Kiss my ASCII, Microsoft – we've got one million fewer daily active users than you, boasts Slack Several months after Microsoft crowed about how its Teams group chat app has reached 13 million daily active users, rival Slack has fired back with figures of its own. The company, which went public in June and has seen its share price slide from its IPO debut at $38.50 per share to around $24 currently, has been sniping at …
You'll find plenty more to frustrate you as you use it more.
It is a reasonably good product but has many. many frustrations, this list is not exhaustive...
*) You can't install as a 'proper' piece of software. It exists in user space and therefore everyone who runs it has a complete copy of the program in their profile. Also it therefore also breaks even Microsoft's own security guidance by having to open up spaces to allow programs to run from where they shouldn't (APpData/Local). Even the MSI they produced doesn't solve this, it just forces an install into AppdData for every login of a new user. Even Chrome which pulled a similar trick allowed Network Administrators a proper installer into ProgramFiles. There with Teams, not only is restricting program installs to Administrators made much harder, due to regular updates even Whitelisting is difficult.
*) You are always in a single program interface. This includes video calling and document viewing. Therefore, if you use it in a meeting when you open a document to review you lose any other document that you were viewing or the video caller or any other part and have to get back to where you were in a non-intuitive way (just using the back button can take you to some weird places). This also makes Teams video calling a lot less useful than Skype with its easily dragable video window.
*) You can't print anything. So quickly opening up the document you can't print it. You have to edit it or download it first. Combined with not being able to have multiple windows as above is a pain at times.
*) Everything defaults to 'shared use'. So if you have a docuemnt open and decide to take some notes by clicking edit you edit for everyone. A number of meetings I've been in an the Agenda has been annotated by an attendee in front of our eyes. Could be embarrassing. The only non-shared option is to download it, all the other options even opening in local Word/Excel whatever will automatically save changes in almost realtime. Even for peopl who realise this and stop and changes or delete them end up messing with the changed date and chnaged by user so causing difficulty looking for the latest document.
*) Video calls can crop the view when you have multiple attendees. This causes issue with widescreen video cameras, especially ones pointing at a table in a meeting room as you can lose people out of the view. In skype you could disable this, in other video conferencing it lays them out better to stop this. Teams just assumes there will always only be one person on VC and so it can just take out the outside edges as more people join.
*)Granular access controls to channels is not possible. You need to set up a new team for every project that will need different member access and therefore every member of the team is also a member of the channel in that team which mean that notifications for that channel also notify the whole team even if they aren't involved in that channel.
*) In fact notifications for channels are a bit all over the place.
"We already migrated to Teams. Given time, Slack is dead."
Given time, Teams is dead.
It's already a product that is forcefully pushed to anyone regardless if they want it or not. As such it will fade to oblivion as soon as people realise it's just bad.
It survives only as long as MS is dumping money on it and it won't happen very long.
We are an Office 365 (well, Microsoft 365) customer, but we don't use Teams - we don't use Slack either.
At my previous employer, they had their own private Jabber server. They were a security company and no confidential communications or data storage was allowed over cloud services.
Wish ours was like that. They prate on about security day in, day out, but have just closed down the internal jabber server which gave us nice, simple, secure instant messaging. Now everything is on Slack, which overcomplex and takes up way too much screen space. Oh yes, and is plastered with instructions not to discuss anything confidential.
Teams' market is probably not actually going to be developers. I've been surprised by the take up of it at my place of work by none devs and it hasn't faded away. I can see how it can be useful, but at the same time it's a bit bloated and unintuitive to use. I don't think slack have to worry about their audience as I don't think devs will go anywhere near it by choice.
Well Skype for Business is going away so...
I agree that the teams interface is -very- non intuituve to use, but when it comes to voice or meetings, it's just the same as SfB in terms of sharing etc.
And one advantage over SfB is the persistence of items.
But I'd rather have the simplicity of SfB for simple quick chats and calls, for sure.
Am I officially old and therefore unable to see the point?
I find myself asking the same question. My assumption is that they're designed for - and by - young people who have become accustomed to constantly exchanging text messages. Personally, I can't see that even "5,000 users and 200 channels" could be remotely productive, let alone an unlimited capacity for gossip.
For those who can remember that far back, RSX-11 had TLK which was a one-to-one remote chat program. It was almost never used because it was less efficient than speaking to someone (by phone or in person) and depended on the other party being present, willing to be interrupted and having an answer to hand. Admittedly, the technology is slicker and you can push the relevant window into the background, but the fundamentals haven't changed that much.
My view is that e-mail has failed to evolve to deal adequately with group communication and these intrusive, hectoring real-time annoyances are simply faute de mieux.
Yup. I can't tell what this thing is supposed to be doing for me that an IRC client couldn't... except keep popping up notifications I don't care about and don't intend to respond to while I'm trying to work, instead of staying in a terminal window that I check when I'm available to answer it of course.
The purported benefits over IRC are persistence of messages when not connected, integrations with other services and group inboxes. We use flowdock at $JOB, its not the shittest thing in the world, you only get notifications for direct mentions, the group inbox means lots of things don't have to go to my actual inbox, and some of the integrations mean you can action things directly from the chat.
On the other hand, I don't think thats worth what we pay for it, I doubt it actually increases productivity any.
The point is to increase productivity by making sure you are always available for communication.
Everywhere I've worked they've used one form or another of instant messaging (Jabber, Sametime, et al).
I despise IM at work and keep the client logged off despite admonishments from management.
I already do enough multi-tasking. Phone cradled on shoulder while typing an email while updating a spreadsheet while updating a resource schedule while posting project statuses while replying to texts on my work cell-phone. The constant barrage of interruptions from IM brings this juggling act crashing to the ground.
I just play dumb when some tech guy comes around and logs in my IM client which mysteriously logs off for some reason.
IM clients at work are NOT productive, they are disruptive.
"The point is to increase productivity by making sure you are always available for communication."
No, that's the *idea*. And anyone who thought that idea, is a moron. At least in work where workers have to think.
Communication is literally *preventing* work and having an application which throws popups *on top of everything else* and *beeps* every 10 second, is absolute bonkers. Just like Teams does by default.
What kind of moron designs anything like that? For complicated work any disruption breaks the chain of thought and it takes up to half an hour to build it back.
"IM clients at work are NOT productive, they are disruptive."
Exactly. I close/silent all of them, put phone to silent and then I can have few hours of actual work done before coffee break or lunch.
Emails twice a day ... and then people whine I didn't reply to them in 10 minutes ... I always say that "Hey, I was *working*, you know, the thing I get paid for."
IRC doesn't have document collaboration, a meetings/calendar/agenda section, nor integral telephony/video conferencing/desktop sharing, SSO, a company directory.
Depends on your job role on how useful you think that all is. But its much more logical to have "Teams" working on projects where everything is in one place. Much easier to navigate, and more discoverable than actual SharePoint sites in my opinion.
IRC was cute, when you're 18, WhatsApp didn't exist and a/s/l was the first thing you asked. But we've moved on from then haven't we?
"IRC doesn't have document collaboration, a meetings/calendar/agenda section, nor integral telephony/video conferencing/desktop sharing, SSO, a company directory."
Doesn't have because it is instant messenger and doesn't *need* them. Much of that is corporate BS which has nothing to do with instant messaging and is just *bloat*.
Stuff added because MS is mentally incapable to make simple, clean and efficient programs.
I see you haven't realized that "one job, one program" *is* a good rule. Programs of course talk to each other, unlike MS applications, so every MS -application has to have all the "features".
Instant messaging isn't about writing documents or having a *video conference* anyway.
"But its much more logical to have "Teams" working on projects where everything is in one place. "
Thats the opposite of "logical". One program, one task is logical.
Adding gazillion non-related items into one program just makes it a "feature list" software where none of those features are actually useful or even work properly. Also said features won't communicate with each other or other Office applications.
"IRC was cute, when you're 18, "
Cute? Efficient messaging for small groups or individuals. Faster, smaller and easier to use than anything MS has "invented".
Teams is a good example: It's just glorified IRC with video/sound, but poorer execution, horrible mess as UI and huge amount of bloat which already is in other Office programs.
But of course Teams doesn't talk to those. Or OS.
"meetings/calendar/agenda section" in Outlook
"SSO" handled by OS
"a company directory" in Outlook
"document collaboration" in Office
"desktop sharing" handled by OS, why it's in application again in the first place?
So basically *all* of the "features" exist because Teams is incapable of communicating with OS or other Office programs.
I can bet the code in Teams is direct copy paste from said programs. Easiest to do that way.
To me that's just Stupid Design(TM). Also makes the program both huge *and* very slow.
E-mail remains popular despite being primitive precisely due to interoperability.
There's no reason why chat, messaging or presence couldn't have been just as universal, except that it was "invented" multiple times by corporations, not developed co-operatively by public sector institutions like MIT and others embracing the Internet RFC culture.
It's a tragedy.
So was it the fact it was late to the party? Too many competing standards? Quality/availability of decent reference implementations? The shift away from DIY servers?
Seems like a walled garden when the popular solutions aren't interoperable. It'd be like having to have an e-mail account with G-mail, Hotmail and Yahoo, etc, individually to communicate with folks with accounts on those services.
"Seems like a walled garden when the popular solutions aren't interoperable"
XMPP kind of died because there wasn't advertising/money in it. Every other application collects private data and sells it.
Every one of them is non-interoperable on purpose: What is mine is mine!
Even the protocol is trade secret.
"not developed co-operatively by public sector institutions like MIT "
It *is*. Not MIT but University of Oulu, a guy named Oikarinen who defined the protocol and wrote server & client for it.
In May 1993, RFC 1459 was published.
There's also XMPP but we don't talk about it.
Can someone develop an app that polls all these apps to work out which one the person you are trying to contact is using and then route the conversation to that?
Insert Obligatory XKCD
I use teams with all my classes. I prefer it to Google Classroom because of the built in class one onenotes. If they could just fix the integration with afew of its other products , like being able to embed a streams video into sway and forms instead of you(seless)tube , which is blocked for students i would be alot happier
We are big O365 corporate users and use Skype an awful lot. Skype is pretty old fashioned though and not equivalent to what Slack and Teams are trying to do.
However, Teams doesn't get much use across the company - probably because the damned app crashes every five minutes after consuming every resource on your device.
Personally I use a lot of Slack - its lightweight, fast, easy and intuitive for a computer geek (even an old one like me!). Not sure how well non-geek users will get on with it though.
Unfortunately our "strategic partnership" with MS means that we are unlikely to make a company wide break to Slack - which is a shame. I expect a lot of other people are in the same position - why buy Slack when you already are paying for teams with O365. I know why, but the bean counters?
To get us to use teams but since we have contractors and dev machines like macs/Linux that can't use office because our 365 instance is so locked down we can see, use or even download the installers without serious hacking or handing over all control to IT security. There's no way for us use it sensibly. It also doesn't offer anywhere near the integration we'd need with our other tools (like atlasian suite of tools, Jenkins servers, analysis tools etc).
We also pointed out that the 200 channels is hopeless for us since we've got over 1000 seats and 200 would hugely limit what we can create channels for.
Never used Teams, never plan to, but the 200 limit isn't for the whole tenant.
According to
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/limits-specifications-teams
A tenant can have 500,000 teams.
1 user can be in 1,000 different teams (i.e. per project, per department, per office, ...)
Each team can have 5,000 members.
Each of those teams can have 200 channels, so you just need to have multiple teams to have more than 200.
You belong to a team, one team.
Either you're wrong about that, or your tenant has a weird configuration. I'm a member of 20 or so Teams teams. (I can't be sure at the moment because once again Teams has stopped responding - a common occurrence.) The left pane in the normal Teams UI has a tree view of teams the user belongs to.
Around these parts, we have "Teams" for pretty much anything anyone wants to create a Team for: product groups, products, product components, cross-product projects, actual feature teams, interest areas, and so on. It's a bit of a pain, actually, because the Teams search mechanism is so woefully terrible; searching for a team by partial name pretty much never succeeds. Because substring searching is an unsolved problem, apparently.
There is a 3rd party Teams client available as a snap package. My experience so far on a new contract with a Windows house is video conferencing works nicely and doesn't consume gigs of ram when idle and max out a core as some folk complain about the real client.
Incidentally, the Teams web client doesn't work on Linux at all, Chromium or Firefox.
Article links to the first site that hates teams. The first comment has 343 people applaud someone saying the article is trash (article whining it doesn't do this or that - when in fact it does)
Slack is cool.
Teams is cool.
Why does one have to exclude the other, they have different social networks, slightly different audiences.
This is like a grown up version of xbox versus playstation. They can both exist. Doesn't mean one has to knock the other.
Oh its for Reg sport. Carry on :)
Where I used to work we did a trial of Teams, since we were an O365 customer. After 2 weeks a few people had tried it and given up.
We then trialled Slack. On day 2 it became production as 99% of people had active accounts. Sure we had to pay for Slack, but the UX is a night and day comparison.
I have only a little exposure to Slack, and didn't care for it; but Teams is downright hateful. The UX is ghastly. Even the scrollbars are 1) poorly styled and 2) often don't respond promptly, or in some cases at all. The Teams developers can't get scrolling right.
We switched from a RocketChat instance that only half the company had access to (for Stupid Networking Reasons) to a Teams instance that's available to everyone, and traffic dropped by an order of magnitude. I see a handful of Teams messages a day, and most of them are people joining or leaving teams.
I don't like these chat systems to begin with - I rarely find them particularly useful, and NNTP did it better decades ago. But the relatively lightweight RocketChat was far more successful at actually encouraging use than unwieldy, sluggish, unpleasant Teams.
Personally, I don't like either. Neither of them do threads in a clean and accessible way.
Teams has a learning curve that's too steep for a comms tool, and some highly questionable UI design aspects ('read more'? really?)
Slack I find clumsy, poor performing, and also has some poor UI aspect (chats that vanish from the sidebar being my pet hate).
As for the alternatives...
Google Hangouts worked well enough, but doesn't do code blocks so is borderline useless. 20 seat limit on conf calls can be a pain.
Apple iMessages / Facetime is Apple only.
Jabber/XMPP/IRC would be too hard to bring on board most places, for less technical folk. No screensharing.
Email isn't collaborative enough and also can't share screen.
Skype has taken a very strange direction and is mostly unfit for anything other than one-to-one video.
Facebook Messenger? haha. No screensharing anyway.
It feels like there's room for a more polished and sophisticated chat/collab/video/voice/screenshare tool.
My previous team were forced to use Teams much to our chagrin... like most MS stuff it tries to be the be-all and end-all to the entire domain of corporate comms, and has a huge feature set, but performs abominably, at least on our Macs.
Slack by contrast does IM incredibly well but is next to useless for even basic video conferencing, for which Google Hangouts is still the king (in my experience) as long as you don’t have too many people involved.
But then again conference calls with more than 25 people involved are definitely a waste of everyone’s time.
A tenant can have 500,000 teams.
1 user can be in 1,000 different teams (i.e. per project, per department, per office, ...)
Each team can have 5,000 members.
Each of those teams can have 200 channels, so you just need to have multiple teams to have more than 200.
But you can only have 1 bloody team open at a time FFS!!!! Lets just call it TEAM
I can't believe Microsoft Management let this product out of the door. I use it every day and it is just awful.
I find it hard to imagine how teams could be worse than it is, I have to use it at work, nothing is ever locate, click on a link in outlook and it spends 20 minutes spinning up a browser in order to decide to switch to the app. I can't stop it blurting crap all over the corner of my screen and sucking he'll out of my processor
""For them, this isn't a wait-until-V3 Microsoft product of the past," he said. "Teams impressed from the start.""
Only if you are Microsoft puppet like Gartner.
It *is* "wait until V3"- product as it's frankly horrible mishmash of "features" no-one has bothered to think and 1/3 of the screen (laptop) is filled with thoroughly unnecessary shit you can't disable, resize (except even larger) or remove. At all.
So called "windows" which aren't windows as they aren't closable, but just areas in main window. Which of course *don't* scale with main window, but it instead drops the area where you can write off *first*. Brilliant work, MS.
Obviously everybody needs an unmovable 15cm wide list of 1 channel on left side of the screen.
Slack isn't much better: Poor copy of IRC and the designers hasn't had a clue why IRC works like it does.
I see all these discussions of alternatives, and people complaining of their companies pulling down the internal Jabber server. But not one single mention of the Matrix stack that can replace all these apps with an extremely proficient platform. One that can have any desired interface, is completely open source, and can be run on a single forgotten machine in a cupboard somewhere.
I even use it to mirror a Discord server for backups, and allow members of my group to use channels and groups on the matrix server as a "private" space where the Discord server is the public space. I know others that use it as a forum, and others that offer a Slack type interface, and at the same time, an IRC-like interface with history. You can set it up how you want it, and the only cost is the management and the hardware it sits on. Or got the Riot path and and let someone else manage it.
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