There's no 'I' in Teams so Microsoft issues 6-month warning for laggards still on Skype for Business Online The sound of a blade being sharpened in Redmond could be heard this week as Microsoft issued a six-month warning for Skype for Business Online. The clock began ticking in 2019, when Microsoft insisted that the then new kid on the block, Teams, was more than ready for prime time. Teams has certainly received more than its fair …
Just wait until you discover the joy of being deluged by Meeting invites and chats launching almost at random as people start to play with Teams. Then there is the joy of trying to delete old chats (you can't) or removing a file added into a chat by someone (this can be done but requires waiting until the 3rd full moon of the month and having a three-eyed goat and vial of unicorn tears to hand)
Have seen it installed in a multi branch retail business where the staff at one branch were wondering what it was for. They were initially curious as it looked like a funky new email system. That is until it was pointed out that you couldn't use it for clients or anyone external for that matter. We've got WhatsApp, Email, Company Mobile, what the feck do we need Teams for?
Very rarely used after the initial week and I think that's the same at most branches.
Isn't the thing about not being able to delete old chats a(nother) result of dodgy (American*) corporations getting caught trying to delete old emails and other electronic records that prove they were up to no good - or, at least, were not being as careful and diligent as they should be?
*Unlike British corporations who try to sweep it under the carpet and hope it will go away - or just try to blag it long enough to escape with their Golden Handshake intact...
Which is what I do when I refuse to use the meeting program du jour foisted on you by manglement while shoveling some buzzword-bingo-laden-marketing-bollocks at us as if we were mushrooms & enjoyed being showered in shite.
You go ahead & have that video meeting, I've got work to do. You know, that work you've been riding my ass about all week long & wouldn't let me leave early yesterday to get my sick kid from school? Yeah, THAT work. And you want me to sit & twiddle my thumbs listening to you wankers verbally masturbate, wasting time, answering the same "Why aren't you done yet?" style questions that should be obvious to anyone with a functioning brain? I'm not done because I'm in another fekkin' MEETING, you lamp licking llama luber! GAH!
*Deep breath*
I am _so_ glad I'm retired. Meetings are the bane of getting actual work done. Anyone who calls a meeting for 4PM on a Friday deserves to be wrapped in carpet, covered in quicklime, & tossed into an abandoned quarry...
Teams sucks purulent donkey schlong! I hate it with a vengeance but have little choice but to use it. Skype for Business meant that people could reach me when they needed to but not in an IN YOUR FACE way like Teams does with it's constant stream of notification boxes flickering away in your peripheral vision. So, I have disabled all Notifications in Teams and now people complain that I am unresponsive. Well, so be it. If you need me, I am available via email and phone (OLD SKOOL RULEZ!).
As with pretty much all "all-in-one" applications, Teams is good at one or 2 items, and sh!t at all the rest. I preferred when we used the best app in each area and it all worked as intended. Next month Teams will include a Web Designer, a CAD program, and start nagging you to do more exercise. After that, well, I've heard on the grapevine that it'll start doing your job for you, so you'll be made redundant.
Teams is good at one or 2 items
And even then MS still manages to bugger up those one or two features, by trying to integrate in to all the other office applications.
For example the calendar in teams almost, but not quite, has the data as the calendar in outlook...
Teams is good at one or 2 items
Really ?
Granted I've avoided it as far as possible - but more stuff at work is moving to it.
As someone else said, Skype works - reasonably unobtrusively, Teams seems designed to make meetings ... well crap.
What f'tard thought having a non-movable tool bar stuck in front of the presented material was a good idea ? And what f'tard thought it made sense for it to appear when you even think of moving the mouse - except when you actually do want to click on something in the toolbar, in which case it goes all shy and decides not to appear until the opportunity to unmute and pop in a pithy comment has passed. And of course, there's that other bit of presentation obscuring crap that pops up every time you cough, or just breath near your mike telling you that you're on mute - yes I f'in know I'm on mute, that's so I don't interrupt the presentation you f'in morons.
And the chat that's so bloated with "xxx joined the meeting" and "xxx left the meeting" notes that you can't actually find the actual chat messages. And the voice that keeps interrupting the meeting to say someone's waiting in the lobby, or joined, or left, or what day of the month it is (I made that last one up, but expect that to be added eventually).
And I've yet to figure out how to actually find stuff that's been stored in there - now that's something Teams excels at, who'd have thought it would beat Sharepoint at being difficult to use and slow !
...just on a standalone client basis it STILL can't even work out if it's successfully delivered a message to the other end. I just can't wrap my head around how the code could be so bad as to not be able to definitively work it out 100% of the time.
I would call this feature "Single Conversation Mode." In this mode, all other chat notifications would be squelched during an active conversation. Once the active conversation was closed or idle for some user-definable period, I could then inspect the queued notifications and decide which ones to respond to or dismiss. I believe this one feature would drastically improve online chat and IM.
Whilst Skype for business might be hard to love it at least did what it was designed to do well,and not try and do a hundred other things you dont need poorly and in so doing compromise the functionality of its core functions.
Teams is typical MS bloatware, it's like that swiss army pen knife that comes with 83 functions when all you needed was a pocket knife. it kills performance on most work laptops because generally businesses dont splash out buying top of the range kit with ooodles of memory and cpu to cope with it. It crashes, it buffers video making even the smallest of group video calls painful to watch,(of course whilst at home everyone blames that on their broadband). Its messaging system is like someone went back to the 90s and plucked some badly put together text only messaging via email service but thought people just want to share amusing animated gifs instead, not you know actually have a quick instant chat. It has a complicated file system and grouping system and a bunch of stuff that literally seems to be just MS trying to have an app for every eventuality
I can only assume it gets picked up by CIOs blinded by MS saying how wonderful it is to have everything in one behemoth application because they never actually use it for real.
Good. I like Teams more than Skype and get annoyed when people send me Skype IMs at this point. Not because I'm particularly fond to Teams so much as Skype performs terribly in my org. Teams does a much better job when it comes to meetings with more than a handful of participants and on mobile in general. Sharing images over chat works much better also. I mean for legitimate work purposes like screen clips, but the unfortunate side-effect is it also makes it easier for people to share stupid GIFs.
Kill it now! Kill it with fire! We got lucky - the office migrated fully to Teams in Feb 2020 (after which everyone stopped using the consumer Skype they preferred to Skype For Business). With a pandemic on the way, this turned out to be a smart move.
We're still trialling Teams. Some regulatory, compliance and security concerns in my org about it.
It... works... for what we want (Meetings, calls, scheduled events, IM). But it's the raft of other... lets call them enthusiastic addons that are causing us to hang back.
Been 18 months of hanging back now, which tells you just how concerned we are...
I recently moved my business to Teams Voice and what a nightmare that was, I am a solo person business and it was either buy a mobile plan and a new phone or go with VOIP, I chose the latter.
What on earth is the admin panel? It took me 4 hours to assign my local number to a resource account to allow people to call the queue line, along with error after error and messages for me to contact Microsoft Support and when you click the link it takes you to an unrelated wiki with information.
The search feature is very specific... you have to type the number exactly how it is so it can be found and when I say exactly I mean all the spaces in the right place. Overall, not a great experience for something so simple.
I discovered you have to assign a "Virtual Phone System" license to the resource account but doing it directly in Teams Admin would throw error after error but when you assigned it through Admin 365 it would work?
Also coming from Skype for Business at my old place and now using Teams at home, I have to admit that Skype for Business just works for what it is. Even at my old work place they refused to use Teams.
The simple fact that all manner of shite gets piled into it. Teams that are no longer needed just linger. Then people start using it as a file repository and unsurprisingly, then cannot find anything. The search, as others has said is absolutely useless. The status of users is often wrong, and my pet hate, why the hell is the "Don't Answer" button the most obvious? The most common thing you do when a call comes in is answer it, the button is not even green but the terrible purple some arts student thought was cool. As for the endless notifications.........
We have to use it and it does have some benefits when we are all over the place but it is not the solution to everything.
"The search feature is very specific... you have to type the number exactly how it is so it can be found and when I say exactly I mean all the spaces in the right place. Overall, not a great experience for something so simple."
North-American-Microsoftie:
«But every phone number everywhere always has the format 808 555 FAIL, doesn't it...?» #facepalm
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