Microsoft flings features at Teams to close the Slack gap

Microsoft rarely misses an opportunity to extoll the virtues of its collaboration platform, Teams, and this month’s Ignite is no exception. Teams, according to the software giant, is “the fastest growing business app in Microsoft history”. As is the norm, a raft of figures was trotted out to back up this fact: 329,000 …

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

Impressive growth?

Any app growing that speed is incredible. I mean, kudos to Microsoft if those figures are right, but personally I don't believe it myself. Even if they were paying people to use Teams I very much doubt that would be actual user figures.

Now, if they said that was the number of people who've just had it randomly stuffed on their PCs without a yes/no option because the Office "Click-To-Run" installer made it happen, I might be more inclined to believe it...

[Michael B.]

Re: Impressive growth?

The teams installer is an active choice that you have to make. It doesn't come, as far as I can remember, with the office installer like Skype for Business. ( I can't rule out IT pushing it to every desktop but that is a different matter altogether.)

[Dan 55]

Re: Impressive growth?

I just installed Office 365 last week as Outlook from Office 2013 stopped working properly for some reason. Teams and Yammer notifier were thrown in and placed on the desktop, so there's your impressive growth.

[bombastic bob]

Re: Impressive growth?

"so there's your impressive growth."

yeah like buying a computer with Win-10-nic on it and either installing an existing 7 license on there or putting Linux or FreeBSD on it *STILL* counts as "Windows 10" for their marketeers.

There's Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics. And Marketing Stats.

icon for the facepalm!

[Ucalegon]

Re: Impressive growth?

Our school has just taken receipt of Teams for Education and plopped it onto just under 1200 user accounts.

No one is using it yet.

No one knows what it does.

It's free.

[TheVogon]

Re: Impressive growth?

"Any app growing that speed is incredible."

It replaces Skype for Business, so they have millions of potential users waiting for it to reach feature parity. Which it now has.

[Dan 55]

Re: Impressive growth?

When you said feature parity you meant failure parity, am I right?

[pyite42]

Re: Impressive growth?

It isn't even close to feature parity.

At least the Skype people make a half-assed attempt to make Linux work properly (though the first thing they did when MS bought them was break desktop sharing for Linux users! But I digress).

Teams is useless for us.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Impressive growth?

"It isn't even close to feature parity."

Yes it is. We are looking at migrating our phones and meeting rooms from Skype to Teams because of the cloud based recording.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sweet!

Teams is going to moon in my shoppe, the 4,000 user are loving it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sweet!

"Teams is going to moon in my shoppe, the 4,000 user are loving it."

No complaints != loving. They are probably using Slack instead behind your back.

[smot]

It's shite

Maybe it's just taken a dislike to me, but the Teams app is the flakiest thing since I stopped using Head & Shoulders.

Slow and unwieldy even on a Core i7, and yet I'm required to use it now.

If this is the world of modern software, gawd 'elp us.

[Ben 56]

Slack > Teams

Everyone except Microsoft knows the four reasons why Slack is better than Teams:

1) Slack's Giphy integration.

2) Slack's lightning startup speed.

3) Teams' lack of Giphy integration.

4) Their names. "Slack" hints at a respite from work, but "Teams" has work and managerial interference written all over it.

[-lb-]

Re: Slack > Teams

Except that Teams has had Giphy integration from launch, even if many orgs choose to switch it off because Giphy can expose a company to legal / hr issues when it chooses randomly to show ppl racist or sexist material (which it does even in "safe" mode).

[HmmmYes]

Ive not tried Teams.

I have tried - and been made to use - various other MS webappey stuff.

Im not a fan.

A poorly designed, cluttered UI is bad enoguh on a local application.

Put one over HTML and you have the problems with browers, network lag etc etc.

[le_gazman]

Shocking GUI

Teams is a lump of shite. It's a front end for various other tools and doesn't do as good a job as the full fat client for any of them. I don't understand why it exists. I also hate how it shits groups into AD and sites into sharepoint. It's a demoni, pointless shit heap!

And not to mention if you do try and use it that you can't delete a chat, there's no splash page, and it's never particularly obvious if a new message comes in.

Back to Skype for Business, nothing to see here except pain and despair...

[hplasm]

One born every minute...

"Teams, according to P.T.Barnum, is “the fastest growing business app in Microsoft history”.

FTFY

[le_gazman]

Teams is an awful app, borderline unusable. The GUI is horrendous, it's impossible to delete chats, there is no home/splash page, I could go on all day...

I went back to using Skype for Business.

[pyite42]

No Linux support, of course!

There is only one feature they need to succeed: feature parity on Linux.

As it stands, it is more effective to use smoke signals to communicate than this piece of garbage.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: No Linux support, of course!

"There is only one feature they need to succeed: feature parity on Linux."

Lol, why would they care about 0.1% of the user base that would probably rather not be using Microsoft anyway? There is a web client for them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: No Linux support, of course!

"Lol, why would they care about 0.1% of the user base that would probably rather not be using Microsoft anyway?"

2% actually - two orders of magnitude higher than you quote. It is also the 5th most request feature for Teams.

And the web client is awful - half the functionality doesn't work. It's 2018 and MS are still the single vendor that can't make video chat work properly in a browser that doesn't run on Windows.