And they are all terrible and constantly getting worse.
New Outlook for Windows sucks. I tried it a few months ago and it is like a mobile app for idiots. It lacks many settings and many things. It is like windows 11, you need to do extra steps for stuff and settings you want. Also if you have only a standalone office and not a Office365 subscription they have ads, like their mobile app. Fucking Microsoft.
I cant stand anything microsoft anymore. Teams, outlook, word, every iteration just makes me more angry.
I got a new job, fully remote, and we use Teams. Not gonna lie, I don’t get the hate. It seems as exactly adequate as WebEx or Zoom. None of them make me cum, none of them make me upset.
What is it about Teams that people hate so much? How does WebEx or Zoom do it any better?
Fully onboard with hating new Outlook though, fuck it sucks. Can’t even browse the global address list, it’s search only.
Teams randomly selects the wrong microphone, so either people can’t hear me or they can hear everyone around me too (laptop mic).
How hard can it be to store my microphone preference?
Teams meetings aren’t really that much worse than Zoom, it’s mostly minor gripes, although there are quite a few of those. The Teams chat client on the other hand is an absolute garbage fire that’s significantly worse than Slack, Discord, or pretty much anything up to and arguably including IRC.
An organization , “team”, channel, and chat are confusing as hell, that breakdown does not in any way align with the way communication works in a large organization. Why is there so little configuration available for notification settings? Why can’t I completely silence or ignore a “team”, channel, or chat? Why do I not receive notifications half the time for the things I actually want to be notified about? Why aren’t there threads or at least a sensible and easy to follow “reply to” option? Why can’t anyone seem to agree on the correct way to organize things? Half our groups are creating gigantic “teams” that include half the company, while the other half are creating shared channels nobody knows about. Both options suck.
Our organization turned off the ability to edit or delete any posts in a Team channel.
So outdated information, typos, stupid questions, etc remain polluting the channel for all eternity.
Teams is fine for video calling and screensharing. The mess begins when organisations, as MS encourages them to do, try to embed everything there is into teams. Then it can very fast become a black hole where no one finds anything anymore
Honestly thats just a user problem, not a Teams one.
Just limit it to files and forms and stuff like that, and explain to users that the teams folders, SharePoint, and the files on their computer are all the same.
Source: IT manager
I had to use teams with multiple accounts with multiple organisations. Sometimes my account is added to their organisation, sometimes I used their provided account. Microsoft was going for a one sign in approach and the whole thing just totally failed to account for my situation. It never successfully let me switch accounts, running multiple concurrently certainly never worked.
With one situation the work around was to follow the original organisation invite again, reset my password then proceed with my meeting. I’d do this maybe ten times a day sometimes if I had to bounce between different companies.
And all controls are basic as fuck. It’s a business tool that thinks its target market is my grandma. All controls were apple-ified. I’d get a long error code and I couldn’t select it to copy and paste it, and if I clicked off the window the notification displaying the error code would go away, so i’d have to print screen the error code, paste out somewhere, and then type it out manually into Google to try and diagnose. This was a solved problem 30 years ago. Why are we going backwards?
Anyway, rant over. It’s a pos. Slack is light years ahead.
So when my old job had it, about 5 (out of 30) people in my area just couldn’t open it.
Not the same five, IT would frequently reinstall it to fix it, but it would just break constantly.
Work computers, very locked down, couldn’t do any alternative to it at the time, and we worked remote, so while everyone else had chat, some unfortunate people needed constant updates via email.
The question was who would be SOL, not if someone would be, that day.
Teams is mostly fine these days and I think it’s the only MS product that is getting better over time instead of worse. If you have a competent IT team then the various MS integrations can actually work well to make Teams a usable one stop for comms, recordings/transcripts, scheduling, file sharing, etc.
New features are slow to come but they do come. The insane memory footprint became much more reasonable for me when they moved from Electron to their own Edge-based WebView2 thing last year. The preview builds have finally combined the “teams” channel listings and ad-hoc chats into one tab where you can group them together however you want.
Teams still pisses me off on occasion but no more than any other piece of enterprise software. It’s fine.
What pisses me off is when I create Teams for teams in Teams, and then want to google how to do something specific.
That’s because they’re called “teams groups” not “teams for teams” ;)
You should tell Microsoft:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-channels-overview
Kinda curious if me skipping all the shitty older versions is why I think the current one is fine. I always opt in to the new versions ASAP to get the pain of switching out of the way sooner rather than later.
Teams is annoying because even when you don’t use it, it prioritizes itself and opens making it take longer to get to the programs I actually need and use. This is only a few seconds on new computers but can be minutes on older ones. First world problem sure but my computer should run how I want it.
I’ve also never been able to get the web version to work there’s no error code it just doesn’t connect. IT doesn’t know and the Microsoft guy just said to use the app, which goes back to the above. If it’s going to be an app then leave it as an app if you have a web version then maybe it should fucking work.
I’m in the same shoes about new job having to use teams and I wildly disagree. It is awful.
The best part of it is the noise cancellation on the microphone in calls seem pretty good and having a chat created for meetings is a good integration. BUT…
- voice quality significantly decreases as soon as it’s more than 2 participants… you can clearly tell the difference as soon as a 3rd member is invited.
- annotating on the screen share is extremely useful in slack (not sure if zoom has it too), not a thing I could find in teams
- the channels Vs chats separation in the UI is just weird
- the chats don’t have threads… that’s such a strong feature to contain conversations. I know the channels kinda serve this purpose but it feels weird to use them and closer to sending an email or posting on a forum than directly talking to someone (with having to write a title and bring presented in 1-2 messages per screen due to the size
Compared to zoom, I guess it’s not a big deal really. I’d prefer zoom but it’s oh well. Compared to slack (which has it’s own set of problems, but still) however it seems like a pile of shit in my opinion.
Teams has live annotations, it’s under accessibility settings.
Why is it under accessibility settings, though?
It’s not an accessibility setting!Are you thinking of live captions?
Annotation is on the sharing toolbar (full screen share only, not a window only share).
Thank you, I’ll give it a try tomorrow.
I manage teams in a MacOS environment and ive seen teams fail to notify when people get a message or phone call straight up. Ive seen it fail to deliver a message, automatically select audio devices (because it has to use its own selection of audio devices) sharing screens is like watching a slideshow no matter what network you are on, controlling another users computer is even worse. Our headsets are Plantronics “certified for teams” or whatever its called and the mute button sometimes desyncs with the client and the headphones may be muted but the client not or vice verse. Theres much more but im so tired from dealing with teams all day. I also think its just a wildly unintuitive ui, settings are completely strewn across all sections
automatically select audio devices (because it has to use its own selection of audio devices)
Dude, this so fucking hard. It doesn’t even respect the system volume on my Windows 11 work laptop; despite being set at like 30%, my eardrums always get blasted at the start of the meeting. Every single time, I have to go into the volume settings and turn down the individual application (which has TWO volume controls for…reasons?), because apparently per-app volume is higher priority than system volume for reasons I have yet to find an answer to.
I want the old Volume Mixer back. At least that worked as any reasonable person would expect.
Weird, I always cum while using Teams
(Dear employer - this was a joke)
I use it for school. I’m in different groups and I need to use it for chat, file and image sharing on different projects and its an absolute nightmare trying to keep track of channels, I’d rather use literally any other software to accomplish this task. Most of us just jump on discord and use that.
I only use it incidentally but my biggest gripe is the total inability to perform its one function of teleconferencing.
The bit where it lags the audio badly and then speeds it up to catch back up to real-time is absolutely infuriating to listen to, and such a failure of a tool that had. one. job.
I used self-hosted rocket chat before, now I use teams, I understand perfectly all the hate
For the scope of WebEx and Zoom, it’s… fine… mostly. I mean I hate that I can’t really full screen a remote screen share, so it could be better, but broadly speaking, video, audio, and screen sharing is fine. Not coincidentally, this is pretty much the only standalone stuff Teams bothered to uniquely implement, most everything else is built upon sharepoint…
It starts getting annoying for chat platform. You want to scroll back, it’s going to be painfully slow. You participate in cross-company conversations, oh boy you get to deal with the worst implementation of instancing to keep your activity segregated I have seen. Broadly speaking it just scales poorly at managing the sorts of conversations you have at a larger company. If your conversations are largely “forget it after a few hours”, you may be fine.
Then you get into what these platforms have been doing for ages, Lotus Notes and Sharepoint suggesting companies build workflows on top of their platform. Now the real pain and suffering begins.
I had to enroll users in teams. Doing so was confusing and 1 user would never get the invite. I ended up ditching it after about a month.
My biggest problems with Teams are system slowdown (this was a big issue before I got my new work laptop), and different versions of Teams launching at startup (personal as default and then you have to choose professional or whatever and wait for it to reload everything). Back during the pandemic I had two different Teams (one for my reserve component, and one for my regular job) and it was a nightmare.
I’ve also had no issues with Teams and haven’t had coworkers with issues in probably six years. I prefer it significantly over Slack, and my first job was using IBM/Lotus Notes before they switched to teams, that was a clunky nightmare.
You aren’t the only one who doesn’t get the Slack love. I HATE their design philosophy. It has threads. That’s all it’s got going for i in my opinion. The rest of it is confusing and a pain to use.
skype!
ahh member skype?
You member! You saw me! You membe!
i was so glad my new job uses google products, but the one thing they are missing is a counterpart to onenote. Keep ain’t it.
I went from a small business that was entirely G Suite to a mega corp that was entirely Microsoft. Company culture wise the mega corp is soooo much better, technology wise…I felt totally limited and like I had gone back in time.
I went from being able to pull up a Google sheet on my phone to live update decision makers both back in the office and people who were remote, to having to jump through hoops to open an Excel sheet, then request editing rights, then having to submit the edited sheet to my supervisor only for her to have a manager review and approve the edit, and then he’d have to attach the edited version to an all hands email and tell everyone to download and use the new one.
It’s gotten better since I started, we now upload everything to OneDrive, but they can’t seem to get the permissions right and every once in a while someone edits a file and someone has to comb though the edit history to restore it.
All of Microsoft office products haven’t changed for the good in more than a decade. I still use office 2007 on my personal desktop and 90% of the features and buttons are in the same spot as the current office 365 offering.
Only thing that is an improvement is live collaboration, but that’s getting constantly screwed up by one drive sucking ass.
Microsoft is just awful at doing basic shit. Office or M365 or copilot or whatever it is called is a mess of new tabs, signing in and duplication of services.
Christ outlook sucks but it isnt even top five of how shit they are.
OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD
Ask again later?
All signs point to yes
Very doubtful
Magic 8 Ball knew Outlook would be bad 50 years ago.
Microsoft sucks and so does Outlook. My dad uses Outlook personally and I just can’t imagine that. It’s like taking your torture rack home with you for personal usage.
My dad is also a huge Outlook fan. I think you need to just have been using it for 20+ years
Yeah, maybe it’s a case of software Stockholm syndrome or something.
My dad also uses Outlook on hi Android tablet. I don’t get it.
Idk I like outlook. Its more feature rich and reliable than any other client Ive used. Especially since basically every company uses Echange for email.
Edit: I should clarify, I dont like outlook overall. But thats more because email in general sucks. Outlook is the best out of all of the email clients though, especially for power users.
Hah, I JUST had a conversation with my boss about whether or not I was using the “new” outlook or the “old” outlook.
He’s apparently using the “old” outlook because there’s a toggle switch in the upper right of his window that says “try the new outlook!” and I don’t have that, meaning…I guess I’m using the “new” outlook?
Who knows at this point. It’s all trash.
https://outlook.office365.com/mail/inbox
^ this is the new version lmao. It’s just an electron app (more or less)
Yeah no shit. Then the new ones literally have less features than the old one. Like connecting SharePoint calendars
In true modern Microsoft fashion. Remove features, lock forum posts of people asking for them back. Provide no reason. Profit because apparently this shit is crack to companies.
Seems like they wanted the web and app version of outlook to work identically. Some things don’t work on the web though, so they decided to cut features on the app until they were the same as web. It’s just such a corporate move.
I still think there is a group of people working at microsoft, pulling the strings to dismantle the company from the inside. I haven’t seen an update that makes things better for any of their projects in years
Same with Google.
I imagine Microsoft has the same problem as Google, which is internally prioritizing flashy new things over maintaining useful old things. That’s why Google comes out with so many new things and kills so many old things.
If you want a raise/promotion/etc., you have a better shot at it by bragging about the new feature/service you launched than bragging about maintaining the relatively stable project that’s been running for years but could use some improvements.
It’s a really bad structure imo and I hate that Google and other companies prioritize like that :/
Same with the US govt.
Do u mean doge?
They have managed to fuck up something as simple as right clicking. There are no words.
Dude they fucked up Ctrl+S and Alt+F in paintbrush and it still fucks with my workflows.
It’s even crazier to think they participated in establishing the right click paradigm to begin with.
In my last job I installed Outlook on my personal phone to access my work calendar conveniently. Found out from a colleague that if the admin for an Outlook server you’re signed into on any device fucks up badly enough you could end up having that device completely wiped so I promptly uninstalled it.
Yeah, you’re talking about MDM (Mobile Device Management) solutions/tech. I’m not an IT employee myself, but I am familiar with these things from work (similar situation as yours), and also because I’m a nerd and like researching these things.
On some phones, like Samsung’s (“Secure Folder”), you can have [essentially] a second, containerized instance of Android running. Or you can think of it like a virtual second user that ultimately you have control of. So what I did was install Outlook in that. Because the MDM permissions (e.g. wipe the phone) would only affect that container.
Otherwise, for everyone else – yeah don’t install work apps/accounts on your personal devices.
Just to expand on this. There is an Exchange specific wipe feature. I think it is quite old school and not really used. Have seen it, but never tested it myself. As per documentation it can perform device wipe, but only if native mail client using ActiveSync is used not Outlook. And it probably does not work with all native mail clients, depends if app has device admin permissions.
Current Intune MDM model always uses separate Android storage so any operation including wipe will affect only this storage not your personal space so employer can not see nor delete your personal data.
In Intune there is another option without a need of enrolling device (MDM) where you can manage supported apps. It’s called MAM. If wipe is initiated it affects only data in all apps that support MAM.
In short, companies / schools cannot really wipe your device if we are talking about Intune MDM. Other MDM solutions probably can.
Activesync
Now, that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time.
My understanding is that it’s called work profile. It’s like having 2 users in the same phone. One is personal and you manage it. The other is company owned and you can only install apps whitelisted by your it admin.
this is still objectionable
why does my employer presume it can commandeer my personal property? the only sound policy is to never let work stuff touch personal computers and vice versa. The workplace is like a gas, if you give it the empty space it will keep expanding to fill it
where the hell did my property rights go once one of my PCs got a radio?
I’d love to keep outlook off my personal phone but there’s no chance I’m getting a company phone considering I’m a shop employee and everything in it is an afterthought for IT. Like our computers still run windows 7.
Unfortunately I need email to do my job, on a ping system for what to test and general communications with coworkers who are often not there or traveling in the field.
That’s fair. I should have said *if you can help it.
here’s some advice from me. Outlook is completely usable from a web browser. This includes phone browsers… just use that if you need your emails on your personal phone.
Whichever version it is, I hope that one day I can delete a mail, change my mind, press ctrl-z and it will actually undo the last delete and not some random one from earlier in the day.
I just stopped deleting everything and now use my archive as a trash instead
As a help desk worker, I am starting to get tired of Microsoft’s bullshit.
Try something new and it doesn’t work out? Fine. That’s reasonable.
But can we stop breaking what was already working?
Sounds like that’s exactly what they’re trying to do.
Yeah I feel this. Outlook pisses me off. So does Microsoft in general.
What pisses me off more is HP.