a good bonding ritual with customers, as the Teams suffering is a universal feeling.
There's any number of reasons an org would choose teams over slack, or any Microsoft product over an alternative, even your example of the cost shows a clear lack of knowledge of information outside your narrow scope.
How do you know your org is paying the price you found on a website?
You realize there are other vendors people pay infrastructure contracts through who bundle Microsoft products in their contract?
Stay in your lane.
It’s an indicator that developer experience pales in comparison to bean-counting, and that is an indicator that the business focuses on ROI in the wrong areas.
I’m sure there are finance teams that love it. I work in marketing and I sure as hell don’t, after it using it in two different full-time roles.
It’s as much as a red flag for me as the author.
The IT department has erected some network shares where all people just dump their files into folders and SharePoint actually seems like an improvement here, though I'm still on the fence about that. My own IT department seems to hedge a grudge against that too. But clearly, raw network shares can't be the solution either.
I've been a Linux fanboy pretty much my entire career when I worked in software dev, but since I've switched, I see the advantage and simplicity of all-in Microsoft. All our contacts use Teams as well. Other merchants, vendors, suppliers everyone uses Microsoft for E-mail and Teams for chat. If I wanted to introduce something like LibreOffice, Slack, Mattermost or RocketChat then I would face insurmountable obstacles within my own company. So why bother? If it works don't touch it.