Microsoft Teams gets off to a wobbly start as the world and its cat starts working from home As those able to do so begin a seemingly indefinite period of working from home, Microsoft's Slack for Suits platform, Teams, began tottering. Problems appeared to kick off as Europeans signed into the service this morning, seeking a bit of collaborative chat as the reality of remote working set in. Alas, it was not to be. …
New product afaik and pretty decent imo. Certainly for those of us who are forced to use the abomination that is Webex Teams, which is some kind of pan-dimensional horror from beyond space time.
(Edit - there is a post below that suggests MS Teams is based on Skype consumer version - no idea if that is correct)
(Icon:Nuke Webex Teams from Orbit - its the only way to be sure)
Teams is a kind of Electron-driven strings-and-yoghurt pots thing holding Active Directory, Sharepoint, and God knows what else together.
Then every so often Electron decides to run garbage collection and as there's a whole lot of garbage to collect the whole computer grinds to a halt.
Downloading it now to put on another computer and I'd say if it went any slower the browser would time out.
Teams Audio/Video piece is based on the old consumer Skype setup that MS bought up.. Skype for Business is rebranded Lync they built themselves and then deprecated.
Teams likely struggling as loads of Schools/Unis etc currently automagically spinning up a team for each course which means creating all the associated gumpf - SharePoint/Groups/OneNotes...
Guessing lots of network/ISP infrastructure going to see a lot of load and with a different pattern - Remote Working stuff rather than NetFlix streaming, gaming, etc...Could be a bit slow for a while.
After all, the latest tweet from the Microsoft Teams social media orifice exhorts users to make the jump from Skype for Business to the platform. The words "frying pan" and "fire" spring effortlessly to mind rather than the "seamless transition" hoped for.
I had the (dis)pleasure of attending two Skype for Business meetings today which both had significant problems too. I wasn't sure if it was SfB's normal flakiness or overload.
Skype worked fine for me.
Skype for Business was an abortion of a product, that really has only worked well (for me) with internal employees, to be fair it was OK for this task.
Skype 4 Business was not compatible with "normal" Skype users, unless the old Skype users upgraded to a Microsoft account.
I work in technical support, try explaining to global customers that *we* don't have a problem, but they'll need to upgrade their free personal Skype account into a Microsoft account, and you'll generally be met with hostility (I eventually kept a backup personal copy of Skype, cause you don't want to upset them and cause a 1-hour registration, before the tech support begins!).
I haven't used Teams much, but the concept seems OK, even though I find it a pain to login to the application to check messages.
the fact that Teams runs on Linux, with all features, is just great! Trying to use Skype for Business in a Win10 virtual machine is a dead loss as audio just echoes and echoes. Teams works very well, for both audio and desktop sharing.
I didn't notice any problem with voice meetings today but just as I was finishing my day, chat seemed to die, but I didn't care as my day was over.
Having recently replaced our VC system with Starleaf and not Teams as many of the users wanted. I felt a big smug this morning as all the senior staff joined a single VC with 46 different endpoints throughout Europe without a hitch as I watched my colleagues in other companies complain about their Teams problems.
We’re migrating to it at the moment and, for the first time, people are using the corporate mandated option rather than ignoring it and using consumer Skype. It resolves a lot of the issues we had with S4B - cross platform and mobile being the main ones. Holding a meeting using Teams has proved painless, so far. Being an engineering office, I think most would prefer to use Slack (I certainly would, and some projects have used it successfully) but, like Consumer Skype, that is merely tolerated rather than approved. Teams is provided by the company and should, eventually, be good enough.
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