Teams' core problem is that the actual Teams-section is more like a bulletin board than a chat system, almost like it was targeting that weird impulse companies had for a few years to build "company facebooks" or whatever.

The real chat part is cordoned off in ad-hoc channels that individual users can sticky, but that aren't "structural" and can't really have order imposed on them, if that makes sense.

It's like if Slack only had the DM and group-message feature, and no channels.

No arguments about the crappiness of Teams.

My thing is that while better IM systems exist, none is what I would call "Good" or even "Acceptable". Being better than Teams is not really saying much :-)

I haven't used Slack in years, so I can't speak to it, but it sucked when I used it. Back when our team was all colocated in one building, I intentionally had my IM app turned off and disconnected. Interruptions in person suck, but with Slack et al interruptions were multiplied significantly. Kind of: "If you can't be bothered to get up and walk to my cube, it probably wasn't that important."

What I want from Teams and similar SW:

A way to, with a keystroke, mark all messages as "Read" (even when focus is not on the window).

A way to, with a keystroke, print out all unread messages on my console (or in a popup window, or whatever).

In other words, just give me a damn API I can program these things with. Teams' API lets me get messages, but will not let me see if a message is read or unread.

Any app that forces me to open up the window, click on a dozen channels to read all the latest messages, sucks. Period. I should be able to read it all with one click/keystroke, and have them marked as "Read" when I do it.

Wait, what? We're moving to Teams soon...

This looks like channels do exist, is it new (there's no date on the page) or do they not work as you'd expect? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/the-new-chat-and-...