A bad influence

We should have killed Clippy in the 00s

Makes sense

unlike email.

Once worked a job in the financial sector, they enforced all Outlook clients to purge emails 3 months old AND disabled all of outlooks built-in archival tools...

Those bitches didn't disable VBA though, so I built my own Outlook archival tool all in VBA complete with an sqlite DB and a UI. Ironically, it was more stable and less susceptible to corruption than outlooks own tools lolol

To me, this is its biggest flaw. You can't scroll back in chats very far, but you can search for lines further back. However in a truly spectacular display of uselessness, the search only returns the chat bubble you searched for, with no surrounding context.

The chat history is the big one for me. It’s not even that it’s not persistent; I’d be fine if it just purged all messages after a set period. The problem is that it seems to selectively purge some messages but keep others. Makes me feel like I’m crazy when I go back and try to find something that I know I sent a while ago, but there’s just a gap.

Chat history is forever by default and has been for years so far as I know, anything else is a company policy. People don't appreciate how much control their company has over the experience.

unlike email

Yeah, that’s unfortunately a thing, too. It’s the one size fits all solution to data protection and security. Made by people who like to make their own life easier, no matter the cost to everyone else. The GDPR does not allow us to store personal data indefinitely without reason, so let’s automatically delete every email without exception, no matter if it is still for an ongoing project or not.

It wasn't made for you.

I once got called in to diagnose why it took 5 minutes to open up a single Excel file. The PC itself was a little dated and underpowered, but the file size was huuuge...like hundreds of MB.

It finally opened. There was ugly table-formatting...to the entire spreadsheet. Colored cell borders, alternating background fill, text and font formatting applied to every single cell; columns A-IV and rows 1-65,536. I pointed that out and said the only way to fix is start a new one and not apply the formatting, or to try and remove it from all the cells. She outright refused because she liked the way it was. So I left, and she went back to looking at pictures of her cats

I had a client as of a couple of years ago with a custom fronted software build on top of an access mdb database running on windows 98 continuously since 2000. They had been backing it up onto a 18 year old 1GB flash drive every night for years. Their interest was exactly zero in upgrading to anything newer.

I genuinely would love an opportunity to scream at the people who decided to release new versions of teams and outlook.

Apparently the prompt for asking is triggered because the "new" version is a different executable than the shortcut you're using is pointing to. So you could fix that by creating a new shortcut.

Another fix would be to get rid of Teams, but when you're on a corporate license there's not much we can do about that

You can uninstall new teams and old teams still works fine

god you'd think these fly by night open source hippies would commit to their ideals a little more, you know? the only real option is paid software maintained by full time employees who get fucking paychecks. nothing else is ever gonna work outside of your weird Foss imagination land. 'Microsoft' was a cute dream, but it just isnt sustainable.

don’t forget all the crapware foisted off on small businesses – point-of-sale systems designed for Windows XP and the company’s gone belly-up but you can’t switch because all of your data is locked in – manufacturing hardware with proprietary EISA cards and drivers for Windows 98 and there’s not enough installs to justify reverse engineering …

Yummy visual basic apps that have been dragged into the modern era kicking and screaming

My brother in Christ, IRC is a better tool.

Microsoft is failing to meet minimum standards of usability that has existed since the 80s

I've used fully functional chat applications, and I've used Microsoft Teams.

Teams is so bad it seems intentional

It could always be worse. You could be using SAP.

If software gets worse than teams, I'd find a new industry

Probably the worst I've seen was an ERP written in COBOL in 2014.

Seriously. It’s not even the worst videoconferencing/chat tool, let alone all the other industries that thrive on barely usable software. Healthcare software, for example.

If all you’ve ever used is phone software that’s either made to as frictionless as possible to gather as much data from you as possible, then I can see hating Teams. If anything, Teams is a victim of its own success. Everyone hated the bloat in Outlook which now looks stripped down by comparison, because Teams is clearly the MS golden child and if you want your project to live at MS it needs to connect to Teams in some way.

It's this. They don't care if you, the user, don't like it anymore. That's irrelevant to MSoft. The big corpo dollars are all they pay attention to. And it's really easy to sell a c suite and middle managers on their new click counter 3000 embedded in the next version of teams. Any way to monitor the employees and show useless metrics without having to actually do their jobs.

Web based teams has worked better than app based teams for years on all of my computers. I haven't touched the app in a long time at this point because i just gave up on it.

It drains away too much resources too

if you like a feature that ms software has, and can't bear to part with it, the only option is open source.

It's useful for me to keep track chat conversations with coworkers, but it doesn't really do anything that Discord can't. It just has the benefit of being pre-installed on our work computers and it already has everyone's contact info (plus then I don't need to juggle multiple Discord accounts or teach my Boomer coworkers about Discord). Especially since I work in a building and location that has little to no cell service inside the building, it's nice to be able to get ahold of people in a faster and less formal way than email.

But for any of the other advertised functions, it's trash.

Apparently it works decent for us most of the time… if you give it a full minute to do… idk what… but it smoothes out eventually

Vanilla teams is a a stinking pile of shit. Corporate policies just add a bit of bonus nuclear waste to that.

Is corporate services what's causing activity badges to constantly have wrong numbers on them within the app?

Wow, no, fuck no. Is there a corporate policy that makes this piece of shit intentionally buggy? For months I've had a blank white window on Mac that remains the whole time I use the app. Generally, not one feature of the app works without some kind of glitch or 5. Emojis are fucking broken half the time... Because that's a complicated totally unsolved problem across the industry /s

What exactly are you using? It's definitely not teams if you think it's a passable app. I've said it's alpha software because that's absolutely what it's always felt like to me. It's gotten 10% better in the 3 years I've used it. One of the worst apps of all time.

Which corporate policy is it that causes the website to default to classic Teams even though your company has switched to v2 Teams? I don't know why I can't just log in to v2 instead of having to switch every time.

I don't have a lot of the issues I see others complaining about, but my teams does randomly shut down and I don't notice until someone sends me an email saying they tried to reach me on teams. Doesn't seem like that has anything to do with corporate policy.

Microsoft Lync

Skype

Microsoft Skype for Business

Microsoft Teams

A small subset of people seem to be really good at driving companies into the ground. It's like a special skill

What's wrong with Electron?

The new variants are just the webapps.

(which you're not allowed to use, depending on company policy)

Yeah, it's clunky for sure, but maybe we just don't use it for that much

you just haven't used them enough or suffered from constantly needing to switch between old and "new" apps

your proverbial non existent household

My God Skype for Business was so bad. Nowadays I prefer zoom or even a slack hangout, but anything is better than Skype for Business.

It is lack of awareness, the users don't report most problems to you. If they did, you wouldn't have time to do anything but read the problems. I don't report to IT every bug that annoys me in teams, because they can't do shit about it and it would take hours for me to list them

It's fine for features. The UI design reminds me of phone apps; you have to guess what the symbol means rather than using actual text, but for the most part it does it's job of facilitating office communications. Files are a bitch, but i don't have to use those in teams too often.

My hate stems from its godawful search, and the fact that it struggles to load goddamn text. I swear to god i can count the seconds for each scroll upwards and i hate it.

Why does Teams break my wireless headset (which I'm required to use for my job) half the time and half the time it's fine? That's one of my biggest gripes with it tbh. Our IT department couldn't figure it out. I'll open teams and suddenly my headset stops working and it fixes itself when I close Teams. The browser client version of the app doesn't seem to do this though thankfully.

And the software you need to install

dont tell him that. then he might see you. unlike all the trash he let through.

Because it's objectively worse than every major alternative while being absurdly resource intensive. Just watching it struggle feels like the punchline to a very dry & tragically unfunny joke

Its features are great, like any other web confrence software that does the same.

However the constant UI changes lead to a lot of issues for IT people who have re-tech the entire staff how to use it every update. For a small business thats not probably too bad. For somewhere with hundreds of employee working from home who barley know where the start menu is - that's a nightmare.

The "new" teams doesn't work with business accounts. you have to use the specific, now seperate, version for "work and school". Guess which one the everyone's existing desktop link is to? Now IT has to get everyone to use the right version of teams...an absolutely insane choice and terrible end user expirence.

Teams feels a bit like a never ending beta. On one hand, it's kind of nice to get constant tweaks and it's generally pretty good. On the other, things do break from time to time. There's also the whole "new teams" thing, which feels... very similar to "old teams". All the old sillyness, like not being able to folder dive in a team while chatting (it will forget where you were when you switch back) for not much benefit. It also is a big regression in basics like spell check speed. It takes seconds for a red squiggle to send, so now my spoild self has to wait a bit before hitting enter.

At least it's not new outlook. Everything on that is way slower and it's very clear the UI was not optimized for a computer. Left click to spell check in an email body, right click to spell check in an email title. Want to add formatting in a meeting invite? Ha, that's rich. Even very basic things like changing fonts take forever.

Both feel a bit like a new PM being given the reigns and going at it. I struggle to see what was so wrong with the old versions, especially outlook...

Have you used Skype for Business? That was atrocious.