What a Mesh: Microsoft puts Office in the Loop, adds mixed reality tech to Teams Microsoft's virtual Ignite event, aimed at IT admins, kicked off today with a focus on Office and Teams, among other cloudy news. Office is getting a new application called Loop, while Teams users get mixed reality meetings based on Microsoft Mesh. Loop is an Office application based on what used to be called Fluid Components …
Agreed.
"Despite everything, Teams is popular because it integrates with Microsoft 365 and brings together virtual meetings and video calls, instant messaging and document collaboration."
I suspect it's "popular" only because companies take the approach of "we've already got it in O365" and then force everyone to use it.
Just take a look at https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/forum/ad198462-1c1c-ec11-b6e7-0022481f8472
That shows what CUSTOMERS and USERS really want. Don't see 3D metaverse in the list.
Custom sounds so you can be alerted to important contacts. YES
Decent search YES
Alerts that don't vanish in 15 seconds...like when your boss pings you while you went down the hall. YES
1000 other more important USABILATY issues on the list. And MS prioritized gimmicks. :-/
Oh christ, the search. Three years I've been using this crap (i.e. forced to use this crap) and it's still as bad as the first day. You need to know there and then that you'll need to refer back to whatever it is and copy it out into something else because you're not going to find it later in Teams, they might as well be more honest and disable the search option to adjust user expectations from the outset.
I would normally agree with you but I've recently downloaded their latest Power Toys and the new Mouse Finder is brilliant for those of us with large multiple monitors who can't quite see where that damn mouse pointer has got to, despite wiggling the mouse around! Two taps of the left-Ctrl key and the pointer is highlighted in a "spotlight". Of course, this "brilliance" is the exception to the general rule of MS crapness and, as it currently stands, the utility does have one annoying bug (hence it fails the "worked properly" part of the question).
Once you've located your mouse pointer you press the ESC key to dismiss the highlight but the ESC keypress is NOT "consumed" by the utility and is allowed to be passed onto whatever window previously had focus. In my case it was the extremely useful FreeFileSync utility which happened to be copying files for me - the ESC caused FreeFileSync to cancel its current operation!
"Alerts that don't vanish in 15 seconds"
That would be an improvement over them not appearing at all, or appearing at some random time 10-20 minutes *after* the corresponding meeting has not only started, but in some cases completed... And then, when you realise you haven't had a prompt to say the meeting has started, it'd be kinda nice if the meeting entry in your calendar would reliably indicate whether or not it has actually started.
Still, 3D, woo. Though I guess, in order to maintain some sort of cosmic balance, some part of the MS empire needs to be making use of all things 3D and colourful, given that the Windows UI design team are doing their level best to swing the balance firmly in the other direction...
add to that list - ability to import contacts from Outlook, or to recognise an existing Outlook contact. I believe you get one shot at importing contacts when you set up Teams, after that, Team doesn't want to know. The sort of integration your basic Android phone can do - look up a contact , chose to email / text / phone-call / message or call using an app - isn't there in the Windows environment.
I've not come across anyone using Teams for more than chat or video-conferencing , and in business settings very often with the video off, using screen share or voice-only. The functionality that was inherited from Skype For Business . The rest is clutter getting in the way.
"I've not come across anyone using Teams for more than chat or video-conferencing"
Sadly, some of the departments here use it for file-sharing among their users. It is horrendously slow, but that's to be expected as in this usage, Teams is the front-end for an unholy mix of Office apps, Office web apps, Sharepoint, a dash of ExchangeOnline, and Azure, each of which contribute their fair share to keeping things slow and bloated. I still don't know why the Director encouraged people to use Teams instead of shared directories on our File Server - it's normally a horrible experience, and that's when it's working normally. When shit starts breaking, it gets even worse, because there's damn little we can do about it.
How about the one where you're in a non-group chat with one other person and you share a file, and somehow they don't permission to access it.
Why on earth would you need to bother with file permissions in a two-person chat?
So you have to share the file and then find where it is buried in sharepoint and manually change the permissions so the person you're chatting to has access. Gaaaah.
Who asked for 3D avatar bollox? I'd like Teams to be reliable, work with my devices, support an anonymous mode (not be hard-linked into whatever hybrid-joined AzureAD identity currently has credCache tokens) and have much clearer privacy options. At no point did I ask for a 3D meta-whatnot needing a chunky GPU to animate a paperclip or my furrowed brow as I deal with yet another emergency Day 0 security fix across my Windows server estate. That is all.
I remember "attending" a couple of conferences and meetings on it. My preferred avatar was a 3m tall yellow chicken but I did have a human(ish) looking one as well. As long as this system allows me a decent avatar, I will consider it but some boring suit is going to be working out how to restrict that.
Obviously the 3D tech will cause higher power consumption for really no benefit - except maybe in Keynesian sense.
But since we are being to consume less, to conserve energy, why there is no opposition to waste like this?
Is Microsoft privileged enough that they can pick and choose part of the green agenda?
What what we want is performance and stability, and basic features like the search box also filtering fields other than just name. In Skype I could immediately see who was online from a department by typing that department name. Can't in Teams. It locks up, it consumes resources like almost nothing else...
I don't need some 3D avatar rubbish, fix the actual product before adding useless crap!!
The technology is improving and organizations find benefit in being able to manage security and identity through Active Directory and Azure AD
I'm not sure the technology has changed much over the last few years, surely you mean the product here? And it requires a considerable leap of faith to consider being forced to put data on Azure to make things more secure. In fact, Microsoft makes it positively impossible to use Teams as a standalone application forcing admins to provide not only AD sync to Azure but also giving MS an account on the inhouse Exchange server just to be able to setup meetings and update the calendar. This is evidence of a very poorly thought out, closely coupled archictecture but Microsoft doesn't care as the plan is obviously to force everyone onto Exchange Online over the next couple of years.
Unfortunately, there is a lack of non-cloudy alternatives for corporate customers.
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