it is getting harder and harder to convince my higher ups to not switch us on to Microsoft Teams (which they practically consider free vs the thousands we spend monthly just for the dev team).
its one saving grace for us is the amount of legacy comments and history of discussions we have built up over years across conversations that is useful for reference.
Don't you guys find the MS Teams "chat" interface an absolute mess? When I tried it a few months ago it felt like another ridiculous UI that wanted to emulate mobile phone messages for some reason with giant chat bubbles, tons of wasted white space, emojiis, avatars, etc. Slack's "compact" mode definitely isn't perfect but it's better.
We as a tech world need to just revert back to the simple format most IRC clients use.
The thing is, their threaded interface kinda sucked, so they built another one ('chat') and tried to push the idea that 'Teams' (threaded) is for 'permanent' info, and 'Chat' is for the ethereal one. Except nobody really bothers with switching back and forth, most teams just choose one or the other and do everything in there. Bit of a mess.
I cannot fault them on the meeting functionality and sharepoint integrations though, they are excellent.
Try it on a Linux system sometime then. The only saving grace is that the crap sputters "Skype" everywhere, so you get to imagine what a sad miserable existence it must be for the people maintaining that obviously inherited, hastily cloned monstrosity.
MSFT just pushed a UI update to Outlook on Mac that is actually really nice. I'm hoping that maybe they've finally got their UX together and Teams will improve. Pretty sure my company will be axing Slack in favor of Teams in the next year or two. Maybe by then it will have a reasonably good UX.
That smacks of a checkbox-driven mentality to software. Similar features don't have the same result. Implementation matters a lot
Flip it around and ask, what is the benefit of more effective communication worth to your company? You're already paying at least $10k a month for each person on your team. Making each person just 1% more efficient should be worth $100 a month.
It's not unbelievable that a communcation app would make that happen. Reaching out to a coworker saves a couple of hours of digging around. A high quality FYI channel means someone can read a proposal and spot a critical issue.
Slack is far from perfect, but choosing Teams instead to save a little cash seems like madness.
I find this kind of usage frightening. I honestly think that a message history of longer than a week encourages poor organisation to such a degree that daily operation is significantly and silently hampered.
Do you have suggestions for process or tooling that allows you to quickly / cheaply take the information or insights that arise from conversation and integrate them into a longer term store? And how to make that longer term location really useful?
To the degree that teams fall into the habit of just searching slack history for info, I think those are the two key factors:
- we remember bits of conversation, and who said something, or in which channel, can be a good way to rediscover the full details; note-taking and aggregating stuff into a knowledge base or docs repository can strip out that info making it harder to rediscover. (The obvious caveat here is that there can be sharp difference between re-finding a conversation you participated in e.g. in your team, vs finding information about a system you depend on from a conversation you didn't participate in.)
- the process of getting stuff shared in slack into a longer-term knowledge base can be slow and tedious, and may require someone to spend time deciding which pieces are potentially valuable, generalizing from the specific case discussed to a form that makes sense out of context, condensing what was said over many messages, arbitrating between views which are valuable but conflicting, etc.
I would like to see an NLP tool for summarizing threads and extracting the information which is most likely to be reusable.
I find searching chat history much more useful than what people used to do, which is throw anything that might be important into a wiki that never gets updated. At least in Slack you get some context around a piece of information rather than a hasty summary.
We implemented a 90 day retention policy for all slack messages about a year ago. Everyone was pretty resistant to it at first, but it's been pretty great, honestly. It forces us to put things we'll want to remember in the handbook and encourages a more async culture. Personally I'd be happy with a 30 day retention policy!
The "amount of legacy comments and history" is the single most useful thing about Slack, imo. Teams in comparison was an absolute nightmare to try to find references to old conversations in, it felt like throwing away information into a bog, never to be retrieved ever again. Slack's archival search was the biggest reason I was able to onboard to a new team as quickly as I did, especially given WFH, since it removed the need to ask an actual person about so many of my questions.
Keeping comments is a bad practice: If your slack ever gets compromised you’ll wish you deleted everything. We purge every 6 mo. Keep updates in tickets.
I get it from the perspective of slack is a disorganized mess in terms of long term history, but moving sensitive data from one system to another with similar security doesnt seem like a win (or loss) for security to me.
When I update a ticket I write it expecting someone else to read it. It’s well written and thought out. When I chat I say whatever is reasonable, it’s low effort.
Note I didn’t call out sensitive information specifically. Just that you wished you deleted messages. You shouldn’t store secrets in a ticket system either.
I worked at a place that used Slack pings in lieu of tickets. The history was kept for ~7 years. This is a huge liability IMO. A off comment by the CEO could be misunderstood by an attacker or the public if it was to be leaked.
I’m saying it’s ok for quick cursory discussions but those who retain Slack messages for tribal knowledge tend to have larger organizational issues. This knowledge should be in tickets where it’s expected to write well written responses with the intention of documenting knowledge.
I don't know why we don't switch to Teams. I enjoy slack and the history of comments is useful, but like you said Teams is already included in things we're paying for so why not use it. We might have to re-do some bots, but if it saves the company money and works basically the same it makes sense to switch.
If you'd used Teams, you'd know why. It is hilariously bad, gratuitously slow, ludicrously weird. I have periodically had to use Microsoft's team chat tools over the years, dating back to Yammer or perhaps even further, and for whatever reason it seems they just do not get chat.
Better question: why not just switch to Mattermost?
I have to use both heavily at work right now, one part of the company is on Slack, another on Teams, I'm involved with both. Despite its (many) issues, Slack is just so, so much nicer than Teams, the difference has an actual, substantial impact on communication. Teams feels like a disconnected and disorientating mess of ideas copied from other communication solutions in a huge hurry without understanding them fully and without even getting them to a point where they "click" and work as intended, and without thinking about how they fit into the big picture. Sole exception: Video calls are much better, when they work. The rest is a mess and makes communication a much more tedious effort than it has to be.
You might not even be able to, Teams API is quite badly convoluted and limited. You simply won't be able to f.e. recreate Slackbot experience in group conversations(chats).
Try Teams, it's not as bad as most comments here seem to indicate. I understand if you're used to the slack UI (as most users of Hackers News are), it seems like a step backwards, but that's only because you're looking for a 1:1 replacement for slack.
Having taking the route of going from Slack to Teams, where Teams is better at, IMHO, is the following:
- Within channels, all conversations are, by default, organized into threads. This gives you to the feeling that there are lots of chat boxes, but once we spend a few days with it, our team started noticing that our conversations have become more structured. However starting a new "thread" off the main channel discussion in slack takes significant conscious effort and its very easy for multiple conversations to get interleaved and become a mess.
- Integrated video/audio calls, along with call built-in note taking, makes for a very seamless jump from text to voice/video. With Slack, we needed to maintain separate Zoom account, as it's built-in voice/video chat was pretty bad.
- If your IT has already sold its soul to Microsoft Enterprise infra, Teams just fits in really really well, with its Active Directory/Azure AD/O365 integrations. It's no wonder that Teams is doing well in the Enterprise space. We still use GSuite for our emails, but given how less our team emails these days, if I were given an option to start from scratch, I'd probably choose to host our email on O365 outlook (even though I feel Gmail's UI is superior).
Of course, nothing is without its problems - you're dealing with Microsoft products, so except to hassle around a little bit with licensing, bad markdown abilities and a few other quirks. I've seen complaints of the client being really slow at times, but my team hasn't seen this issue in the recent past, since we switched in, except once or twice, where a restart of the client solves it.
One part of our team (~12 people) used Hangouts Chat for a few months, which has been around for more than a few years, and every six months. It sucks. They just released a new update to how their buttons looked every 6 months. I don't know why Google even bothers putting up this product.
The criticism for Teams is disproportionate in Hacker News, I don't understand why. I encourage you to try it out for a few days with a select group of people and make up your own mind.
It's not that much about the UI even(which is terrible as a lot of other people here explained), but rather the disgustingly bad performance and costant issues. I use teams every day at work, it eats insane amounts of ram, it leaks memory during video conferences, it's practically unusable during a call, switching tabs from chat to teams takes anywhere from one to five seconds, push notifications simply do not work properly, so does motification badge - it also often takes seconds for teams to acknowledge that you've seen certain activity. Text input has such an insane latency that it's uncomfortable to write, often eating characters from the next message after pressing return if you start typing too quickly. And this is just a tip of the iceberg. Almost all of few hundreads of people in our org hate the app as well and we're almost purely a Microsoft shop. I liked Slack until it became incredibly bloated. But even now, it's still in another league when compared to the abysmal experience that Teams offer.
Just a heads up, it looks like you're using single newlines and `-` for bullet points. If you don't want HN to eat your formatting just add another newline after each bulletpoint.
I've tried Teams. I dislike the UI however that is mostly personal preference and indeed it's not bad enough to make it unusable. If the UI was the only thing wrong with it I could still live with it.
The problem is that it's just so damn slow and unstable. It is an order of magnitude worse than Slack which is also an Electron app, so Electron alone isn't to blame here.
The notification system is a mess. They use their own notification system instead of integrating with the system one which is terrible because those notifications take up way more space than the default system ones and established UX behaviors (like dismissing them by swiping right on the trackpad) don't apply. There's also a bug where the notification is its own window which remains (in an invisible state) even when no notification is displayed (which means you can Cmd+Tab into it).
The tiny video window while you're on a call will bring up the main Teams UI when you try to minimize it. So if you're in a call with the participants in the main window and switch away from it, the little window will pop up in the bottom right corner of the screen. If you minimize that one, the main Teams window will come back into foreground and you now need to minimize it too.
The text editing experience is awful. It's wysiwyg-based with some minor Markdown-like formatting supported, but the problem is that copy/pasting most content from other apps will paste as "rich text" so not only is the formatting of that pasted text screwed up, but the screwed up formatting continues as you type beyond it. The button to copy a meeting invite link will copy HTML which means it'll work if pasted into a rich-text field (although the formatting will still be screwed up and differ from whatever was there before), but it will just spew out several long lines of HTML if you paste it into a plain text field like a code editor or another messenger. When you make a button called "copy meeting link", it should copy a plain-text link and that's it.
The slowness of it all is just the icing on the cake and makes dealing with those (relatively minor if in isolation) issues painful.
Teams is a pile of shit and its only objective is to win marketshare by appealing to bean-counters who will never seriously use it or people who've spent their entire life in a bullshit Microsoft environment and never tried real tools. I guess if your only experience of enterprise chat is Skype for Business (ex-Lync) then maybe it's better, but that's a pretty low bar and is definitely a trip back to the dark ages once you've used a real messenger like Slack or even the consumer-grade ones such as Discord, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.
My experience using it for the past 3 months was so bad that it's now on my "stuff I don't work with" list and any potential client that insists on it gets an instant decline on my part.
I don't understand the fascination with Microsoft Teams, it doesn't work.
Sound simply doesn't work in the app, full stop. You need to use the web version, in Chrome, because nothing else works... Well Edge maybe, who knows. There is apparently no way to get sound working in the Mac client, meaning that it might as well not exist.
No one at my company has managed to have a functional video conference using the Mac client, and I talked to people at two major software development companies in Denmark, they have the same problem. The web client works. It’s not as good or easy as Google Meet, or what ever it’s called, but it works. The Mac client does NOT work and have not worked for at least six month.
its one saving grace for us is the amount of legacy comments and history of discussions we have built up over years across conversations that is useful for reference.