Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users and employees
Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users and employees
188 comments
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I cant stand anything microsoft anymore. Teams, outlook, word, every iteration just makes me more angry.
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I got a new job, fully remote, and we use Teams. Not gonna lie, I don’t get the hate. It seems as exactly adequate as WebEx or Zoom. None of them make me cum, none of them make me upset.
What is it about Teams that people hate so much? How does WebEx or Zoom do it any better?
Fully onboard with hating new Outlook though, fuck it sucks. Can’t even browse the global address list, it’s search only.
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It uses a fucking inordinate amount of resources to accomplish its task, mostly.
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That's Electron baby!
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Several years ago I inadvertently (because I didn’t realize who they were) got in a twitter argument with someone who I seem to recall as the creator of electron about how it was fucking embarrassing how bad electron apps are. At the time I kinda felt bad because he seemed like a decent guy and I let loose but I wonder what the carbon footprint of his little side project is…
I think what started the rant was that back at that time, if you scrolled one page back in a chat, it would display a graphic representing a chat while it loaded the chat. And the fucking software was sitting there using a GB of ram and couldn’t keep 5 min of conversation cached. Just inexcusably bad.
I don’t know who at Microsoft had such a hard-on for electron back then, but it seems to have spread and it’s still nowhere close to the good old windows GUI for resource usage.
Thankfully it has gotten better. Slightly. Still pegs my CPU but I think that’s because I have a shit CPU with integrated gfx
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I could see the benefit if they wanted it to work on other systems, but I doubt that's why they chose it. Someone up high just saw it as the cool new thing and forced it onto projects, even when it didn't make sense.
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Microsoft can’t render text properly. Which is embarrassing for the company that makes the most popular document tools. Every app Microsoft makes that renders text well is running chromium at some level.
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Ahem… it’s Edge Webview 2. Which I promise is in no way exactly the same as Electron…
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Comparing the amount of noise my laptop's CPU fans make between the two of them when doing moderately intensive tasks like screen sharing a 4K display, Zoom is measurably worse.
Possibly the one time that Microsoft's inexplicable inability to make their own software run well on their own OS has somehow not manifested.
Don't get me wrong, it is still death-by-a-thousand-cuts terrible, but the most current iteration of Teams is not the worst in its field... at this one specific thing.
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It has gotten so much better over the years. Which is more testament to how unutterably awful it was at release than how good it is now.
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Yeah, Zoom is the only one I’ve used that makes my computer chug and stutter. Webex and Teams have been fine IME.
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Teams randomly selects the wrong microphone, so either people can't hear me or they can hear everyone around me too (laptop mic).
How hard can it be to store my microphone preference?
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Teams meetings aren't really that much worse than Zoom, it's mostly minor gripes, although there are quite a few of those. The Teams chat client on the other hand is an absolute garbage fire that's significantly worse than Slack, Discord, or pretty much anything up to and arguably including IRC.
An organization , "team", channel, and chat are confusing as hell, that breakdown does not in any way align with the way communication works in a large organization. Why is there so little configuration available for notification settings? Why can't I completely silence or ignore a "team", channel, or chat? Why do I not receive notifications half the time for the things I actually want to be notified about? Why aren't there threads or at least a sensible and easy to follow "reply to" option? Why can't anyone seem to agree on the correct way to organize things? Half our groups are creating gigantic "teams" that include half the company, while the other half are creating shared channels nobody knows about. Both options suck.
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Our organization turned off the ability to edit or delete any posts in a Team channel.
So outdated information, typos, stupid questions, etc remain polluting the channel for all eternity.
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For me, it has nothing to do with how good or bad the actual application is, it's the terms of service that go along with it. Basically microsoft hoovers up every morsel of data you put into their system, including your voice and face. I liken it to giving all your personal data to someone (including your voice and face), they put in a pretty looking safe on the side of the street and then they sell the keys to it.
Ignoring the fact that the data could be stolen from one of the many third parties it partners with, microsoft could (will) also give the data to the government which will then be used as evidence to deport or jail you or people you know for speaking out against the American regime or acted against Gods will and had an abortion. Or maybe someone in DC makes up some bullshit law targeting some arbitrary demographic which includes you, they request data from microsoft which is promptly provided; you get arrested and sent to jail or deported.
Data privacy is important, especially when the government is corrupt and insane. It's prudent to protect ourselves and the people we know.
Haven't needed to use it myself, but here's an open source alternative I've heard a lot about:
Not sure it'll help with your work though.
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So when my old job had it, about 5 (out of 30) people in my area just couldn't open it.
Not the same five, IT would frequently reinstall it to fix it, but it would just break constantly.
Work computers, very locked down, couldn't do any alternative to it at the time, and we worked remote, so while everyone else had chat, some unfortunate people needed constant updates via email.
The question was who would be SOL, not if someone would be, that day.
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I can almost feel my shoulders cramping up gaaaaaaaaahhhh
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I had to use teams with multiple accounts with multiple organisations. Sometimes my account is added to their organisation, sometimes I used their provided account. Microsoft was going for a one sign in approach and the whole thing just totally failed to account for my situation. It never successfully let me switch accounts, running multiple concurrently certainly never worked.
With one situation the work around was to follow the original organisation invite again, reset my password then proceed with my meeting. I'd do this maybe ten times a day sometimes if I had to bounce between different companies.
And all controls are basic as fuck. It's a business tool that thinks its target market is my grandma. All controls were apple-ified. I'd get a long error code and I couldn't select it to copy and paste it, and if I clicked off the window the notification displaying the error code would go away, so i'd have to print screen the error code, paste out somewhere, and then type it out manually into Google to try and diagnose. This was a solved problem 30 years ago. Why are we going backwards?
Anyway, rant over. It's a pos. Slack is light years ahead.
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Sounds like you need a virtual machine for each Teams account!
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Teams is fine for video calling and screensharing. The mess begins when organisations, as MS encourages them to do, try to embed everything there is into teams. Then it can very fast become a black hole where no one finds anything anymore
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Honestly thats just a user problem, not a Teams one.
Just limit it to files and forms and stuff like that, and explain to users that the teams folders, SharePoint, and the files on their computer are all the same.
Source: IT manager
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I'm in the same shoes about new job having to use teams and I wildly disagree. It is awful.
The best part of it is the noise cancellation on the microphone in calls seem pretty good and having a chat created for meetings is a good integration. BUT..
- voice quality significantly decreases as soon as it's more than 2 participants.. you can clearly tell the difference as soon as a 3rd member is invited.
- annotating on the screen share is extremely useful in slack (not sure if zoom has it too), not a thing I could find in teams
- the channels Vs chats separation in the UI is just weird
- the chats don't have threads.. that's such a strong feature to contain conversations. I know the channels kinda serve this purpose but it feels weird to use them and closer to sending an email or posting on a forum than directly talking to someone (with having to write a title and bring presented in 1-2 messages per screen due to the size
Compared to zoom, I guess it's not a big deal really. I'd prefer zoom but it's oh well. Compared to slack (which has it's own set of problems, but still) however it seems like a pile of shit in my opinion.
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Teams has live annotations, it's under accessibility settings.
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Are you thinking of live captions?
Annotation is on the sharing toolbar (full screen share only, not a window only share).
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Why is it under accessibility settings, though?
It's not an accessibility setting!-
Its not, AFAIK. I think they are thinking of live captions.
Annotation is on the sharing toolbar, usable with full screen share only.
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Thank you, I'll give it a try tomorrow.
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Teams is mostly fine these days and I think it's the only MS product that is getting better over time instead of worse. If you have a competent IT team then the various MS integrations can actually work well to make Teams a usable one stop for comms, recordings/transcripts, scheduling, file sharing, etc.
New features are slow to come but they do come. The insane memory footprint became much more reasonable for me when they moved from Electron to their own Edge-based WebView2 thing last year. The preview builds have finally combined the "teams" channel listings and ad-hoc chats into one tab where you can group them together however you want.
Teams still pisses me off on occasion but no more than any other piece of enterprise software. It's fine.
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What pisses me off is when I create Teams for teams in Teams, and then want to google how to do something specific.
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That's because they're called "teams groups" not "teams for teams" ;)
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You should tell Microsoft:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-channels-overview
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Kinda curious if me skipping all the shitty older versions is why I think the current one is fine. I always opt in to the new versions ASAP to get the pain of switching out of the way sooner rather than later.
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I use it for school. I'm in different groups and I need to use it for chat, file and image sharing on different projects and its an absolute nightmare trying to keep track of channels, I'd rather use literally any other software to accomplish this task. Most of us just jump on discord and use that.
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The leave button is right next to the share button. That's my biggest complaint.
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I manage teams in a MacOS environment and ive seen teams fail to notify when people get a message or phone call straight up. Ive seen it fail to deliver a message, automatically select audio devices (because it has to use its own selection of audio devices) sharing screens is like watching a slideshow no matter what network you are on, controlling another users computer is even worse. Our headsets are Plantronics “certified for teams” or whatever its called and the mute button sometimes desyncs with the client and the headphones may be muted but the client not or vice verse. Theres much more but im so tired from dealing with teams all day. I also think its just a wildly unintuitive ui, settings are completely strewn across all sections
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automatically select audio devices (because it has to use its own selection of audio devices)
Dude, this so fucking hard. It doesn't even respect the system volume on my Windows 11 work laptop; despite being set at like 30%, my eardrums always get blasted at the start of the meeting. Every single time, I have to go into the volume settings and turn down the individual application (which has TWO volume controls for...reasons?), because apparently per-app volume is higher priority than system volume for reasons I have yet to find an answer to.
I want the old Volume Mixer back. At least that worked as any reasonable person would expect.
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Teams is annoying because even when you don't use it, it prioritizes itself and opens making it take longer to get to the programs I actually need and use. This is only a few seconds on new computers but can be minutes on older ones. First world problem sure but my computer should run how I want it.
I've also never been able to get the web version to work there's no error code it just doesn't connect. IT doesn't know and the Microsoft guy just said to use the app, which goes back to the above. If it's going to be an app then leave it as an app if you have a web version then maybe it should fucking work.
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It closes and opens itself multiple times a day for whatever reason, updating ? Crashing ? I don’t know because it always just reappears in a completely other place than where I had it before.
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Well, are you using "new" Teams, or "classic" Teams, both of which can be installed and nag for updates that fail. My "new" Teams (just finally had to uninstall "classic" altogether) just randomly crashes/restarts throughout the day, and also randomly is "unable to authenticate", making me offline but unaware of it, so miss messages. My "old" Outlook also ~15-20% of the time, on a fresh PC start, just can't connect to server, and nothing will fix it except for rebooting PC. Yeah, so fucking done with MS shit, it's all hot garbage, from 11 on down through all their apps. They've fucked up EMAIL ffs.
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I only use it incidentally but my biggest gripe is the total inability to perform its one function of teleconferencing.
The bit where it lags the audio badly and then speeds it up to catch back up to real-time is absolutely infuriating to listen to, and such a failure of a tool that had. one. job.
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I had to enroll users in teams. Doing so was confusing and 1 user would never get the invite. I ended up ditching it after about a month.
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Teams has been successful in detecting my headphones and mics 20% of the time. So, my alternative is to go on my phone and also my laptop (but mute myself) so I can share my screen during meetings. Windows detects my headphones and mics just fine in other applications, like Zoom or Discord. It's a pain in the ass.
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My biggest problems with Teams are system slowdown (this was a big issue before I got my new work laptop), and different versions of Teams launching at startup (personal as default and then you have to choose professional or whatever and wait for it to reload everything). Back during the pandemic I had two different Teams (one for my reserve component, and one for my regular job) and it was a nightmare.
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Weird, I always cum while using Teams
(Dear employer - this was a joke)
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YOUR FIYA'D! YA HEAR ME? FIYA'D! GET OUTTA HE'E.
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I used self-hosted rocket chat before, now I use teams, I understand perfectly all the hate
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For the scope of WebEx and Zoom, it's.. fine... mostly. I mean I hate that I can't really full screen a remote screen share, so it could be better, but broadly speaking, video, audio, and screen sharing is fine. Not coincidentally, this is pretty much the only standalone stuff Teams bothered to uniquely implement, most everything else is built upon sharepoint...
It starts getting annoying for chat platform. You want to scroll back, it's going to be painfully slow. You participate in cross-company conversations, oh boy you get to deal with the worst implementation of instancing to keep your activity segregated I have seen. Broadly speaking it just scales poorly at managing the sorts of conversations you have at a larger company. If your conversations are largely "forget it after a few hours", you may be fine.
Then you get into what these platforms have been doing for ages, Lotus Notes and Sharepoint suggesting companies build workflows on top of their platform. Now the real pain and suffering begins.
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I’ve also had no issues with Teams and haven’t had coworkers with issues in probably six years. I prefer it significantly over Slack, and my first job was using IBM/Lotus Notes before they switched to teams, that was a clunky nightmare.
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You aren’t the only one who doesn’t get the Slack love. I HATE their design philosophy. It has threads. That’s all it’s got going for i in my opinion. The rest of it is confusing and a pain to use.
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Not gonna lie, I don’t get the hate.
TEAMs was terrible going into the pandemic but it's steadily gotten better, especially over the past 18 months. Reading down the comment chain though I'm in awe at the amount of problems that people are apparently still having with it!
TEAMs via app or browser on my Windows 10 box at work? Fine. TEAMs via app or browser on my Windows 11 Surface? Fine. TEAMs via app or browser on my wheezy HP laptop with Windows 11? Fine. TEAMs via browser (Firefox even!) on all three of my Linux systems? Also completely fine!
Hell I've got Creative T-60 USB-C speakers, a logi webcam, and Turtle Beach headphones hooked to a USB sharing KVM for two of those linux boxes and it still just works.
I must be the luckiest dumb-ass alive when it comes to MS TEAMs because at least for the last two years it just works.
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My TEAMs laptop unfortunately only has an 11th gen i5 and 16 gigs of RAM so it runs like crap. And yes I only run TEAMs, a proprietary application with <50 MB RAM and <1% CPU usage, and occasionally Firefox.
Though TEAMs in Edge runs fine. It's only an issue with the app.
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Popup #10000: Have you tried feature X that nobody asked for yet?
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RIP Clippy
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skype!
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ahh member skype?
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You member! You saw me! You membe!
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Bring back Outlook Express!
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i was so glad my new job uses google products, but the one thing they are missing is a counterpart to onenote. Keep ain't it.
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Obsidian is my answer to it.
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looks cool but unfortunately we can only use approved apps which are mostly within the google ecosystem.
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I went from a small business that was entirely G Suite to a mega corp that was entirely Microsoft. Company culture wise the mega corp is soooo much better, technology wise....I felt totally limited and like I had gone back in time.
I went from being able to pull up a Google sheet on my phone to live update decision makers both back in the office and people who were remote, to having to jump through hoops to open an Excel sheet, then request editing rights, then having to submit the edited sheet to my supervisor only for her to have a manager review and approve the edit, and then he'd have to attach the edited version to an all hands email and tell everyone to download and use the new one.
It's gotten better since I started, we now upload everything to OneDrive, but they can't seem to get the permissions right and every once in a while someone edits a file and someone has to comb though the edit history to restore it.
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This whole comment chain makes me feel abject despair at the prospect of getting a job outside the service industry.
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Shitty software still better than customers
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188 comments