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▲ axus 2 days ago

I'll give my own interpretation. Not that I love Teams, but the alternative in a dinosaur corporation is basically email.

1) WebEx and the open source chat that Oracle appropriated. Fortunately Zoom came and went too quickly.

2) Searching the Exchange corporate directory. BASIC features: status, embedding pictures, attaching files that Outlook would block. Sharing links that aren't obfuscated.

3) Can you even run Teams from Apple / Linux?

4) Ha! Imagine the nightmares for the person linking Atlassian and Teams.

5) Group texts, file shares, voice calls, recorded meetings. Meetings with groups from other companies is almost painless.

▲inetknght 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Fortunately Zoom came and went too quickly.

I've used both Teams and Zoom (and others). Honestly, I'd rather use Zoom instead of Teams.

> BASIC features: status, embedding pictures, attaching files that Outlook would block. Sharing links that aren't obfuscated.

Status is settable by just about any competitor to Teams. Slack and Zoom both can set your current status.

Embedding pictures and files is also not unique to Teams.

Obfuscated links? Just a matter of time before Microsoft changes that to some microsoft link for a "vulnerability scanner" and then charges the company for the privilege to block random things it doesn't understand how to scan.

> Can you even run Teams from Apple / Linux?

Yes / technically yes (not supported any more)

> Group texts, file shares, voice calls, recorded meetings. Meetings with groups from other companies is almost painless.

Slack and Zoom are better at all of these.

▲dijit 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I wouldn’t say Zoom is better to be honest with you, for just meetings the UX of Teams is pretty bad but the UX of Zoom is almost as bad; there’s not much in it.

Last time I checked Zoom was a pig on resources and required a weird background worker- and you couldn't even send files.

▲dctoedt 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Zoom FTW, big-time.

▲mr_toad 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 3) Can you even run Teams from Apple

Unfortunately. Teams is just as performant on MacOS/iOS as it is on Windows.

▲lenkite 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Teams is a React App. Teams classic uses Electron - so perf was identical. The New Teams uses native platform web-view, so mileage may slightly vary. Still a React App, though. sighs.

▲javcasas 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Teams works better in a browser window in Linux where if it hogs too much CPU Cromium pulls the plug.

That's how I run it.

▲andrewflnr 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Can you even run Teams from Apple / Linux?

I can tell you I've successfully been in Teams video conferences from my Linux desktop, in the browser. I was surprised too.

▲dijit 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> 1) WebEx and the open source chat that Oracle appropriated. Fortunately Zoom came and went too quickly.

Ok, then I can see why Teams ranks among them. I would invite you to try something like Zulip or Mattermost but I think ignorance is bliss and you should avoid knowing about anything that could be better. Your mind might do this for you (rejection) but best not to tempt fate.

> 2) Searching the Exchange corporate directory. BASIC features: status, embedding pictures, attaching files that Outlook would block. Sharing links that aren't obfuscated.

Appreciate the list, the only one of these that's Teams specific is searching a corp directory. Do you use the "Teams" functionality, or do you use the chat exclusively?

> 3) Can you even run Teams from Apple / Linux?

Yes, it's very slow. It's also very slow from laptops, the best "Teams experience" I've ever seen has been in GameDev where we all ran Windows 7 on dodecacore CPUs with 128-256G of DDR4.

It was still slower than Slack on my macbook air though.

> 4) Ha! Imagine the nightmares for the person linking Atlassian and Teams.

Yeah, people do. People also use Excel from within Teams.

Writing bots for Teams is a special nightmare, but webhooks can work.

> 5) Group texts, file shares, voice calls, recorded meetings. Meetings with groups from other companies is almost painless.

Do you spend a lot of your day face-to-face or more of your day in Teams?

Do you find yourself arranging meetings to sync rather than using the chat functionality?

Do you find that people have to ask around a lot to get an answer and then ask again later when it's forgotten, or can they find their answer in history?

▲axus 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Someone patiently explained and introduced the "Teams" feature of "Teams" to me. It's easy to ignore. Here's a tough one: ever used a Microsoft Loop component?

My preference is text chat but we do a lot of unscheduled voice chats when screen-sharing is involved. In-person meetings are nice when possible, it's been easy enough to connect a Teams meeting from a conference room phone.

Before Teams I set up a Mattermost instance, and I think RocketChat integrated to GitLab? Nobody used those. As we all know the value in these things comes from network effects; with Teams corporate IT can set Teams as a startup app by Domain policy, now everyone in your company has to be online. That's the real killer feature.

▲tracker1 2 days ago | parent [-]

I find that MS Teams works pretty well if you don't put too many channels in a team, or at least don't use the extra features in the sub-channels. Nothing like having wiki/files spread across multiple channels under a team as opposed to a directory structure.

To me, what I really don't like is that you can present the files and wiki via network file share, but the format of the wiki is read-only in that mode... it would be significantly better as user editable markdown with front-matter. It's some strange quasi-html extensions that you aren't going to be able to really even use.

I don't like that they separated the chat channels out... you now have unread, channels, chats, meeting chats... going between them is now a mess as I'm usually in a combination of meeting chats and 1:1 chats mostly.

While I do appreciate the integration of outlook's calendar, I really don't want meeting notifications for anything more than a couple days out... it can wait until I check my mail.

The real time video chat is okay... I think Zoom and Slack both have lightly better video quality and features though. I don't like Zoom's chat/discussion features nearly as much... I like Slack overall slightly better, but don't think some of the externalized integrations are as good as Teams.

Overall, it's "okay"... I don't love it as I think it's gotten worse over time while Slack is getting better, slowly. I'm not vocal enough to raise hell one way or another for/against it. I've used it on Linux without much issue... so it works well enough.

▲masfuerte 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Is native Teams on Linux still a thing? I had it installed but the package disappeared from the MS repository. I currently use the web version.

▲dijit 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Quite right, it seems that Teams for Linux is discontinued.

Guess this means I wont' get to run Teams in the company I'm joining, which is doing all its security attestation via Microsoft;

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32678839

▲vondur 2 days ago | parent [-]

The web version runs fine in a chromium based browser.

▲inetknght 2 days ago | parent [-]

It also refuses to run well in non-Chromium-based browsers.

Yet more vendor lock-in.

▲wkat4242 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes even when I log into Outlook M365 from Firefox on Linux it's constantly kicking me out. Every time I get back to my computer it gives me this passive agressive "Please hold on while we're signing you out..." when I never asked to sign out. Grrrr.

I also notice it works way better in firefox if you set the user agent to Edge on windows. Some features which are broken in firefox suddenly work totally fine. Which reinforces my belief that they are simply doing this to bully people into using Edge.

▲PhilipRoman 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is a native Teams package in the AUR which worked well when I had to use it. I assume it will get outdated eventually from lack of MS support. Web works of course.

▲jabl 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There is a PWA you can install, with it's own icon and everything. Yes, it's a not-even-glorified-web-browser, but meh, it works (for some definition of works).