Who tf thought I’d ever want to edit a spreadsheet in a chat application anyway?
If only that would be the worst. Someone over at M$ had the glorious idea to set up a different admin center for every fucking thing. Sometimes they interconnect, sometimes you can edit user in several admin centers, some things you can only edit in a particular one. You’re searching for specific settings over and over. And if that dumpster fire of bullshittery isn’t enough they randomly change the naming of everything or the position of menus without any apparent reason. So the knowledge you gained where certain settings goes to waste and you have to start all over again. Damn you Microsoft. If I’ll ever find out who’s responsible for that shit I’ll cut your head off and shit down your neck.
Edit: Just take a look at msportals.io to see how bad it has gotten. For my daily business I need several of M365 and Azure IT Admin portals. I hate it. I fucking hate it.
If that’s not shit enough, they also keep renaming and completely overhauling those portals again and again.
You forgot about the few random settings that can only be changed with powershell for some reason!
Then they change how you use powershell
The only admin portal I’ve encountered that is more circular used to be Duo. That seems to have improved since, but I used to spend 40m trying to find an essential section and looping through links without getting there.
all that different from Discord? – people trying to use a proprietary chatroom for everything from support to wiki to knowledge base to documentation …
I can hate two things at once. You act like it’s hard.
Hating discord is so wonderfully easy to do, I could probably muster up the ability to do it as a way to compartmentalize my mind during intense torture by baddy mafia guys if I ever got caught on an undercover mission.
Don’t get me started. Monthly scorecards that are mandated to be distributed via Teams, but you can’t embed files in that sheet, otherwise Teams shits the bed.
Also, who would ever want to adjust volume levels for individual speakers? Every huddle is fucking torture.
Yet, I can’t point/draw on the screen somebody shares (at least on Mac)
Or share only part of my screen. Very annoying since I only have a 5k2 ultrawide and a 4k in portrait. Regardless of which one I share, no one can read it. I have to switch the entire screen to some crappy low resolution so others can see what I’m doing.
Such a basic feature.
On KDE Plasma there’s an effect to zoom in the whole screen on your cursor (it may be windows-plus and windows-minus or you may need to set it yourself). I believe Windows has something similar as well as an accessibility feature. I should think that would work when screensharing.
I’m on macOS, it does work while screen sharing in that it zooms in on my monitor, but it doesn’t zoom in the shared screen.
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Haha, funny. But I actually know the lead developer behind Teams.
It’s Microsoft Copilot.
We should have killed Clippy in the 00s
Clippy kept the real madness at bay. Without his presence we are lost.
Makes sense
I haaaate Teams. Worst thing ever to happen to workplace productivity. And (unless this has been fixed since I retired) chat history isn’t persistent past 6 months so you lose your proof of what was discussed, unlike email.
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
That policy sounds like destruction of evidence before it’s legally considered to be evidence.
Oh it for sure was, a year or 2 before I was hired they got hit with a regulation violation (not sure which anymore, I think it was Reg B) and then a few months after that this outlook policy conveniently came into effect to “minimize impact from a data breach” lmao
A subpoena is a certain kind of data breech if you think about it
I work in cybersecurity. This quote is gold and I’m putting it on our office whiteboard.
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.
oh my god this drives me absolutely nuts when I’m looking for help I received months ago and distinctly remember enough to put into a search bar but can’t go back to the actual conversation… even though it is clearly saved somewhere since it still comes up in search!!!
From my experience, discord might have one of the best chat searches out there. It’s stupid fast and you can search metadata like time, sender, attachments, etc.
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.
That’s probably some kind of data policies that your company has put in place. Default teams chat history is forever.
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.
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.
It wasn’t made for you.
I once worked for an organization that maintained a 10+ year old single excel file with no discernable backups for regulatory data.
The bar is low.
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
You should’ve just downloaded some more RAM for her.
People do silly things. We have a department at work which pulls data from our ERP system to excel. They’re pulling 10’s of thousands of rows to return only a few bits of detail like product descriptions for a handful of items. I’ve offered to help them but they really don’t want help. They seem to be happy with this monster.
There’s another department which runs reports from our BI system, exports it to Excel, adds some calculations, then builds reports from that. They literally just need to ask the BI analyst to build them a report to their requirements.
I’m convinced people like screwing around in excel because it gives them something creative to do in an otherwise bland job.
They probably had an advanced distributed snapshot backup system. Where any and all employees that used the file in the last 10 years had a version of it saved from a point in time–potentially even on their personal machines or as email attachments to their personal emails.
Close. Each employee had a tab.
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 got called to a 12 year old server with a failed HDD once. They said no problem we have a daily backup. Just put in a new drive and restore from tape.
The tape wouldn’t read. I took it out of the drive and noticed some brown specs and dust falling out. The tape was clear, like scotch tape. They backed up daily to the same tape for over 10 years without verification. The remnants of the magnetic layer was scattered inside the drive. That client became pretty sad pretty fast.
I don’t even know man. I used to click a teams link and teams would pop up. Now a splash screen for “new” teams comes up and none of my programmable mouse shortcuts work and it seems like sometimes it launches through a browser, other times it doesn’t. I have personal and two work accounts which makes things complex too.
Edit; oh, and if I click on teams icon it says do you want to use “new teams” or “classic teams”? If I click on classic a brief screen pops up and in small print it says classic teams died in March of 2023 - Rip. Then the whole app just shuts down. It feels very amateur.
I genuinely would love an opportunity to scream at the people who decided to release new versions of teams and outlook.
I have yet to find anything at all better about “new” Outlook. The fact that I can’t scroll through my calendar anymore is maddening.
May they step on a Lego barefooted in the middle of the night.
The “new” version isn’t even a native app… It’s just the web version. It’s missing a whole heap of features from regular Outlook, like support for native add-ins. It doesn’t feel like a native app; the UI doesn’t follow the design standards of any desktop OS.
Also, if you want to use it with an IMAP or POP email server, you have to connect it to Microsoft’s cloud, and they store a copy of your email! https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/imap-without-microsoft-cloud-in-new-outlook/0e17ab6b-48f2-42dc-9e61-f219f7521289
I have yet to find anything at all better about “new” Outlook.
My favorite part is how they removed useful functions that worked perfectly well on the old version.
They are now cloud based so that it is easier for Microsoft to train AI models.
Both of them are the same thing but require edge to be installed
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
The new executable is “ms-teams.exe”, with a hyphen
You can uninstall new teams and old teams still works fine
for now
When it breaks I will run teams web over Firefox
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.
Honestly, I think that anyone who is this angry about Microsoft products needs to spend some time working with the types of industrial software that makes the manufacturing world go round. Just to get some perspective on what truly God awful software actually looks like.
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
You mean usability like nick collision, channel takeovers, absence of services, no support for media or files, disagreements in the community that lead to multiple separated IRC networks, fully visible client IPs, the joke the ident protocol was?
I understand not liking teams, or webex, or zoom. But IRC in the 80s is hardly an shining beacon of usability or standards.
There are modern IRC clients like TheLounge and Convos that support media and video. And push messages. You can also have your own internal server not exposed to the internet, this eliminating the problems of takeover, splits and whatnot…
Also the protocol has evolved and there’s been integrated options in the servers to hide IPs for at the least a decade.
You may remember those issues and problems when you abandoned it, but it contniues to evolve and endure. I have a private server for my friends and it’s been the most stable and direct way to chat and share images for years.
Edit: I have not tested the video stuff in Convos. I use TheLounge and it’s perfectly capable of taking an mp4 to upload on the server and display it in the chat. I share images daily by uploading them from my IRC client and they are displayed in the chat… it’s not just text anymore!
I have no doubt there are improved clients. But that is the problem. IRC is not standardized at all. Different clients give different results. Also, we are talking about IRC in the 80s, not today.
That’s very far away from good usability.
Original IRC also used 8bit text, so no unicode. Note I did not say ASCII, because IRC did not even defined encodings. Do you remember the pain of different Code pages on computers?
IRC as a protocol was basically a dumpster fire that somehow worked.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved IRC (using irssi on bash mostly). But I wouldn’t praise it for usability. At all. And I would never pretend IRC set standards for usability in the 80s.
With the exception of the great split. And the freenode fiasco. IRC have been consistently fantastic for me since i logged on in ~93
I’m talking software/firmware in general, not just chat clients/protocols. As I said, you seem to need some perspective.
Lol, this is such an absurd line of reasoning.
“This problem was solved in the 80s and then Microsoft bullied an inferior product into business space, and it impacts my work every single day”
And your response is “eat shit, some people have it worse?”
This isn’t the fucking pain Olympics and you don’t get a fucking medal for working on a worse stack.
This is a wildly toxic mindset and I promise your entire life will start to get better once you ditch it.
Edit:
Also, you seem to be missing a crucial element here. It’s not that, like in your situation, things were bad and are still equally bad.
This is the situation where things were good, and then made worse. Completely different trendline.
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Wait, so me saying that Teams is not that bad relatively speaking is a toxic mindset? You do see the irony of flying handle at me to say that, right?
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“working with teams isn’t as bad as working with some software in a completely different domain”
Apples and oranges, reeks of “You can’t be cold because I live in Canada” energy, but ok, whatever.
“You need perspective”
Extremely condescending. Enforces the notion that nobody can dream of better things as long as other people (you specifically) see themselves are enduring something worse.
I’ve used fully functional chat applications, and I’ve used Microsoft Teams.
Teams is so bad it seems intentional
Everything is relative. Teams is a shining beacon of competency when compared to a lot of the utter shit software and firmware that I end up having to deal with.
Sure, but I work much more than I’d like with teams, and it’s pain in my ass.
If software gets worse than teams, I’d find a new industry
I think what he is saying is that you’d be jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
It could always be worse. You could be using SAP.
I am so glad my new job had sense to say no. Their cost benefit analysis pretty much said the amount of pain, man hours, and bullshit it would cost to run far outweighed the higher price of the alternative product they went with.
the higher price of the alternative product
Good lord, you mean there’s something out there more expensive than SAP?
Probably the worst I’ve seen was an ERP written in COBOL in 2014.
Why are ERP systems always shit for everyone involved? I’ve yet to see one that didn’t warrant a full time position just to clean it up and fix it when it inevitably breaks. Epicor was the worst offender I have seen.
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.
Microsoft has become really effective at developing malware like Windows, edge, teams, etc and selling it to corporations to spy on employees and contractors
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.
Microsoft Teams is proof that there is no god
It’s proof that there is, god is evil.
A coworker of mine said this once:
“I wasn’t a religious man until I joined IT. If something as evil as a printer exists, then the opposite must as well.”
Printer and Microsoft can be interchangeable.
Every update, some thing breaks. The “new” Teams does not work well with the microphone on my work laptop, I’ve had to resort to using headphones. The interface just sucks too. I hate that the left pane auto-hides now. So inconvenient. It’s not just Teams too. Every part of Office has broken for us during previous updates. I miss the times when Windows was just an OS for the most part and MS was not trying hard to be Apple.
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.
A customer wanted to used Teams couple of days ago, I couldn’t make it work on my companies laptop, trying three different browers. I just loaded an empty white page.
I had to use a laptop from another customer, that also use Teams, to do so, which worked, but gave me toothache, in terms of security.
Both laptops where on the same network and both ran Debian and I tried the same browsers, without any plugins and jitsi-meet works fine on my companies laptop. So apparently the system need to be specially configured for Teams to work.
I am staying with jitsi-meet, thank you very much.
The customer, I got the laptop from, knew what they did and provided managed Linux Systems for people to be able to use Teams.
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.
Trying to share a video, a website, or ANYTHING visual on this stupid trash app is horrible. It shares at like 3 frames per second.
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
I don’t think people realize how much corporate policies affect their Teams experience. A lot of complaints I hear are not things I see in my experience because our Teams isn’t strangled by corporate policies.
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?
OMG… That’s the one thing that triggers me every time.
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.
Interesting take. I’ve been using teams for a few years now since that’s what most of my customers use. I can’t say I’ve experienced any bugs or any of the issues you’re sharing.
Only thing I can think of it’s related to Mac and their version of teams. The app for windows seems to work flawlessly.
Now I wonder why the mac version would be a subpar product…
I use it on Windows and I’ve encountered a few bugs, though haven’t experienced many of the stories seen in here. I’ve experienced notifications not coming through which is kinda essential for me tbh, have had the app crash every now and then, and regularly have a thing occur where I would put an emoji on anything and it would go away a second after causing me to do it again. The notifications not coming through is a big deal for me, the rest I can live with just fine.
We are a mostly mac shop, but I don’t see that as an excuse actually. Also, we have windows users in our company and also I’ve used the web version and it’s atrocious too. Everyone at my company that ever mentions a Teams opinion hates it…
Not who you’re responding to, but Teams works great in my office. I don’t love the UI, but it’s not buggy at all.
Maybe it’s a Mac thing?
I mean, they support Mac, but yeah the web version is horrible and even windows users in my office hate it.
I guess I’ve just been lucky with it. I only use it on my windows laptops and Android phones, where it’s been pretty flawless.
Though I do work with people in other organizations that have more restrictive permissions applied to Teams from their IT department that make it more difficult to get anything done.
Are you using the video chat? Apparently there are other features, but we don’t use any of them. Only video chat
Yes. I organize about 10 meetings a week - all involving people outside the office.
I’m quite confused then because the app has always been a trash fire for us
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.
I just want to find whomever decided to write teams in electron, and punch them straight in their genitals.
Seriously, fuck that app.
What’s wrong with Electron?
My problem isn’t so much with electron, it’s more with teams being run on electron. Out of all of the office (or related) applications, as far as I’m aware, teams is the only electron app, and it’s the only one with the kind of problems it gets.
I can run Outlook or Excel for months and nothing goes wrong. The other day, I ran teams for more than 24 straight hours (not doing anything other than chatting, and the occasional maybe 30m video meeting, or 15 minute call), and when I joined a video meeting, it ran like complete garbage. It was choppy and jittery. Just really bad. The fix was to close teams and reopen it.
That’s why I don’t like electron. It’s the only ms office related app that uses electron that I know of, and it’s also the only one that I know of which needs regular maintenance (by shutting it down, and starting it up again) in order to function correctly.
Using Teams always reminds me that Microsoft bought Skype for billions, ruined it and developed a shifty replacement.
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
Wait wait wait… Are we talking about teams or “new teams”?
The new variants are just the webapps.
Why has Teams for GNU/Linux been discontinued, you bastard?
(yes, there’s an unofficial client thankfully)
(which you’re not allowed to use, depending on company policy)
isn’t it literally just a wrapper around the browser version? don’t see how browser usage might be allowed but not this
Because it’s “not official” and is therefore seen as a security risk.
Surprisingly, I can’t get my webcam to work on Teams from FF or Chromium but it just works on this wrapper.
If it’s just a wrapper around the browser version, why not just use the browser version directly? Chrome (and probably other browsers) let you “install” sites so they have their own icon on the desktop and launcher, and launch it in a separate window. You just need to ensure you check the “open in new Window” option when creating the shortcut.
