You'd understand why there's no even half-decent clients for Teams if you ever tried to write a bot in Teams.

That's just a pure lesson in pain.

Webhooks work, but proper bots are borderline impossible; at least without giving you the feeling that you'd rather pull your own teeth out with pliers.

I actually had a look. Now you can get messages and stuff from MS Graph. The situation is better than a few years ago when only very useless Teams APIs were available.

But the available APIs still suck. For example there is none to just get all recent notifications. I don't know if teams itself has access to more and better apis? If not that would explain a lot.

https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/microsoft-te...

I'm in the same boat and I am this close to just torching the mainsail

Even authenticating to Teams is a herculean task. Microsoft's official APIs seem purpose-built to prevent people from writing proper Teams interfaces, and attempting to replicate their proprietary SSO flow is extremely painful. (In theory, you could hook into it by starting a fresh web browser at the appropriate login page, waiting for the appropriate redirects, and then harvesting the relevant cookies, but that's a really ugly solution, and it already represents a lot of invested work.)

> get something even worse than Teams

I'm not sure that's actually possible, you know...

You can upload custom emoji to teams, most businesses just turn it off

This was discussed before: if your Windows computer doesn't have a valid HEVC license installed, then Teams falls back to software encoding and performs horrible. Most manufacturers include the license, but not all. It's also only 99 cents on the Microsoft store (which might be unavailable on enterprise managed devices)

How extensively do you use it? When my team was just using it for meetings and the attached chats, it did actually work completely fine. When broader orgs started pushing more communications through it (the "teams" in teams, and all the weird chat room/forums that entails) all of the rough edges became very apparent. All of that is just a shockingly disorganized mess.

One day they will discover threaded conversions.

"I don't have an issue with it" tells me you've never used anything else. Have you tried Slack? Zulip? Mattermost? Fucking... IRC from 1988?

Teams isn't just mediocre, it's aggressively hostile to basic usability. The camera bar sits at the top of the window, directly blocking where you're supposed to position your camera for eye contact. Chat organisation is broken: you get duplicate groups because the order people were added matters somehow. Notifications phantom in and out. Reactions are buried in an activity feed. Search is useless. You can't reliably paste text without major formatting issues. The mobile app logs you out randomly and doesn’t tell you unless you manually check it. Desktop notifications don't sync with read state. Files uploaded to chat don't appear in the Files tab. The "new Teams" broke half the features that worked in classic Teams. Presence status is a coin flip. Audio settings reset themselves between calls. Screen sharing has a 50/50 chance of sharing the wrong window. The difference between a chat and a channel is arbitrary and confusing. You can't edit messages older than a few hours. Threading is bolted on and barely works.

Performance is inexcusable. Multiple gigabytes of RAM to display text messages and lag constantly on modern hardware. How do you make a chat application lag? It's rendering text, not computing fluid dynamics. Opening the application takes 30 seconds on an SSD. Switching between chats stutters. Typing has input delay.

The real problem isn't that Teams is terrible. It's that "it technically functions" has become an acceptable standard. When you've never experienced better, "it works" seems fine. But Teams is what happens when a monopoly position means you don't have to care about quality. Microsoft has unlimited resources and still ships this.

Even Skype for Business was more stable, and in Skype for Business you couldn't reliably select text. That's how low the bar is.

It has a very large number of bugs.

My favourite one ( still happens ) is having to mute then unmute at the beginning of the conversation otherwise nobody can hear me. It was so common, with people fiddling with their headset, calling again etc that I eventually asked everyone exhibiting audio issues to start with this

Another interesting one is that if you’re not connected properly , you send messages , but never get notified that they never left, and are never notified that you’re not connected.

It’s also a resource hog and will eat your machine for breakfast.

The list goes on and on, it’s very surprising.

Notifying you about messages you've already seen. You have to change chats and to back for it to dismiss it. Kills me.

Likes to open new windows if you click a notification.

It is slow.

The search is not good at showing multiple results from the one chat. Why does it search all the other chats anyway...

Switching accounts constantly is a pain in the arse - I unfortunately have to use four accounts and one sub-account (member of some other org's team or something).

I don't love it, but I don't have many of the problems other people seem to have. And I've used everything from IRC in the 80s to Slack more recently. The only thing I can think of is that I don't run it on Windows, but rather a fairly new MacBook Pro M4. Maybe in this case it actually runs better on Mac, which is kind of ironic.

It's a resource hog, crashes, it's constantly littering files all over SharePoint which becomes even more than a garbage bin than it already is.

And the UI is terrible, huge balloons around everything. I want density but even at the densest setting it sucks.

Oh and it also fails to update online status. Often I click on a colleague who seems green and only then it updates and it turns out they've been away for 3 hours. Grrr

Another one for the pile. You can choose to open office documents in Teams directly, the browser, or in the native desktop app, but you can only set it to open by default in either Teams or browser. Why?

Wrote up a few of my gripes on here a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45933952

Teams feels as though it were vibe-coded, but dates back well before there was such a thing. It works, basically, but isn't something I'd feel good about shipping myself.

The only possibility is if you get it from Oracle instead.

It will surely be worse, at least at the beginning. But there is a significant chance that with time they will improve it, and one can hope that one year after the first release the product will actually be better than Teams, given that the developers will improve it based on their own experience.

Because slack startet to extort their customers. I guess many moved away, to be prepared if slack decides to push their prices even further.

Teams, Sharepoint, Exchange, and OneDrive seem to be connected by a maze of dark twisty integration passages which no single human has mapped fully.

And every private channel as well. And if you rename the Team, the SharePoint will become out-of-sync and all URLs will still use the old Team name.

I knew I could smell a poo in the room, I didn't know what or who was responsible but it all makes sense now.

Somehow, Teams overrides the volume controls on my Android phone. It's physically user-hostile.

By default, Teams never releases your audio input channel, even when you close it.

Zoom calls work fine in the browser. They first make it look like you need the native client, but there's some dance you need to make to get the web link. Reload, wait, spin in your chair, something like that.

Of course I would never choose Zoom or Teams if I had the power, but Chromium does work with both when those are the tools your client uses.

It makes you download it but then a button appears saying join in browser. I have tons of zoom binary copies

As someone who has gone from 100% Slack in startups to all-in Teams in big corpo, I disagree. Teams won't even display all office file formats without you having to open the dedicated app. And if it does it's usually a half-baked browser mess. And don't even get me started on the UX or meeting options or mobile support or the complete lack of a dedicated Linux client. I don't need one app to do everything half-assed, I need one app that does exactly what it's meant for well. Preferably on every platform.

For many of us, you are describing a black hole of integrated nightmare software

Sharepoint... the only webapp I have to use that feels worse than Teams. I swear when I open the intranet landing page, the loading, reloading, resizing, rereloading, re-whatever takes at least 10 seconds to settle. How can engineers build something be so inefficient?

It is 100% that bad.

The children who write Teams cannot reliably deliver notifications on my mac without me restarting Teams every morning.

I've spent a full day attempting to send a webhook in. Teams used to work like slack (a channel admin can create an endpoint; you post to it.) Microsoft deprecated that because it worked. It's now a maze of permissions and it silently fails with no error messages at all.

Scrollback regularly fails and also requires app restart.

I cannot insert images into a channel w/ a customer via drag and drop, but I can paste them by opening them in preview, copying the image, and cmd+v into the channel. I wasted 4 hours w/ support trying to figure out why I can't drag images into the shared channel before giving up. This is typical of the Teams experience.

I could go on. Besides facebook's tools, it is the worst piece of software I've used and a demonstration of monopoly power to distribute total garbage. Slack has issues, but it does reliably do the core thing.

> Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office

A holy trinity if ever I have seen one.

Teams not being able to do threaded conversations consistently or reliably is a massive pain for me. I hate it. Corporate IT is just hell for users.

Okay and what exactly does this integration bring?

- opening Sharepoint pages in Teams' half-baked browser;

- opening Word or Excel in Teams' own half-baked editor;

- Exchange integration is the calendar, period. Nothing else. The only thing actually usable.

Am I missing anything?