Microsoft loosens Teams' necktie as platform courts your forensic accountant relatives

Microsoft's Teams is getting personal in a preview of the Slack-for-suits platform that is aimed more at consumers than companies. More a repositioning than a full-on re-engineering exercise, the Teams gang is seeking to make the existing Teams app a more attractive proposition for individuals rather than those who have had …

[Anonymous Coward]

Insert...

....vomit emoji here

[Teiwaz]

What about the old adage....

There's no 'i' in 'Teams'???

Maybe a 'Sport' or other usage that's teamy editions (sorry, that would be 'subscription' these days).

Wait, no. Those don't really say 'individual' either.

The only heavily individual yet group identity heavy I can think of is a 'gang'

Pick your gang colours and LS logos now

[Will 28]

Profanity Detection - needs work.

Work claim to have some form of teams profanity detection turned on (which I must be topping the list for, just can't help myself), and yet I found all I needed to do was search the gifs for "flip the bird" and now I can swear at people all I want :). I found this out while my colleague was complaining about the lack of "middle finger" gifs in response to something I said (which probably contained profanities).

[David 132]

Re: Profanity Detection - needs work.

The only appropriate response to profanity filters is, pace Fry & Laurie, “Skank off, you pempslider!”

[cornetman]

Tried to do a business call with Skype For Business a few days ago (their choice). A complete shit show as a Linux user.

Tried to run it in a Windows VM with very little success.

In the end, we fell back to Zoom which is what we use much in virtual proceedings these days.

It just works, even a native package for Linux Mint.

It's not perfect and lags slightly in features compared to the Windows client but I'll take "just works" over "pain in the arse" any day.

Skype is little better TBH. As long as you stick to Windows, then it seems to do what it is supposed to.

More often than not if I connect with the Linux client, I get the "you sound like a chipmunk again" response and we have to try to connect again.

Really, I don't know why we haven't cracked the multi platform video chat thing years ago. It's not exactly rocket science.

But it seems like companies want to reinvent it over and over again, generally doing it badly in the process.

[ovation1357]

Out of curiosity have you tested your sound with other apps?

I'm running Zoom and Teams on Linux and using the built-in Mic was always a bit iffy, but since I invested in a USB gaming headset the sound has been fine.

[cornetman]

TBH, we use Zoom a lot here and the builtin mic/video on my Thinkpad is just perfect.

Just goes to show, if there is a willing it can be made to work, although I can see why Microsoft wouldn't be that keen to show Linux in the best possible light.

[Teiwaz]

I don't know why we haven't cracked the multi platform video chat thing years ago

Well, where Skype is concerned, there's little impetus by the owner to make other platforms (and especially Linux) in any way more interoperable with theirs.