back to article Microsoft rolls out one Teams app to rule them all

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 …

  1. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Banana Skin?

    Without looking too closely it would seem to me there are multiple ways this could go wrong!

    1. David 132 Silver badge

      Re: Banana Skin?

      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

      1. Woodnag

        Re: Banana Skin?

        Much easier to profile people with access to both work and home activities... and MS owns LinkedIn too.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Banana Skin?

          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..

        2. cyberdemon Silver badge
          Devil

          Re: Banana Skin?

          Who the heck uses Teams for personal use?

          One may be forced to have multiple work accounts (e.g. a contractor working for multiple companies), but a personal account? You are willingly forking over your personal data to The Dev^W^W Microsoft?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Banana Skin?

        "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.

  2. mattaw2001

    I'm so sure that ms teams will keep the data between my personal life and work life separate I'm willing to risk my career!

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      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.

    2. M.V. Lipvig Silver badge

      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.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Separating work / home

    As long as I can separate work from home, show as being online for work, not for for home or reverse depending on the time of day. Not that it matters as I have separate laptops for home and work.

    1. Giles C Silver badge

      Re: Separating work / home

      Very sensible, if stuff needs to be shared between home and work that is what email is for. I go further and have separate mobile phones for home and work.

    2. PK

      Re: Separating work / home

      This is why I have a separate windows id for work on my home PC, so I'm only logged on to the correct 364 account. Also much easier to switch off at the end of the day when I can't see my work stuff from the normal id.

  4. Chasxith

    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?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Oh hush.

      If you don't know by now that Microsoft products always take 10% more resources than actually available you've not been paying attention over the last, well, decades.

    2. TReko Silver badge

      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.

  5. may_i Bronze badge

    M$ Unveils, blah, blah, All users, including those on Windows 10 and Mac can blah, blah...

    but Linux users can go fsck themselves.

    "Unified" eh?

    "one Teams app" eh?

    Nah.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: M$ Unveils, blah, blah, All users, including those on Windows 10 and Mac can blah, blah...

      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.

  6. ITMA Silver badge
    Devil

    Blah blah blah....

    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.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Blah blah blah....

      That's just to make it compatible with Microsoft security overall..

  7. katrinab Silver badge
    Unhappy

    I’d rather keep work and personal life completely separate, and personally I’d prefer if Teams Personal was called something completely different, like maybe Skype.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      It is: Jitsi and WebRTC..

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    The limits of collaboration platforms

    The limits of collaboration platforms are that you have to be there to collaborate. Couldn't we plug ChatGPT into it and go and touch grass.

  9. steviebuk Silver badge

    Jesus christ

    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.

    1. Like a badger

      Re: Jesus christ

      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.

  10. captain veg Silver badge

    personal email

    "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.

  11. JRStern

    I think that's good

    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.

  12. JavaJester

    Too Little, Too Late

    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.

  13. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

    Que?

    What does a "personal" user of Teams use it for?

    And is it voluntary?

    1. katrinab Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: Que?

      Attending job interviews mostly I guess?

      1. Julian Poyntz

        Re: Que?

        Webclient for that

  14. Bebu
    Coat

    "one Teams app to rule them all"

    and "in the darkness bind them." ;)

  15. Julian Poyntz

    Why can't they fix

    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

    1. petef

      Re: Why can't they fix

      You are being kind in limiting your list of Teams failings.

  16. Zippy´s Sausage Factory
    Unhappy

    "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.

  17. Missing Semicolon Silver badge
    Unhappy

    No Linux client

    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.

  18. Andrew Scott

    personal email address login

    pretty sure it requires a microsoft email address to login. gmail or yahoo email probably won't work.

  19. Matthew 25

    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?

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