Disney kicks Slack to the curb, looks to Microsoft Teams for a happily ever after There's no fairy tale ending for Slack at entertainment behemoth Disney following reports that the Salesforce-owned messaging service will be ditched in favor of Microsoft Teams. A 1.1 TB file, allegedly collated from Disney's internal Slack archive, was published by a group calling itself "Nullbulge" in July, apparently in …
My kid started a new school this year, crappy notebook(12" maybe?) running win11 and running hot and it's Teams to the rescue? Not really, it's been a horrible experience. Some instructors have no clue how to use it, but continue to shovel shit down the tubes anyway. It will be a fun year ;-{
Microsoft has a habit of retiring APIs without sufficient transition notice. That by itself is reason enough to think twice about using Teams.
Group chats show in the same place as individual chats. Are you using a "Team" as a chat room? Because the team is for posting files related to the project or posting team announcements etc, if you try to use it as a chat room then everyone will get confused as hell trying to keep track...
That seems like a good place to do that when you're starting to try to use Teams properly. You already have a team, it already has people on it, when you click on it, there is a chat window, so surely that's where chats should happen. It's a mess. Not that Slack is better. It's just a different collection of annoyances. If pressed, I'd have to take Teams, but neither of them is winning any awards with me.
It's like trying to use your Facebook wall as a chat room... Completely different way of functioning.
Unfortunately it is assumed that being able to use software like Teams is a general being IT competent thing and therefore the idea of a specific training session to tell people how to correctly use the tools they pay so much for is "not required"...
If you set up a team for a new project, all chat to do with that project has to be done within a channel within that team instead of random ad-hoc 1-1 and group chats between members as that way there is a record other people on the project can find and people who come onto the project later can review. This is the right way to do things.
Teams makes them difficult to use, team chats are in a different place and also behave differently when you reply. It's not the user doing it wrong, it's the software.
That’s me, a Mac native suddenly in a job with a Windows box and Teams and Glow (which is going to hell). Recently my line manager retired. The Technicians Team had a vast number of files loaded, MSDS worked up, Risk Analyses etc so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every year of new students. I noticed in the summer that it was missing from my Teams. I raised a ticket with IT and damn glad I did the Team was in danger of being nuked as it had no owners. They made me an owner and I made my new line manager one so there are two of us.
Nobody else noticed a damn thing of course. Retiring manager didn’t think about the fact he was the only owner of it.
Surely in that situation the software should poll all the Team members about the situation? Then something could be organised. Instead it was headed for the delete shute.
Having worked for dozens of companies consulting over the years, I can say from experience orgs with Teams, it's always an unhappy place that people only use when necessary, and act like big brother is always watching. Slack orgs actually like to communicate and do so freely, spawning non-work interest chat for mutual hobbies, and in general is a much friendlier experience.
Not to mention if you use Teams on anything NOT windows, the experience is downright miserable as anything Microsoft on non-Microsoft devices.
I actually quit a job once because they moved to Teams, or at the time OCS, as it simply didn't work with Linux which I use, so it hobbled my ability to work effectively there.
@Mikus , while I agree that Teams is less than ideal, I've been running it on Linux Mint for over a year and it's been fine.
I have no real issues with it at all.
The version I use is the first hit in software manager.
I suspect it is just the web version in some sort of wrapper but it works fine for me.
There are a few quirks; like it doesn't highlight which screen you are sharing in red, so you need to keep track of which one you've shared, and you can't pop out a video call into a separate window.
But overall I think it's workable - it means I can stay away from W11 and still continue to work for my curreny employer ;)
I can't say I've recognized a pattern with what people are willing to say on it. Plenty of informal things happened on Teams when I used it. I have worked in multiple places where Slack was used. One of them used it pretty much just for work stuff, which was manageable. The ones where it was also used for informal stuff were a bit annoying. I'm not sure if there is an alternative that still lets people do what they're intending, but staying on top of many work-related chats and channels and subchannels and threads while trying not to be distracted by large informal channels, but still being on the informal channels because sometimes important things that weren't work related would be posted there and I wouldn't find out for days was not very helpful to productivity.
There was always a challenge figuring out which channels were monitored and which ones were not. You'd have thought that message frequency would be a good enough indicator of that, but it wasn't because the channels that people weren't watching could sometimes be because a subset of people had taken to using it for communication other people didn't care about.
Teams was just about usable until they've forced "New Teams" which is just part of the trend of web apps with a minimal GUI. It's absolutely horrible. Features are missing, it eats RAM, it's slow, randomly restarts and is just a horrible app.
I can understand that maintenance of these web apps might be easier, but the enshitification that comes along with it makes apps so clunky. Slower, with less features and with more bugs. It's just horrible and whoever thought this was a good way for IT to go should be first against the wall when the revolution comes...
I'm a Linux guy so I don't daily drive Microsoft products, I actively avoid them...but I do support them in user environments...in my opinion the "new" apps are better...some of the missing features that most people that I support complain about are not actually missing features...they're workarounds that have come to be thought of as features.
I've wanted the old Outlook client to die for nearly a decade now, because it is awful and it can be insanely difficult to troubleshoot...moreover...some issues are actually impossible to diagnose and fix and simply force you to "recreate the profile".
So far, with hundreds of users, I have had no technical issues at all (which is surprising for a Microsoft product)...it's all been user based moaning about "muh features"...I'll take that over undiagnosable new profile fixes to impossible problems any day of the week...it's also opening the door to me suggesting alternate mail clients.
I hope the next casualty of this "feature cull" is Excel...because hardly anyone uses that product the way it was intended...as a calculator...I've seen people using it as a password manager, todo list manager, a fucking table construction tool to copy/paste into Word from...anything but calculating shit.
Speak it brother. Excel is a spreadsheet, nothing more. It is NOT a database and should NEVER be used as one. I have built Access (Spit!) databases specifically to avoid using Excel. I have designed and built relational databases which work well, generate official reports, print barcodes linked to the data that the benchtop robot could use etc etc.
The thought of trying to do all that in Excel makes me break out in a cold sweat.
Another one is people who don’t know how to anchor the top row so you always have the column names. When the top is miles of scrolling that is unforgiveable.
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