Microsoft actively hates its users. Why are all of the keyboard shortcuts in the most inconvenient place possible? Why does Outlook not mark mail as read/unread in an intuitive way? Why does Teams schedule send require one tap on mobile but two clicks on desktop? Also this isn’t even the thread to get into whatever tf is going on with LinkedIn. Planting seeds and harvesting crops was a mistake.
My favorite Teams feature is that when you share your screen, it puts some giant bar that can't be hidden at the top of the screen that covers up your tabs.
I have so many issues using Teams with a normal headset. I went into sound settings, and turned off exclusive access to the device.
I disabled communication devices. I turned off the sync buttons setting in Teams.
Yet Teams still loves to randomly unmute my mic even when it's muted from the PHYSICAL button. Makes no sense
That's the dumbest fucking part of teams, half of the problems that make people hate it are simple dumb shit like this that just prove they, like every other fucking company, prioritize business facing improvements, to the detriment of any user level improvement. IM LOOKING AT YOU AUTODESK!
You probably can. The issue is that most bt headsets mount themselves as a pair of stereo headphones, and a handsfree kit. And for some weird reason Teams will ONLY EVER broadcast audio to the handsfree kit. If you change the volume control to the handsfree kit, blam, you can change the volume.
It isn't just teams. That's how the hardware is implemented and it also means that you cannot have high quality audio and use the mic at the same time. It's actually Windows, not the bt device or the app.
Legacy decisions that keep getting carried forward
I figured out you can disable Bluetooth telephony services if you navigate deep into the printers and other devices control panel. But this might also disable the mic. I'm not able to test it right now.
Microsoft's O365 stack and Teams aren't great, my friend, but they're light years ahead of anything Google and Slack offer. Especially when any sort of collaboration is involved.
The collaboration features in 365 fuck up and get in the way a lot more often than they work correctly WITH ONLY TWO CONCURRENT USERS. Conversely, I've seen entire classrooms in Google Docs working together like it wasn't even a thing.
I don't have a lot of love for any of these companies, but what you are saying is objectively false.
Completely wrong. The Microsoft word collaboration is completly Terrible, constantly locks other people from editing even if they are on another part of the page. It really doesn't work for more than 2 people, while you can have like 30 people on a google doc with no issues (probably more, haven't tried more).
Also, I blocked beehaw, why can I see your comment
I can't dispute that. I'm not a Word person. I live in Excel and often have half a dozen people working in the same file without issue, but that's much more logically structured than a Word document. Google's team sites are also disjointed and janky af compared to Sharepoint.
Just transitioned from a Google + slack company to a Microsoft account company.
I asked if we put our email accounts on our phones to be able to answer after hours, my supervisor said very few people are given access to emails on their phones.
I am fine with the switch, I used to get 40-60 emails to sort through a day. Now I will be doing maybe 5-10 a day and only 3 or 4 might actually be for me and I only have an 8 hour day with no after hours meetings.
They must have some intense data retention policies. You can configure compliance levels to allow anyone into their Outlook acct using the app without any special permissions pretty easily.
I've had a company require employees to install MDM on personal phones (remote control/management) to be allowed to use them for 2fa app or email access.. there was a surprised Pikachu when I refused. Eventually they issued me a company phone, because it was impossible to do most tasks without 2fa. That device was on 9 to 5 only.
I work in IT and endpoint management is among my tasks. Knowing the things we can do to smartphones that are controlled by our mdm is enough to where I would never agree to having thatopn my personal device. I even refused to get a company provided smartphone.
It was kind of fun, because I joined the company as a part of acquihire and they came to my entire team to install MDM on our laptops. It turned out we were mostly running Linux, while their MDM was Windows and MacOS only. They left..
They came back 2 weeks later to tell us it would be best if we installed Windows. We told them "no, thank you" to which they responded with surprised pikachu, because they were used to their suggestions being treated as commands. So they left again.
A month later they came back to tell us we really should install Windows to which we responded that we'd have to rebuild out entire tooling and we're on tight deadlines as-is. It's important to note that their Windows setup didn't allow VMs..
Some time later we got an email to let us know MDM vendor will soon have Linux beta. Does it support Arch and Nixos? They'll get back to us on that. And we started researching how hard would it be to run BSD on a laptop ;-)
Ah, the confidence boost you get when you know your job is absolutely secure and the only reason you don't quit is because of a retention bonus :D
Because the only 2FA allowed was onelogin push. Don't ask me why.
They also used an "enterprise" VPN that was acquired by some larger company, was pretty much abandoned at that point and only worked with a proprietary client that took days to set up on Linux - this was fun for me and all my colleagues who ended at that sad company as a result of an acquihire and were 80% devs running linux.
I have an MDM on my work phone and I can't even access PlayStore anymore. It only allows Company Allowed Apps which is to say nothing. YouTube is broken because MDM somehow controls my DNS records. Firefox cannot be installed so Ads everywhere. Chrome only and it can only go to approved websites because Yahoo is safe but Ars Technica is not???
Why would anyone want that on a device they pay for?
MDM can be configured in 2 modes, one with company owned devices and one with bring your own device. But there are lots of settings that can be done, usually it is configured with work and personal profiles and the work one has all the restrictions in place and the personal has no limits. Maybe just some device features can be also enforced, like forbid the OEM unlock and ADB.
My particular company emails contain privilege information and there is absolutely zero trust in letting smart phones aka roaming data leaks anywhere near that.
Any work tool is like that, including slack and teams. If you're using a corporate device or tool paid for/managed by your employer, you have no privacy whatsoever. If you're using the internet at work, IT knows at least which sites you visit
Usually the logs/conversations don't get read, they just have words that get flagged (from swear words to drugs to who knows what else), the rest is mainly in case something happens they can look into it more and maybe cover their ass.
That said, I bet more data goes to microsoft from teams than goes to slack from slack, so in that case I bet slack is a bit better
I use Slack for personal projects and Teams for work. I think both are fine. The main reason it made sense to use Teams at work was because there were a number of products in use by different teams. IT had Slack and the rest had Zoom. Zoom was raising their costs and we already had Teams as part of 0365. So it was either buy Slack licenses for the entire company or just get everyone on Teams. It was kind of a no-brainer and it was hard to come up with a convincing argument to pay for Slack for everyone other than "Microsoft bad".
It’s funny you mention that about teams and O365. Microsoft just announced O/M365 licenses will be sold without Teams now, in the US. Something something antitrust lawsuit.
I don't particularly like the UI, but I haven't had any Issue with teams ever tbh. It even worked on Firefox with uBlock, NoScript (ofc allowing like one or two domains for it) and VPN. For me, Office in general just works most of the time. I would never use it for private stuff, let alone pay hundreds for it, but for work it's more than fine.
Except Outlook. Holy fuck, how is such a central application such a pile of steaming garbage? It has the worst UI/UX I have ever seen in any mail client by far.
Same. Teams isn't exactly good, but it works pretty okayish most of the time. I absolutely don't get the love for slack, it seems to be more like an "I use Arch, BTW" thing.
Lol there's a difference between overhyping and being upset that you were forced to move from a superior chat program to a slower, less efficient and more difficult to use program (Teams)
Edit: Found the Microsoft employee down voting me lmao
I'm forced to have two separate Outlook accounts, I quite literally can not use both accounts on the same computer without getting stuck in a neigh inescapable login loop from hell.
If your job has Office365 access, use the web version of Outlook. You can open multiple accounts in separate tabs and the interface isn't from 1995. I have multiple boxes I have to run and this saved me from having to constantly log in and log out of Outlook.
I typically use the web version and multiple tabs, but it still doesn't work. I think it might have something to do with my organization trying to force all the traffic through their own log in page and outlook having no idea what account to associate where.
I'm a software consultant and juggle multiple accounts without issue in Outlook. Whenever the authentication expires I have to sign in again in a bunch of places, but that only happens once a month.
Outlook is a fucking mess. I wanted to search for a keyword in a long-ass email yesterday, so of course I did ^F, like a normal person would. That opened the dialog to write and send a reply??? Why???
And web browser outlook having no keyboard shortcuts whatsoever is fucking criminal.
Beats WebEx. I contracted at Cisco after they had bought WebEx and the dev teams had to stagger their scrums in the morning because WebEx infra couldn't support all the meetings at once.
Actually we just finished our switch from Skype to Teams and honestly, as much as I love having GIFs to express my disdain for work, at least Skype could group chats, didn't require all the RAM in the world, and automatically saved chats which, in a records management hellscape was an absolute lifesaver. Also my headphones would automatically answer a call when I put them on my head but I have a feeling that has more to do with the settings than anything else.
Also I'm tired of having to tell people "no we can't do that because Microsoft hasn't integrated that very valuable and highly requested feature you're asking for"
I don't know if I could deal with this bullshit. I work at such a small office we don't do anything but calls, faxes, and shitloads of emails. The odd side text sometimes. Adding a whole chat space thing where I'm constantly on the hook for a reply would do my head in.
We were forcibly moved from Mattermost to Teams (because cost) and the lack of custom emotes is sorely felt throughout the company. I never counted, but I wouldn't have been at all surprised if we'd had >100 of them. So many in-jokes gone forever.
But I also harp a lot to my superiors about donating to open-source projects we utilize, make loads of money thanks to them, yet never give anything back.
I kinda get that some projects with limited backing can't "get their shit together", when successful users don't give them anything. It's a stupid pattern, and I hope we can break it.
That's not a terrible idea as long as it's significantly cheaper than the closed alternatives. I think the biggest issue would be that orgs that pay would expect a certain level of service that a community project might not be able to deliver on.
Most of the small to mid size companies that I have worked for would choose a larger more established system that costs more even if it offers less over a self-hosted one that they had to pay some sort of fee for.
Is like this weird idea in the business world that if you're using Foss systems that it must be completely free, and that the reason why you are using it is because you are broke or cheap.
That's kind of what I was getting at. Medium to large organizations usually require a certain level of reliability that closed software companies usually guarantee with dedicated support staff and SLAs. An open source project developed by the community with no dedicated support is risky from that perspective.
If someone with the technical know-how and ability to maintain those systems offered support (red hat for example) for a lower price, many small and medium sized companies would get on board. That could also just look like a company hiring a small team to implement and maintain their own systems while contributing back to the community project.
It's just a much harder sell to non-technical leaders. They just want uptime guarantees and fixed costs.
My guess is that if you're going to start a MSP you can do that with Foss and probably have a lot of success as long as you've got the sales chops to get the contracts.
Then you can funnel some of your customers money to foss well also increasing awareness and adoption of the better free and open source software programs
I don't think that is necessary, as some companies do actually help, either with money or even dedicated staff, which can be as good or better.
We should push for developers to promote the idea of more help towards FOSS projects, maybe find some hours a month, or send any money saved from not paying for licenses.
Oh you want to use the default audio devices on your system? What default audio devices I'm going to use this random loopback device and your monitor with no speakers!
I have had to help so many end users with that it pains me.
"How can I stop this from happening again?"
Well, we can disable.other audio devices, but seeing as it's Windows 11 they may just re-enable good luck!
I ran into a user who's noise cancellation stopped working upon the rollout of "New" Teams. Tried diagnosing the microphone array, settings updates, firmware. No luck.
Know what worked? Both versions of browser based Teams!!! Ihatethemihatethemihatethem
It's a stupid solution, but have the user download voicemod, then use voicemod as the default microphone in teams. It's stupid, but it solves all these problems.
Not the windows troubleshooter, as the mic was otherwise fine. There was nothing I could find in any Teams settings, and the admin panel showed all of the telemetry as being fine.
My boss has gotten to the point of "As Ashe would say, fucking Microsoft"
Let's not forget the endless name changes, 404'd documentation that points to non existent tools all of the time, the GUI that barely works. Always an adventure
I despise these blurred backgrounds. I understand if you use it when working from home and don't have a dedicated office, but so many people do it even when they're at the corporate office. The flickering is just super annoying.
