Ever found yourself praying to whatever deity runs Microsoft Teams? You're not alone From the department of what can't Microsoft Teams do comes news of tuition for Buddhist monks and AI slithering into medical workflows. In what may come as a surprise to some, monks and nuns studying at the Sitagu International Buddhist Academy in Myanmar can be trained in the dark arts of Microsoft 365 as part of a diploma in …
(The medical slang link is worth following)
In IT a "Code Brown" is part of the process leading up to an incident log. It often proceeds the "Java Shuffle" where you rapidly install, configure and remove multiple versions of Java until one works with the awful vendor interface to your horribly expensive equipment. Nowadays you now have 10 VMs on standby with OS versions that have security policies best described as "lace doily".
Having been forcibly moved from the mature Skype for Business (lets be fair it's Lync re-branded) to the less than mature Teams (it may be market ready some time in 2022) I can't see why people are still pressing ahead with it.
There are so many things it either can't do, does less well than earlier products or does them but in a much clunkier way than older prodcuts that I get the impression of a very hurried design to implementation cycle and a total lack of UAT. Or maybe just a total lack of disregard for customer satisfaction that it makes Microsoft's previous efforts in that are pale into insignificance.
The problem we have is that the team implementing Teams internally and for our customers respond to complaints about problems with "but look at all these great features". In other words "yes, we know that feature doesn't work very well (or indeed at all) but look at all the bells and whistles that you could be using". To which of course the user response is "we don't actually have any use for the bells and whistles".
Maybe MS should have tried getting the basics right before they moved onto the complicated stuff.
I'm absolutley fine with most of the Office applications, but the implementation thereof within teams is sometimes ropey. And the integration of it all within the teams app itself is ropier still.
It's certainly not at a stage where I would expect it to be in UAT, let alone RTM.
Now the thing is over the years there have been a lot of alternatives to office out there (usually free) and most of them have had the feel that they are not fully ready for market. Microsoft seem to have decided this is the target to aim for.
One of my children is required to use Teams for school. We thought using it in a browser would be fine (though there are scores of scripts to allow from dozens of different domains) until we realised that the browser version doesn't allow video calls, so we installed the app - only available as a .deb or a .rpm (not ideal for OpenSuse, but works ok). The blasted thing takes an age to wake up, and installed itself to auto run every time my child logs in to the somewhat underpowered laptop which is the only computer we have with a webcam. That said, once it's going it seems to work ok.
Oh, and now it's installed, OpenSuse checks for updates every hour and complains because the repository key doesn't check out, or somesuch.
My wife has had plenty of her own problems with Teams, apparently because she works for two different organisations which use it, and it doesn't like that. One of the organisations is the professional body for her line of work and at a board meeting a few months ago, they spent so long trying to get everyone on line at the same time that they gave up and went with Zoom instead.
I've also had problems with the thing at work. I don't use it myself, but have been called to help people who can't find information in the places they think it should be, or can't join video calls with the link they've been given, even though it works fine for others.
Teams does strike me as a product which isn't quite ready for the heavy beating it's getting in mainstream use these days. Give it another couple of years and maybe.
M.
As you say, loads or people use Teams because of Office365 or even just Exchange Online. They have permitted it to be used for free if you did not have it in your subscription and once in use, it will not come out. It does not matter how bad it is, it works sufficiently that it is just about usable and for most people the alternatives will have been blocked.
This is the crux of it, in the corporate and education areas you have no choice, you just have to lump it.
My wife recounted a later occasion where the person "chairing" the meeting was a sign language user. It proved impossible to "pin" the interpreter onscreen and because there were more than 9 (or whatever Teams's limit is) people attending, the mostly silent interpreter kept getting shuffled offscreen. Zoom, apparently, made pinning the interpreter a doddle.
M.
Zoom links almost never work. If I manually type in the meeting and access codes it works on the #irst try 99% of the time. Teams does not work at all with Firefox on Ubuntu. But Teams is fine with Chromium on Ubuntu. I just found out today the school where I'll be working a few hours daily uses Google Classroom which I'd never even heard of. Another agency was all gung ho on their proprietary version of Zoom until I asked a few basic tech quertions... I suddenly didn't need to use it any more and was told to use whatever the school uses.
Yeah, education on line is quite interesting.
The other school my children attend uses Google Classroom, and it was my children who first spotted that Google had added the "Meet" facility to the usual list of options before the teachers had noticed, and held online get-togethers from very early on in lockdown.
My main concern with Classroom is that while Google says they won't pass on the data, it's obvious that they do - I've had this argument here before, but I am not at all happy that when logged in to Google Classroom, YouTube "knows" it's a specific child using the computer and sets filters according to age data that should not be shared outside Classroom. In one instance this blocked a video from being watched which the children had been asked to watch as part of their lesson! Easily sorted by opening the link in Firefox Private mode, but that should not be necessary.
We found that Teams works ok - if rather slowly, but that's understandable when you look at the data it is pulling in from a vast range of addresses - with Firefox on OpenSuse (15.2) for all the functions we tried, except video calls which have to be made through the client software. I was slightly surprised to see a Linux version was actually available. We'd have been stuck if it weren't as we don't have a Windows machine in the house, and our only Mac is so out of date (and non-updatable) it is barely usable to browse anything more than the very simplest of websites.
The main problem with online education is that some schools just don't seem to have thought through what might work and what might not. I get the distinct impression that some of them were rather hoping that it would all go away and that come September with all the children back in school, everything would be back to normal, though perhaps with a few more children "off sick" than usual.
Of those that have thought it through, there's an interesting question about the long-term value of the additional equipment (webcams, laptops) and licences they have had to buy. If there's one thing I am certain about it is that at least 50% of the value of school is the social interaction, and you get significantly less of that as a passive viewer of an online ppt stack.
M.
Low knowledge/experience generally leads to low expectations and simple requirements, in that respect Teams did just work, so woudl prety much anything of teh same ilk. More Tech savvy users with higher expectations and requiremenst (like seeing more than 9 people at the same time) may well get lost trying to find a setting and then again when they have to remember where it was when they try to help others.
I started using teams in the last month coming fom a Hangouts (awful + Google), Slack (ok), Zoom (simple and does the job) and Teams is mediocre at best, the UI is weird and unintuitive and things have to be enabled in odd places before you go some where else to do things like see more than 9 people, video quality is poor and resource usage very high. teh whole thing feels like a devops beta thing that really needs a rewrite to scale up properly. trying to work out how to invite someone to call that didn't have teams failed and when finally found the button didn't do anything. Beta software by DevOps with no regression testing.
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