Banana Skin?
Without looking too closely it would seem to me there are multiple ways this could go wrong!
Microsoft has released a unified Teams app, doing away with the requirement to have one app for work or education and another for personal use. The new addition, long anticipated and arguably how things should have worked from the start, allows users to add or select a different account with a click in the top right-hand …
Indeed. The most obvious that comes to mind is posting pet pics (or worse) into a chat with your family/friends/wife/etc, only to realize that the Teams window is signed in to your work account and you've just shared something nauseatingly twee with colleagues.
Even old Teams for Business was terrible for that; the number of times I've been messaging someone, then a toast notification appears to tell me someone else has IM'd me, I click the popup, type a reply to the new person... and then remember, for the umpteenth time, that Teams doesn't (or didn't) switch away from the existing chat when doing that, to the utter confusion of the original person with whom I was conversing.
Ah well. If only Management had adopted my proposal to standardise on ICQ or Yahoo! Messenger.... :P
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the REAL reason Microsoft makes this 'generously' happen.
I also wonder what this will do when DLP comes to play.
As for "Sadly, Linux fans will have to stick with the web version for now.", nobody sane would run any Microsoft products on Linux, heck, I already use the sandboxed web versions to prevent this rubbish from infecting my Mac, and that turned out to be a very good decision as Microsoft seems determined to use their applications to make MacOS as unsafe as Windows..
"The most obvious that comes to mind is posting pet pics (or worse) into a chat with your family/friends/wife/etc, only to realize that the Teams window is signed in to your work account and you've just shared something nauseatingly twee with colleagues."
True, but there's nearly the same opportunities with purely-work Teams.
In a 450-person all staff calls, "Hey Bro! How ya doing?" plus username pops into the chat. Or better still, "God, she's boring!" about the presenter, intended for a parallel private chat but instead going into a the main NHS Teams meeting chat. Only 2,500 people on the call.
There's no reason to use it for personal stuff and I won't install it on my personal phone, which is what Microsoft really wants it to do.
I hate pretty much everything about Teams but have to use it for some projects. And there are times when for things like support, I need it, so it will be good to have the option to use a separate account for that.
This, exactly. I work for a DEI heavy company, but am a Conservative, so there's no way I'd ever want any sharing. Especially when the company considers any app uses by them to be theirs to snoop - sharing a work account with a personal account would expose the l'il darlins to my highly offensive opinions, such as the idea of personal responsibility or an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. Or, God forbid... a mention of God.
Bugger the home and work faffing around (I'd never dare use my work PC for home use, and only once have I taken in my own laptop as emergency work cover) - when will M$ finally optimise the damn thing so it doesn't swallow so much RAM?
Or does it need that RAM to store all the telemetry before upload?
IRC could do much of what teams could do in less than 1MB of RAM.
Add in video calls, whiteboards etc and the old MS Messenger could do this in 16MB of RAM.
Teams is bloated because it is a web application so needs a webserver instance to run locally just to run it in 500 to 1000MB of RAM.
Au contraire, Linux users should be thankful that there isn't a way to foist that crap on them.
Leave it nicely in a browser with no ability to background or grab data and metrics it's not supposed to grab.
Frankly, when my new machine arrives I'll set up a VM, just for Microsoft applications. There's no way I let their code loose on my machine without some serious fencing off.
And I bet they STILL haven't fixed that stupid security hole where when you click on "Sign out" it DOES NOT!
There are frequent instances when all you have to do is click on a user name/email address and it signs you in without asking for so much as a password AFTER you've signed out.
Its taken them long enough. Having to explain to a user "use the work or school option" it was beyond ridiculous. For anyone that would listen I'd always moan "I despised Steve Jobs but the only thing he got right when moving back to Apple was getting rid of all the stupid names and variations on the Mac. This is what Microsoft should of done with Teams from the start".
Having said that, Teams is still kinda shit.
And worse still, Teams seems to be intentionally morphing to borg Outlook.
Not that Outlook was much cop, but the indications are already there that Tealook will be an order of magnitude worse: "Colleague X is trying to reach you in Teams" (after you've seen and responded), plus intrusive, unasked for notifications panels obscuring vital bits of screen, or endless fucking pinging from responses in a busy chat that you're either invested in and already know of, or trying to barely listen to because the meeting is of no real interest or relevance
FFS Microsoft, why do you keep making things worse? And then there's the shit-headed Recall feature, that nobody asked for, nobody wants, and you MORONS won't accept that.
"All users, including those on Windows 10 and Mac, can now connect and collaborate with anyone, anytime – for free – when signing in with a personal email.""
Sounds dreadful.
I don't really have a "personal email"* for precisely this reason.
-A.
*Well of course I have email addresses. The personal ones are only shared with people that I'm personal with. Close friends, relatives. that kind of thing. The rest get disposable monikers.
I haven't been in the game with this recently but .... omg it's like seven years ago I was wrestling with this at work, I never did figure it out but I was on the phone yelling at Microsoft support because they couldn't explain a thing and I couldn't log in at work and download something important and ... and then it worked.
Microsoft, yay.
Microsoft missed an opportunity with the 2020 pandemic to get Teams out in front of the masses. Nobody was going to pay $$ per month with free options available, and by the time they bothered to put out a free version in 2023, Zoom and Google had pretty much divvied up the home market. Nobody running a virtual conference seriously considered Teams due to the lack of a free Teams client.
Bloat
The fucking silly replacement of words with emojis
The lack of ability to change the scroll bars
Limit of 15 to *pinned"
Constant screw up of audio/visual if you have a dock and then dock /unndock a few times
No control of enter (make it so it does. It send) as if you have been in a list and come out, it senda
"Microsoft has released a unified Teams app, doing away with the requirement to have one app for work or education and another for personal use."
There better be a group policy where you can disallow personal accounts on a work computer, or there is going to be some serious corporate data leakage going on.
Which is crazy, as as far as I can see the Windows client is sort of Electron anyway, isn't it?
The Web client has been deliberately borked, so that it now no longer lets you set custom backgrounds. This means that in some companies, you have to use the Windows client for calls, as it is mandated to use the company backdrop.
To be fair, I hate all instant messaging based collaboration tools. I suffer with ADHD and find all these things so distracting I'm unable to do much of anything. Ping, there we go again. Ping, is that one more important? Ping, that was funny - I'll reply. Ping the server instance for the other division has started acting up. Now where was I?