Microsoft to move some Teams features to more costly 'Premium' edition Microsoft has revealed that a Premium cut of its Teams cloudy collaborationware suite will debut in early February, and some features that are currently included in Microsoft 365 will move to the new – more costly – product. Teams Premium was announced in October 2022, and a preview has operated since December 16. On Tuesday …
<i?This is the second time MS have tried to charge for add-on features to Teams.</i>
I admit I looked down the list of 'premium' features and was quite happy to see that the change won't affect us at all.. Poor though Teams might be, it's still a damn sight better than what we had previously (Webex) which, at best' was clunky. And the Mac client was actively terrible..
We're setting up our own Jitsi servers. As long as you protect the server it's very safe, you only need Firefox on the desktop (or the Jitsi client for mobile use) as WebRTC has been implemented in browsers for ages and it's easy to set up a conference.
Chrome also works well, but our lawyers are apparently not exactly fans of Google :)
"This is the second time MS have tried to charge for add-on features to Teams."
I suppose that the first time there were still other strong competitors in the market. Once those are eliminated, a free level gets companies to take the bait and once the company integrates it across their whole operation, the hook is set and M$ can reel them in and upcharge like made.
Tesla did these with their very brief $35,000 Model 3. They did sell a few, but you had to submit to high pressure sales tactics before being allowed to buy one and it was massively crippled. No online ordering from the web site. The same thing goes if you want to opt-out of the telematics. You lose all of the features that are worth anything. No map updates, no phone app, no Supercharger access, etc.
My university employers computer network dept (iSolutions) have decreed that we WILL have to use 'teams' for all of our telephony from Mid Jan, all desktop phones will be removed, even in high risk lab spaces no telephones to call for help will exist. I wonder if they'll have to pay for the telephony connectivity features, thus negating the savings removing the phones, the whole reason for doing so, were supposed to have made...
We're currently suffering with Teams, some Surface Hubs and on-premise Exchange: Microsoft really does not want to do this and is using Teams to force incompatabilities. Expect more Azure / Office 365 lock-in "goodies" down the road. :-/
It's not popular to say so but Google's work on WebRTC has, at least in theory, made conferencing apps interoperable. Or at the very least things that can be purely browser-based.
Normal MS practice.
Try using any of the 365 services, with Sharepoint turned off for the user.
Whiehever service is is might appear to work at first, but chances are you will at some point come up against something which doesn't work (or onky half-works) without Sharepoint.
It is Sharepoint at fault, or something like Windows Active Directory membership?
It was admittedly a couple years ago now, but I remember using the Teams Linux client on an RHEL laptop for a meeting with a remote group at another company, no network or AD etc. in common. Our corporate tool at the time was Zoom, which was fine, but the remote folks weren't allowed to use it so we had to adapt to Teams for this meeting on our side. It worked well enough.
Fast forward to the last few months or so, and the success can't be replicated. I've tried a couple other Linuxes, both the Linux Teams and browser clients, different Teams companies / parties on the other end, etc. No joy. My side attempts to connect, looks like it succeeds, then fails. Repeat.
My Linux desktops and laptops aren't members of the remote sides' workgroup or AD or sharepoint or ... well, anything Microsoft. Zoom (when the far side has it available) works as expected. The remote folks (after we get them on the phone) sigh knowingly, and report it happens a lot with anyone outside "our network".
No idea what changed, but these days it looks like Teams is a fail for non-Windows clients. Presumably it's a small enough market for Microsoft that they don't commit a lot of resources to it.
Nope - this is (of course) entirely deliberate. MS want to push everyone to pay - repeatedly - for their products as "services". This will sooner or later lead to the demise of Windows in the commercial space. They've already alienated the owners of "non-compliant" hardware by refusing to left them use Windows 11. This idiocy is going to push ever more corporate clients towards other solutions.
Our consultancy stopped dealing with MS products entirely about three years ago. Our hassle to remuneration ratio has significantly improved, and our market share has grown massively. We no longer have to deal with MS' brokenware!
I was urgently searching for something on Sharepoint and it was the first time I’d done so. I was looking for a document that the title and contents of were cropping up frequently in my OneDrive. Annoyingly all that comes up is my bloody files on the sharepoint search. A quick Google tells me that there are options as to what you can search through in Sharepoint. To do so however you need to be an admin which I’m not. A colleague had the document bookmarked which helped but still bloody annoying.
Never liked the features they’re making premium in Teams anyway so no great loss here.
Having done this migration around 18 months ago for around 5000 users, I'd say do it and don't look back, the "premium" features on the list are actually not very well used across any organization and the cost saving on Webex can be huge and the functionality of Teams is so much better, I don't mind Zoom for VC but Teams has the extra integration with Chat etc.
Also the Teams Meeting room devices - deployed around 150 of those in various formats from Yealink and they have been great.
In my experience, Teams videoconferencing is OK; it's worked about as well for us as some of the previous systems we used, including Skype and SfB/Lync. I've only used Zoom a couple of times so I can't really compare it; I didn't love Zoom, but that may have been due to unfamiliarity.
For everything else, I find Teams obnoxious where it isn't actually broken, and steadily getting worse. Take chat: You can't turn off the "smart" (stupid) editing tricks, for example, like trying to convert punctuation into idiotic emoji. Recently a Teams update caused it to always put all text in a quotation block in italics; apparently you can't turn that off either, and you can't change the formatting of the quoted text. The code-insert blocks are visually awful, with a ton of wasted space.
I'm certainly no fan of WebEx, and I understand the economic arguments, but I'd say Teams is far from good.
Like others, we are forced to use Teams at work since we are very much down the "use everything MS shoves at us, and change it as fast as MS chooses to change stuff". I'm told by people who have been here a bit longer that our current setup is (to paraphrase) "less rubbish than what it replaced" - that's high praise !
And, I was "completely unsurprised" to find that TPTB are now baulking at the licensing costs and are moving people to a lower priced licence and forcing them to use the online versions only - based on some arbitrary measure of how many emails they send. Yep, they've been firmly wedded to the ecosystem for about the length of time it takes for the vendor to decide you are now trapped and they can start ratcheting up the prices in the full knowledge that it's no impractical for you to leave.
Lets just say, there's "a few" really pee'd off users - especially when their request for re-instatement of the full licence (quoting along the lines of "can't do my job properly with the online rubbish") gets rejected.
But back to Teams. I don't even think the video conferencing is "OK". The UI seems to have been designed to "annoy" users. OK, the application version (we we now get having moved to Windoze 10) is much less rubbish than the broswer version, but there are still too many UI features which fall into the "WTF was anyone thinking when they did that" - and that's after you've selected all the options you can to get rid of annoyances. Oh yeah, and for security reasons there's a lot of stuff we aren't allowed to use it for - but can use Skype (which they haven't managed to turn off yet).
"Pro" - surprised that hasn't been used for something in Teams yet as it's used pretty much everywhere else.
Obviously it originally meant relating to a profession, but these days who knows what it means - it seems unlikely that someone listening to drum 'n' bass on their 'Airpods Pro' on the bus are doing so in the course of any profession!
Maybe yes, in the late 70s, but in answer to OP above, early 70s, no. But I was fortunate enough to experience a real Italian ice cream stall in the mid-70s. After that, whatever was on offered in the UK looked distinctly monochrome. Hence earlier comment. Fortunately, the UK market has moved on.
In the UK, especially to those of us brought up in the 70s, the choice was vanilla or nothing.
(oh, possibly with "raspberry" ripple squeezed in if you were exotic).
The 80's brought Viennetta, was that still a bit monochrome?
I remember comparatively ‘boring’ ice cream from back then. When Vienetta launched in 82 we thought that was dead posh in our house. My dad still liked his Rum ‘n’ Raisin though and you were in serious trouble if caught eating it.
Fortunately, the UK market has moved on.
In the mid 1970s my father became good friends with a man of Italian descent who made icecream in the small Rhondda village of Penygraig. As well as vanilla and the standard British ripples (chocolate, raspberry, lime, strawberry from memory) he absolutely did do the rum'n'raisin and tutti fruiti and a large range of what he termed 'continental' flavours - that is icecream that wasn't vanilla with a ripple; things like chocolate, strawberry, banana and at Christmas, Christmas pudding (though maybe that was later in the 70s).
He won awards for several icecreams, including the vanilla which was double cream, milk, sugar, vanilla and not much else as I remember it. I remember attending one of the national shows where he won a prize and crawling the stands getting free samples at each one :-)
The company is still going under the guardianship of Mike Jenkins' son Kevin, trading under the name of Sub Zero and with a parlour much closer to my front door than was the case when we had to drive up the Rhondda. On the downside there is now less cream and more skimmed milk in the product. Still tastes pretty special though.
M.
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I take it you've not had to use AutoDesk products - all subscription only - or optical modelling software such as Zemax.
When checking the prices of Zemax, especially single user network licenses to get around the "locked to one user for 30 days at a time" bollocks, be sure you are sitting down.
Something like £10K per year! For ONE user.
Enjoy the lockin folks.
Not using the tools that your company uses will result in a very short career..
Hint: Some companies use MS toolsets for budgetary reasons (we went to O365 because the cost of it comes out of operating budget, not capital. And because we are who we are, our capital budget is about 10% of what it was 5 years ago.. And we use Active Directory[1] so it (kind of) makes sense to use tools that tie into that[2]..
[1] Which, sadly to say, is one of the better mass authentication services around. I've herded NIS, plain kerberos and Novell (which was good but not simple to manage) and AD is one of the better ones. Probably because it's based on kerberos but with additional tools round it to manage it.
[2] Even on the Mac side - we use an authentication broker to allow people to log into the Macs without them having to be bound to AD.
we went to O365 because the cost of it comes out of operating budget, not capital
Our accountants (and owners) looked at the whole picture, capital as well as operational costs. The use of Microsoft products causes a lot of extra peripheral costs (security, update resources, cost of associated risk and downtime, loss of staff time, usability impact with each new version - it was apparently quite a list) and as soon as all of that was taken into account it became cost effective to ditch it, and so we are.
Not that it's an easy process (exactly because of the aggressive product entanglement that Microsoft deploys to keep people locked in) but we're getting there.
As for Teams (returning to topic), we never even started using it despite Microsoft's attempt to ram it down everyone's throat by making it install and start up with every system. As a matter of fact, it may have been because of it as it annoyed management to the point that they started to look at the whole picture in the first place, something others had been suggesting for quite some time. Teams was ironically the final straw..
> sadly to say, [AD] is one of the better mass authentication services around.
AD is very widely deployed, no argument; and better than some alternatives, admittedly.
But still hard to call "good". Problem is, the Linux/UNIX world didn't really have viable alternatives back when the time was ripe, so here we are.
I do miss NIS, for the simplicity if nothing else. Shame about the security bits ....
And in most cases, if the company says you use X, then the company pays for X. If an employer expected me to use something and pay for it myself, then I'd politely "suggest they reconsider" - but one thing I would not do is comply. I'd not take a job with anyone trying that, and if a current employer wanted to sack me for it then they'd find themselves in a tribunal.
TBH, I've never heard of a case like that - it's normal for employers to provide tools like that.
Personally, I think it's a stunningly silly idea to put all your eggs in one basket. When your single supplier suffers the inevitable SNAFU - and there's legion examples of this happening at Chez Redmond - then what happens?
I, for one, would live in terror if my entire business model was beholden to Patch Tuesday for any more services that it absolutely has to be.
Easier said than done.
What do you do then in the case of a collaboration tool?
Run multiple products in parallel.
It really does not matter where you go now the applications you run are usually a single point of failure, it is simple not possible to run something in parallel "just in case".
The underlying OS is becoming less relevant.
entire business model was beholden to Patch Tuesday
Which is why your business shouldn't blindly accept the patches but actually have a staged management system that allows you to test the patches before mass deployment..
It's not the science of putting objects into orbit (or even the Atlantic!)
Which is why your business shouldn't blindly accept the patches but actually have a staged management system that allows you to test the patches before mass deployment..
.. which means that you are effectively running the QA that Microsoft was supposed to perform. Aren't you glad you're locked in so hard that you have no choice but to be used as beta tester? You're saving your friends in Redmond (well, their shareholders) a fortune, and they're hard up as it is..
If I was responsible for a business that used exclusively MS products, Patch Tuesday would become a Patch Tuesday from a month before at the earliest.
I would not want to risk the business on a borked update stopping our ability to conduct business. We'd have some test kit out in the company that would be updated but would run alongside other systems that were not updated... you know just in case MS sent us a pile of bovine excrement (BAU for MS to do this)
Being an MS only shop is possible but ONLY if you put into place some extensive POS mitigation procedures and practices.
Update on Tuesdays is only for the foolish...
Isn't that part of the problem?
The moment they bring out a patch it also becomes public what the vulnerability is, giving the criminals a heads up that rich pickings may exist for a while until everyone has done their quality control (because MS doesn't appear to do any anymore) and finally installs it. Basically, every patch Tuesday starts a cyber arms race, coming to computers near you. No wonder so much gets breached.
The problem with NOT announcing the CVEs alongside a patch is, of course, that you would have to trust Microsoft which too is extremely problematic (although it's not like most have a choice).
"If I was responsible for a business that used exclusively MS products, Patch Tuesday would become a Patch Tuesday from a month before at the earliest."
Sadly that's no longer an option for a lot of orgs.
We used to be 1 month behind for production (with Dev/Test getting patches a couple days after patch Tuesday which gave us a month to notice any issues), however our insurers now require us to have our entire environment patched within 10 days.
It's all rather stressful and since running with this new remit (June 2022) we've hit a number of bugs (particularly with on-prem exchange) where the latest patches bork something and degrade our production environment.
*Sigh
Maybe your management should have a word with our management. Not only could this possibly save you a lot of grief, you would most likely save a fortune too.
The downside: you need to get different skillsets in the team.
'The software giant has also positioned the Premium edition as offering so many features that you can do everything in Teams and won't need to endure the misery of running multiple tools.'
Teams is just a bunch of separate tools they've acquired and stapled together with chewing gum, cat hair, and used condoms. That's why it's such a bloated, buggy, dog-slow, and inconsistent piece of crap. My life was much less miserable when we were running multiple tools that were actually good at doing what they do, like Slack.
Really, the only reason to use Teams has been (a) IT'S FREE so we're using it no matter how bad it is, and (b) Microsoft admins don't know how to work with or configure anything that's outside the Microsoft stack. So now you're removing (a).
Be glad you not using Slack as well then.
Current memory use: Teams 255MB & Slack is 325MB.
Given Slack's more limited functionality it seems like Teams is not the worst.
IMHO: Teams is OK at everything. While Zoom maybe good for video conf it is not that much better that it is worth switching tools; Same for Slack and chat. They are all tools I use, whether I like them or not they do generally work (Teams is not really any worse overall in this regard).
What is really annoying is that professionals in IT get so attached to things that are tools simply because that is what they are used to, and are unwilling to be objective in that "I like" is not relevant. You use the tools you need to use to solve the problem in an effective way.
I'm reminded of the time, almost 15 years ago, when I still used a Palm PDA (I'd switched from a Psion 3a after the second time the hinges broke, and they were still promising the Psion 5). Started with a Palm Pilot, switched to the Sony Clié range (until Sony dropped it) and ended up with a Tungsten. Great device and I used Agendus that brought diary, contacts and todo into a single app. My mobile phone was a Nokia and I had a separate digital camera and GPS (the latter mainly for when I was hiring cars for business travel); I also had an iPod. I tried the Apple 3GS as it promised the ability to reduce the number of separate devices I needed to take on business flights (and the number of accompanying battery chargers)! The 3GS didn't eliminate everything else, but the iPhone development since has.
Getting to the point: there wasn't a version of Agendus, or equivalent for iOS (at least, not one that actually worked as well as on the Palm), so I started using the native Apple apps. I missed the convenience of a single app, at first, but came to appreciate that the individual apps were actually better and the underlying operating system (iOS) provided sufficient integration that the whole experience (and productivity) was improved. In a similar way, I recall using Lotus Symphony (back in the mid-1980's) as a single program that could act as word processor, spreadsheet and database (and, at the time, it worked well for what our department needed). Within a few years, however, I appreciated the power and versatility of separate programs (WordPerfect, Quattro Pro and Paradox were my trio of preference for several years, until MS Office got established in Windows).
My experience (and it's mine, YMMV) is that integrated apps work well in bespoke applications but, for general use, the compromises needed to integrate can limit usefulness. Teams doing everything sounds like a wrong move and, whilst it can do it all, it doesn't do it all well enough, and people migrate to other apps that work better. Of course, that won't stop corporations settling on it, as those who make the relevant decisions rarely have to endure the consequences...
I remember Lotus Notes being pretty integrated - calendar, mail, ToDos and notes could be usefully converted from one to another. However, I don't see similar integration with the Mac apps. There's no native way to convert an email or message to a Reminder or put a Reminder into the Calendar or vice/versa. There's copy/paste and drag/drop, but they mostly just copy text without the underlying data, depending on which apps it's being dragged from and to.
I have a vague recollection that when I first started with Macs there was some integration between Reminders and Calendar. I've written scripts to do what I want, but I think Apple is missing a trick.
I remember Lotus Notes being pretty integrated
And pretty awful. For example - hit the Windows shortcut key for refresh (F5? F9 - can't remember) and Bloats doesn't refresh your session - instead it clears your authentication and you have to sign in again..
And if you actually have the misfortune to be the one running the server - good luck. Especially when the inevitable Notes server crash happens and you have to either spend hours watching the Notes startup process spending ages doing a DB clean/repair or find that an essential DB is corrupted beyond repair and you have to restore from last nights backup..
The 90's called and were overjoyed someone is still living there...
All the dinosaur companies moving from Notes to O365/Teams/etc are falling into the usual trap of not taking any notice of new functions/features and using the same config/processes as when you installed the software 20 years ago and are relying on MS to just handle everything. All the other customers (old and new) are using all the new functionality (and some missing from your moan that have been available since 1995 at least) for a resilient rapid development system which can run on almost any host OS, can be upgraded in place with minimal effort/cost.
Notes integrates very well with a lot of systems, even most MS packages now that MS has stopped changing standards version by version to break that functionality.
btw - that server startup clean/repair has not been an issue since V6 (2004 if I remember rightly) and at that time Exchange servers ran on a knife-edge and upgrades were new servers/new install of Exchange and migrate the mailfiles...major project taking days/weeks to achieve
Video on Teams is poor quality, choppy or blocky chosen at random.
There's no Full Screen mode that gives pixel to pixel matching for screen sharing. This is a regression, as teams used to be able to do it, but they broke it a while ago and haven't bothered to fix it.
On the plus side, their audio seems better now, almost rivalling Zoom, almost.
I'm beginning to think I may be the only commentator who has a company installation of Teams that actually works without any issues. We had problems at the outset but these were traced to firewalls and secure access - once those were dealt with, it's run smoothly. Audio and video are good, dropped calls are pretty much non-existent now and the overall experience is better than any Zoom calls I've endured or worse still Webex. Sitting back and waiting for the downvotes...…...
I had a similar experience at my last gig - Teams pretty much working as advertised, with the occasional glitch now and then. I've moved on to an org that uses G-Suite so I'm stuck with Google Meet. All the things people complain about with Teams? Multiply them by about 100 and you have some idea how much fun it is to use Meet all day long. Audio issues, crap video, crap screenshare with progressive build so it takes 10 seconds to see anything readable on the screen if the presenter doesn't have a perfect connection, no remote control, stupid low paste limits in the chat window (~200 characters of text and no files of any sort), and on and on. It's horrible. Despite all the bitching about Teams, I'd go back to it in an instant.
Legacy Meet or the new one (based on Duo)?
Most of my clients use MS365 and Teams, and across the board it's dreadful - excessive resource consumptions, call that may or may not connect, users shown as offline even though they're busy fiddling a Word document, Excel file or something else, plus a number of other sporadic bugs and issues on top.
The clients that are on Google Workspace are a breeze in comparison. Meet can be slightly awkward to use but it works reliably, even with larger meetings (early in the pandemic (legacy) Meet did have its problems but not anymore).
Across the board we see a lot less problems on Google Workspace than on MS365, not just as far as video conferencing tools are concerned. OneDrive is another clusterfork that causes pain, and the repeated outages in MS365 (like the resent OneDrive outage, another one of many) plus a number of really bad security holes (that took forever to get fixed) show that MS doesn't give a damn more about the quality and security of its cloud stack than it does for its on-premises software MS is so eager to get rid of. In contrast, Google has been pretty reliable, and since they were caught with their pants down (hacked) back in 2010 they have really beefed up on the security front.
My only complaint with TEAMs is TEAM-fatigue. But that could easily be replaced with any other tool-fatigue. The only problem have been when the internet is truly carp. I have been on calls of many hours with nary a drop or glitch. With SWMBO in the next room doing the same for her business. With bad internet, nothing the remote dev did worked - even their VPN was dead - no fault of TEAMs it seems.
Zoom on the other hand, is the tool of the devil. For all the features it doesn't have, i am amazed it is so popular! At the level we pay for (eg, nothing), we don't get persistent chat, not rich text (images) in chat. Much work and progress record is lost as soon as the meeting terminates - or even if you disconnect temporarily. Maybe someone in our org, or our business partners org has neutered the meetings but that is a PITA as you try and formalise any documentation afterwards. Even changing presenter was painful.
I'm beginning to think I may be the only commentator who has a company installation of Teams that actually works without any issues.
Then your company hasn't got round to integrating phone numbers into Teams and chucking the phones out. That's a special kind of fail.
Well without a phone number, how does someone get hold of you if needed ?
I have the joy of working in an office where mobiles aren't allowed, there's no desk phones, so the only way of someone from outside to call me is via the PSTN number mapped to Skype - fine if that computer is logged in etc. (we have more than one system we work on). Bear in mind that we need to cater for non-technical family members who might need us sometime - so anything other than "call this number" isn't really an answer.
And actually, that's an issue I'm currently working through as I need to update the "in emergency, this is how you get hold of me" and "in emergency, this is how you get hold of my employer to tell them I won't be in" lists for the family.
I'm beginning to think I may be the only commentator who has a company installation of Teams that actually works without any issues
In that case I'd stick a laptop with wireshark on a span port near the firewall and see what is leaving the building. You may have noticed, for instance, that Microsoft handles all your authentication requests which in theory means that Microsoft can hold open the door for anyone that wants to, say, use the benefits of that law they helped establish, the Cloud Act..
If Microsoft code starts behaving it's a sign they no longer want you to upgrade or update, and then I definitely would want to know why.
No, I'm not paranoid. I just don't trust anyone..
Curious if you ever have to use Teams between different orgs or even companies.
Teams worked well enough for us inside the company, though everybody was video off because the quality was poor and bogged the network; so it was essentially a shared conference call or phone bridge most of the time. [shrug] With a chat window on the side, I suppose.
But if we ever had to Teams with people elsewhere, connecting was hit or miss.
Of the three I've tried in anger - Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet; Teams generally has the best video quality, and Google generally has the worst. In the case of Google, the actual resolution and frames per second may be OK, but the latency seems to be about 15 seconds, which makes it unusable for real-time interaction.
Over the years, I've used many, but teams is largely the one that manages well network throughput and quality of voice and video.
Amazon Chime ? Unusable under 1Gbps bi-directional throughput if one single attendee has the idea of turning cam on.
Webex ? What can I say ?
Google meet is also quite cumbersome to use.
Not a big fan of MS, myself, but teams never dropped a single syllabe for me in years, on a tiny DSL line, while with the rest of the brigade, you may have to use morse in order to have your point move across.
In my own limited experience (mostly user, not administrator) Zoom is easy and mostly reliable, but quality varies so I guess the servers are under pressure as few pay. Not many features but not usually needed.
Teams sucks, I use the web interface as the app for Linux is awful, and even then it only work with Chrome-based browsers. So much for web standards! Video is often poor as well, in spite of apparent resources of MS and paid-for accounts. Not sure if its down to too little home BW for some users but seems worse than Zoom. Some features just don't work on web version though,
Webex used to be the biggest cluster-fsck I ever experienced, you would only know the plugin was out of date or needed after the meeting started, and it needed admin privileges to install so many time not my machine so no-go. But last time I was forced to use it, it was "OK" using a web browser without plugins, so maybe they have improved something.
We have Google accounts but generally avoid them for anything beyond email (fairly good spam filters) and calendar.
This "perceived" integration is a big selling point, yes. Until you realize just how badly the different products integrate. Maybe because none of them appear to be properly designed, but look more like an interns project that then got bombarded to primetime because it resembles a bad copy of a popular tool.
Until you realize just how badly the different products integrate
Teams is actually a toolset sitting on to of a (limited by design) set of Sharepoint sites. It's fairly trivially easy for an admin that doesn't know what they are doing to utterly kill Teams..
And given that the Teams admin training basically consists of 80% front-end and 20% back-end it's understandable that most Teams admins don't really know what they are doing.
So, they're already lying through their teeth ?
Not only is Borkzilla not including the features that people want and need (aka good performance and no headaches), but it can't be arsed to lay down the rules transparently.
I thank my lucky stars that I don't need to use this shite on a daily basis.
Its sensible practice. Now they've pre-announced the price they can see how bad the outcry is before deciding whether to stick with it or pick another value - whilst avoiding headlines about u-turns and the like.
Hey, valued customer - because we know your time is money, you like to plan ahead, and we're confident we'll be first in any cost/feature comparison you make, we'll only tell you the price after we launch the changes to the product you're already using. Screw you! MS x x x
`The software giant has suggested Teams Premium will have an "expected list price of $10 per user per month" but will reveal the actual price only once the tool becomes generally available.`
I understood "$10" as MSRP, and "actual price" as whatever discounted price you can negotiate. Basically you arm wrestle them for the final price.
I haven't tried, but I suspect that I can use the video recording feature that my VM host provides. Presumably quite a few other other options are available, depending on your setup and how much effort you are willing to expend, but "simply hitting a record button that already exists" sounds like quite a low bar. Who dreamt up this "security feature"? Do they know anything about computers? Why are they working for Microsoft?
There's basically nothing you can do to prevent someone with sufficient motivation from capturing the video. Even if you completely took over the OS so no video capture software would work, you could use hardware which copies as well as displays, and even if you prevented that as well, it won't stop a user pointing a camera at the screen. Since it's impossible to prevent, the feature isn't going to stop people but is probably there just to respond to people who don't understand that and think that blocking the record button is all they need to do to hide what they've said. I've dealt with those users who demand a feature even though it's not going to accomplish what they want, but if they're annoying enough, you add it anyway. If enough of those people have demanded a lock on that button, then a lock will be added, even though it doesn't accomplish much.
My capture device is an hdmi-USB adapter that presents itself as a camera at the USB end, and I can record from the “camera” using my preferred video recording software.
I say “camera” here, but usually I use it with an actual camera. I could do the same thing with the hdmi end plugged into the display-out of a computer. I’d probably need to run the audio separately to be able to record and hear it at the same time - audio jack to splitter, one end to earphones, the other end to a mixer. The mixer would go to the recording computer and also bring in a microphone feed. I’d either have two microphones, one attached to each computer, or one mic with a splitter.
I've got one of those as well, and if yours is anything like mine, you can just use capture software which allows you to feed the recorded track into your headphones simultaneously, common in software geared for audio production as well as video. No other hardware is needed. This is why the lock on the record button won't do anything, and I'm sure the person who put it there knows that and was asked to do it by someone who doesn't.
Well technically the full strategy is "let another company do the initial marketing and prove the market, copy their ideas, give it away for free for a few years, wait until other company loses all market share because they needed revenue to survive and you didn't, then once it's the only thing any of your corporate business partners will use, charge for it."
But, yeah.
So MS have hoodwinked every company into almost living through MS Teams 24/7 over the last 3 years and just like any well practiced drug dealer the freebies are over and now you can't live without your daily fix and they're jacking up the price!
You still wanna get high? That's gonna cost ya my friend!
A strategic goal of the corporate masters to to require all that has any value whatsoever to be rented, temporarily and without rights, to the Shmucks so as to guarantee and perpetuate the master class of wealth vs. the Shmuck Pauper class. Please resist, this cannot in any way turn out well for the vast majority of humanity. But, you knew that already. Right?
Teams is currently working ok for us - but it has definitely had its fair share of weirdness. My main gripe is the utterly useless search functionality - it will show you a message that matches your search text, but won't let you view the message in context (which, more often than not, makes it entirely useless).
I fully expect it to die horribly now that I've said something (almost) nice about it, as I'm going to be stuck in Teams meetings the rest of the day...
I came here to post the same. This is a bit weird. Why make that a premium item? It is most of use to those who are deaf.
But their constant changes of interfaces show how little they care about people with differing abilities. It is just about the dollars. I have so many older people totally confused about Win11.
I haven't done anything more than check the article, so I have no idea what the actual feature is but the list in the article says they are moving live translation, not live transcription. I suspect transcription is to be kept as these days an essential function, but translation can be seen as very much a value-added function so can be charged-for.
Not an MS apologist, not at all a fan of Teams, though I'd say it seems to have settled down recently, either that or I've just become a bit more adept at wrangling it.
M.
before my company rolls something new out. 10 bucks a head per month, that'll be hundreds of thousands of dollars a month as we have tens of tousands of employees all using Teams. I can't see them accepting a sudden and unexpected new bill like that. "Oh, here's a new multimillion dollar a year bill for something we used to include" is not going to fly well over there.
Icon, as it looks like the spit-take the CEO will have when this is presented to him.
This kind of tactics is illegal in the EU. Companies with huge market shares and deep pockets are not allowed to price services at a loss to close out competitors then hike the cost when they have achieved market share goals.
Being illegal never stopped them in the past, and weak enforcement ensures that they will continue to do it in the future. They have no morals.
Bad news for small companies providing innovative new services.
Microsoft has enough experience with EU investigations, court cases and enforcement to know that it amounts to squat, so they evidently feel free to ignore the very possibility of EU action. Sadly, judging with the blinding speed and deep insight with which the EU moves I can't say they're wrong, bad as it is.
It's not, simple as that. Microsoft (thankfully) doesn't have a monopoly on messaging/video conferencing programs, and moving product features that used to be free or part of a lower price tier into a premium subscription is perfectly legal in the EU as well.
Also, why you expect a company to have "morals", I don't know (aside from the fact that what constitutes "morality" is culture-dependent and open to interpretation). Microsoft is a business, and it's aim is to earn money by selling products and services. At best it cares about laws and regulations, but morals are for the marketing department.
Lastly, please explain how why Microsoft moving included features of Teams into a premium subscription is "bad news for small companies providing innovative new services" when there is an abundance of small businesses doing exactly that, also several in the messaging area. How, exactly, is Microsoft's announcement impairing small businesses from being innovative?
"Those features are:
Live translated captions;
Timeline markers in Teams meeting recordings for when a user left or joined meetings;
Custom organization Together mode scenes;
Virtual Appointments – SMS notifications;
Virtual Appointments – Organizational analytics in the Teams admin center;
Virtual Appointments – Scheduled queue view."
I literally couldn't give a shit about any of them. It's a means of making phone calls without paying phone companies. That's all.
-A.
And the ultra special, limited availability version:- Teams: Not annoying!
Shirley, you jest! That version will never make it into production!
Or even into beta. You see, there could never be an approved specification that could possibly make Teams "less annoying"....
I hold no truck for present day Microsoft, but do acknowledge impetus during early years of the company towards advancement of personal, educational, public-sector, and corporate computational activities. That said, Microsoft's increasing adoption of rental as source of revenue makes sense to the dispassionate observer.
Software, in terms of commercial product, holds no intrinsic monetary value despite cost of its development. Sales of software initially were of a product held on floppy disks; this had physical reality and by (false) implication the digital 'content' was property too. In early days, one bought software incarnated thusly. Enterprise bought licences enabling legal copying of Microsoft software and its distribution among a stated number of staff or terminals.
So-called 'piracy' was a minor irritant. It was stamped upon in commercial contexts lest it grow. Realistically, Microsoft grasped that educational institutions, students, and connected families, could not be hauled up before courts for mere sharing. Instead, students, being potential long-term customers upon taking up paid work, were wooed by free software and special offers; meanwhile institutions were taken onboard through various inducements to promulgate Microsoft products among staff, thereby effectively blocking out other vendors of mainstream office applications.
Although 'selling licences' to use standalone software is rentier activity in pejorative sense, what Microsoft has been embarking upon in recent years truly is rental of a service instead of pretence of copyrighted materials possessing scarcity within supply/demand led markets and subject to price discovery.
Because access to the Internet is almost ubiquitous, Microsoft is enabled to offer far more extensive services than stand alone software suites. Interim attempts to prop-up (specious) intellectual property (IP) rights by forcing supposedly stand alone software to register online and to 'call home' from time to time, are now being supplanted by software suites capable of integration with powerful Microsoft computational facilities and given access to as much secure off-site storage as the customer wishes to rent.
In this context, it is sensible to enable software suites to run at basic level in absence of Internet connection ('outages' etc.), and nothing is gained by chasing the odd 'pirate' who doesn't need integration with Microsoft online services. Also, the Microsoft operating system may as well be made open source, and freely available too in compiled version; no longer shall it be where the real money lies.
The manifestation of Microsoft discussed here is compatible with 'rental services' operating within proper market-capitalism; it need have no connection with ersatz markets created by IP protection laws. Companies relying on IP protection are operating in a realm of ever more difficult to enforce 'rights' to nonsensical monopoly. Contrary to that, Microsoft is moving towards genuine monopoly mediated by market forces. This last may be where real cause for concern rests.
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