Microsoft hits Ctrl-Z after Teams trips over file sharing Microsoft Teams experienced a file-sharing outage overnight that disrupted collaboration for many users and forced the software biz to roll back a recent backend change. The problem began during US business hours, with users reporting odd behavior. Attachments failed to upload, downloads stopped working, and collaboration for …
I blame Skype; this used to happen all the time in the Linux app, and the same file would work fine in the web version.
Maybe "integrating" the two broke it ?
Not that we care, we've moved to something not-Microsoft at 3 quid per user per month, and uninstalled Skype. That's how much people hate Teams, even though we have a 365 sub for Office that (probably) includes it.
Yet, on the upside, Microsoft subscription payment service is ticking along nicely without missing a beat.
Apologies to Goodfellas.
"Now the guy's got Microsoft as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Microsoft. Trouble with the billing? He can go to Microsoft. Trouble with licensing, downtime, Azure acting up? He can call Microsoft. But now the guy's gotta come up with Microsoft’s money every month no matter what. Business slow? Screw you, pay us. Oh, you had a breach? Screw you, pay us. Your latest software update took down your servers, huh? Screw you, pay us."
Maybe Microsoft should consider — oh, I don't know — giving users the capability of sending actual file attachments in Teams, rather than making them inline shared files with all the attendant permissions problems they create?
This could be just a me problem, but trying to open shared documents in Teams using multiple user accounts (one privileged) via Firefox results in being denied access because FF guessed at the wrong user profile to access from that tab. I end up having to open a private browsing window, then copying and pasting the Teams document link into a new session so I can force the right account. It's a multi-step process to open some file that may or may not be important.
So trying to run Windows Troubleshooting on an Azure AD joined PC, and it demands my MS account credentials. I enter my business username to be told that “doesn’t exist”. So now I can’t run said Troubleshooter to fix the small heap of dung Windows Update left behind.
Also downloaded Chrome because one of our systems demands it, with MS bleating that “Edge is built on the same platform as Chrome” (so far so correct “ but with trust from Microsoft”. I nearly fell off my chair laughing.
Software development and maintenance is difficult. It involves such requirements as thinking. Automation would make it simpler. It is proposed therefore to set up an automatic process which makes random changes to the software at random times. Those that cause problems can then be reverted, those that don't can be left in even if their effects are meaningless.
In defense of the cloud, it has enabled some very powerful capabilities which would be much more difficult to implement without it. I got an IM in Teams from a teammate in India requesting a file, which popped up on my phone. From my phone, I was able to locate the file in OneDrive and send it to him via Teams. I'm not saying you couldn't implement something similar with on-prem technology, but the cloud does make it simpler for the customer, freeing them from having to administer the complicated back-end infrastructure. For smaller organizations, cloud technologies can enable capabilities that they simply wouldn't have otherwise.
It obviously has its downsides as well, such as operational cost and being at the mercy of the vendor's changes, so it's not all bread and roses, to be sure.
"How's that new update going"
"Just finished getting ChatGPT to confirm the output from Copilot, so good to go"
"Ok roll it out"
.
.
.
"People are saying it broke file sharing"
"Ask ChatGPT how to fix it"
"It say press CNTL+U. Not sure what it does, so here goes"
"Hmmm odd, thought U was for undo. Looks like its just underscored everything. I'll ask on Reddit"
"It's CNTL + Z apparently".
"Yah, we're back".
Even in my work as a humble Tech Author responsible for our product's document quality, I find it vital to understand our corporate business model, as embodied in our workflows. My colleagues love their mandatory Procedures with their flow charts and swimlane graphics. Corporately, we are forced to do it on SharePoint+365, with the dreaded Teams relentlessly blotting out the remaining landscape. There is no meeting of minds - or of workflows. Not only is the Microshite product fundamentally incompatible with either our Procedures or any sane workflow, but it is no longer anything one can lay a business model over with any certainty. Come back tomorrow and it has been broken yet again by some arbitrary update. It makes my other hat, as systems engineer designing the Layers 1 and 2 of that overlay, impossible, as the underlying Layer 3 and 4 tools at our disposal are in constant and arbitrary churn. Our document management and resulting quality are appalling, and with little chance of any fundamental improvement.
I am hardening to the view that platform engineering is as essential for Tech Docs delivery as it is for software delivery. As M$ move ever deeper into "fuck up the local installs and force the sheeple into our cloud" land, those departments of big corporates who need reliability and predictability from our IT will equally inexorably move to the likes of Oracle "unbreakable", RedHat and Canonical for our infrastructure. Manglement's favoured Windoze will be tolerated only as far as the local installs can still deliver on a mixed-ecology network.
</rant>
Nah, I expect better QA from a startup which absolutely needs good-looking software to hope surviving.
A 30-year old company jas captive customers and had the time to develop an internal bureaucracy that ensures that nobody is ever truly responsible for anything: as long as the right boxes are ticked and some convoluted process followed, who cares if things actually works ?
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