What I conclude from an organization using Teams is that they're running Microsoft stack, which affects my opinion far more negatively. Microsoft sales are powerful. If you use Teams, there's a chance that:
- You use Windows for OS
- You use Sharepoint for documentation
- You use Outlook for Mail
- You use OneDrive for storage
- You use Azure for hosting
- You use Copilot for LLM
- You use GitHub for scm
- etc
all of those are things I actively want to avoid. they're all sub-par, they're all managed by button-clicking pseudo-sysadmins, they're all red flags.
You would severely limit yourself if you're strict about your list without nuance. GitHub is pretty much bog standard in most companies unless you're working for the few using mercurial, etc.
I work in a MS stack and most of your list is untrue for my case.
We use slack for messaging, Confluence, Wikimedia, and GDrive for documentation, Google Mail for email, I develop primarily dotnet/C# apps on a MacBook pro M5, have access to all major LLM providers and primarily use Claude and antigravity.
There only thing that checks of your list is Azure hosting.
On a personal note, it has been by far one of the best place I've worked at.
The dotnet ecosystem is so well developed and rich, I expect to be paid a huge premium if I ever have to deal with Java again.
The Facebook comparison is on spot: Both GitHub and Teams have become social networks. Even better if inferior, they solve visibility and connection issues. Actually Microsoft keeps the friction for people without an account just high enough that you want to use it in a business. What we need is that those services are regulated more like Telefone networks allowing federation.
100%. We're a total Microsoft shop and it's all so mediocre. We started with Azure AD and slowly replaced all our AAA solutions with Microsoft ones. The Microsoft ones are cheaper (packaged together) and better integrated but in terms of user experience they're really mediocre.
The only thing that was not really worse was email, we came from lotus notes which was a crashy piece of shit.
But our messaging, storage etc solutions all were a big step back when we went to Microsoft.
The reason was that during the years a lot of people had been 'creative' and built tools in its database/scripting language. Many of these tools had been abandoned but still had wormed their way into critical business processes. It took us years to decommission most of them and in some cases rebuild them with modern tech.
I really miss Lotus Sametime though. It had so many features that Teams doesn't.
- Show my online presence status to everyone except person X
- Send me a popup when person X comes online
- Disable message read receipts for person X
- Custom emoji
Well lots of stuff like that. Really handy in avoiding toxic colleagues if you're neurospicy :) Or to catch them first thing when they came online because you need something from them. It was also much more fun in sametime than Teams.
Teams also keeps a 100% persistent record of everything you say even if you delete it. In Microsoft Purview. It's definitely your enemy.
The "comes online" alert is possible if you choose to be notified when the person becomes available, but it's capped at stalking 15 people I think. Not the best but achieves that goal.
That's ok, I never stalk more than 15 people at a time anyway :) :) :)
But it was damn handy sometimes. Teams doesn't have this feature.
What was more of a lifesaver was the not showing status to some people though. There was one guy who would consider me his personal support person and this was really annoying. I know it's not normally considerd a good thing to solve a human problem by technical means. But for me it works just fine and much better than taking it up with the person themselves.
In our european company (insurance/gov space) we use Teams, Outlook, Sharepoint as side products of Office, largely to get the official editing tools for the documents our clients provide.
Depending on who you are in our company, you are using either Mac or Windows, although we are slowly shifting to OpenSUSE. Azure and GitHub are completely out of the question, and OneDrive is only used in the context of Teams/Sharepoint. Sharepoint, too, is only used by half the company for whom it is relevant.
Security-wise most of our data is with our customers on european servers (Word/etc. are not linked to OneDrive), except billing.
Serious question: what's your preferred alternative to SharePoint? We have an eclectic portemonteau of software, bookstack for docs, outlook and ms-365 for office etc. We're not a software company, think more mercantile and manufacture. We have a lot of stuff in excel, price calc, processes etc. I don't see a way away from excel. Currently we have all xls files on network drives, which is hard to maintain. Even though I'm not a Microsoft fan, I find myself pushing for SharePoint, simply so we can use the integrated share features in word and excel. LibreOffice and Collarbora don't seem to be there yet, even if I could convince people to switch from excel to Calc (and of our Ancient Wisdom Sheets would even work in LibreOffice).
a shared drive is much better than sharepoint. I don't see how sharepoint can make it easier.
the best alternative is using google workspace instead. it doesn't make you sign in four times a minute.
Google is completely out of the question. As I said, we cannot switch away from Excel, whether I like it or not. Google Sheets is not a viable option: Everyone in the company knows Excel.
Network shares aren't bad per se, but they encourage people to place multiple files with the same name and then a V4, V5, V6 etc suffix. People have to download or check out the Excel files if they want to work with them, delete their local copies when they are done, and make sure they always check out the most recent version. If multiple people have to edit an Excel file, they have to synchronize so they don't override each other's files. So yeah, network shares aren't bad per se, but they aren't ideal either. SharePoint has a clear advantage here.
I'm not usually someone who advocates for Microsoft, on the contrary actually, but in this case I don't see a really good alternative.
If you have a better workflow, please explain it to me.
Not only is that certainly not a fact, as the sibling commenter said, I find it striking how you're seemingly purposely missing the point.
They KNOW excel, they know where which buttons are, and the business logic and price calc are done in excel. These people aren't mentally challenged as you seem to think, they will know if their excel suddenly looks differently, offered by Google instead of Microsoft and in a browser instead of a native windows app.
So if you have nothing to contribute except power user arrogance, I will no longer interact with you.
> I find it striking how you're seemingly purposely missing the point.
Lol. You answer rude and get a rude response and then give up.
> They KNOW excel, they know where which buttons are
That’s not knowing excel though.
You’re not making the claim that people writing complex formulas with named ranges have an equation that doesn’t work in Sheet.
Sure, not specializing in computers doesn’t make you mentally challenged but it doesn’t make you proficient in it. If the reason somebody can’t use something is cause it “looks different” how have they survived the last 2 decades of Microsoft changes?
But the excel-boundedness is exactly my point. Several sheets are so large they have been split into three files, referencing each other or external sources via power query. I'm not even saying it's good like it is, but it's just the status quo. I don't see any viable way to turn away from Excel in the short term, which is why I seek solutions.
And knowing where which function or button is in Excel IS knowing Excel, and programming formulas, VB macros and power queries is knowing Excel too. It has been a cornerstone in this company for the past 20 years. These people aren't IT people, Their core skills and how they bring value to the company lie somewhere else, and that's perfectly fine too. but I cannot expect them to just change the software they're been relying on for years just because I say so.
I my experience, it's often that Excel is an absolute necessity. Try telling people who work in finance or accounting that they will have to use Google Sheets or another alternative and you'll have a picket line out front of the office within a week.
I've never met anyone who was a die-hard for Word, I'm sure they exist but they can't be a large contingent of users.
Excel is a lot like Photoshop. Everyone hates the parent companies, but there just aren't good alternatives for either one.
I documented a recent experience joining another company's Teams instance:
---
To log into the Teams website on my Mac:
* Use Passwords to log into Okta.
* Use Okta Verify + Touch ID for MFA.
* Log into Teams with Okta.
* Install Microsoft Authenticator on my phone because Okta’s SSO isn’t enough for MS.
* Log into my work account in Microsoft Authenticator. (Bonus: typing an Okta password into some random app’s webview gives me the warm fuzzies!)
* Bounce to Okta Verify + Face ID on my phone for MFA.
* Scan the QR code on my Mac with my phone.
* Enter the 2 digit code shown on my Mac to double-plus authenticate with Microsoft Authenticator.
As punishment for doing all this correctly, finally have to use Teams.
---
This is 100% accurate. Halfway through the hoopjumping, I realized it was ridiculous and started over from scratch so I could record each step of it.
I'm certain some step in there is necessary to support Outlook Express, and they can't clean up the process without annoying some bank paying for enterprise support of their Windows Server 2003 setup. These are the downsides of eternal backward compatibility.
Don't forget that you need to randomly login again for teams, again for outlook, and for whatever reason the onedrive website will not open unless you try multiple times.
I’ll touch on two areas that the article and many comments didn’t mention. We switched from Slack to Teams at a previous company.
- The loss of institutional knowledge was absolutely punishing and costly. Overnight, we lost access to an easily searchable knowledge base. A solution was available, but the search was awful and you had to know what you were looking for. While this isn’t really a fault of Teams and the vendor lock-in trap was unavoidable, the sheer monetary amount in wasted effort must have been massive. Additionally, many teams began to default to closed channels. Even future info was difficult or impossible to search.
- The loss of community was palpable. This was mid-pandemic and the formerly in-person work environment was all online. The Slack UI lends itself much more towards “casual” conversations in general chat rooms. It’s a bit difficult to put into words, but posting a funny link or a picture of your cat in Slack feels personable, while doing the same in Teams’ threaded UI feels one step away from writing an email. Even the reaction emojis were bland. It’s difficult to keep people engaged and sticking around if they don’t feel part of a team or community.
There are plenty of serious businesses doing serious things, complex things, that use microsoft teams for chat. My work uses it, it kinda sucks, but honestly there's way more things to bikeshed than chat apps. You can send text messages and make video calls and do presentations in microsoft teams.
The usability in Teams always feels bad to me, like it was designed and developed by someone trying to be fancy without being usable.. Text content in chats is in a strange light gray color, messages are collapsed by default so you have to expand them to read anything longer than a few words, then requiring a "title" for every message.. Slack just feels more natural to me, more thought-out..
My company is using Teams. I chose it, and I do regret it but we're not using anything else from Microsoft and I've gradually reduced the surface to where we are just using it for messaging/large file storage, both of which it does fine actually.
My reasons:
- critical reason: it was half the price of anything else which was important when we were starting, less so now
- probably much less than half the price when factoring in storage allowances actually
- critical reason: it has built in translation without extra charge
- the only real alternative close to the price and with translation was Google workspace and I've had such bad experiences with Google that I'm still glad I didn't choose that
- inexperience: it was sold to me as a messaging and storage app that also came with a suite of other apps (which have ALL turned out to be useless) and I didn't know I was inheriting a heaving mutated behemoth built on the stinking undead corpses of SharePoint and AD.
So yeah, wish I'd had more info at the time. But at this point now that I've limited the surface we're using and it's all settled in, the only real problems we have are the tedious 2fa issues that crop up whenever a new person joins.
Same question I've had in the other comment. What is your preferred alternative to SharePoint? Because we do need document sharing, and I don't see a viable way away from Excel for us. Right now we're sharing Excel files on network drives, which is horrible for versioning files, so I'd rather prefer something like SharePoint, but not from Microsoft. LibreOffice and Collabora don't seem to be there yet.
Personally, I am not a big fan of Microsoft, but in this case, my company is so entrenched in Excel that I don't see any alternative.
Yeah I don't yet have a great solution to that. We're not versioning docs well. I'm trying to drive adoption of nextcloud office (which is collabora I think) but haven't succeeded so far.
Of course it is. And from a user's perspective, I often hear people saying they are 'forced' to use it because their employers want them to, otherwise they risk being fired, but I have never understood how that behavior is considered legal, since it's literally coercing somebody to accept Microsoft's abusive privacy and service policies that explicitly state that unless agreed, their products can't be used.
I have never used Zoom or Teams in my life since I never agreed with their ToS&PP, and I've never been in a situation where my career would depend on it (I'm self-employed). When somebody asks me to join these, I nicely respond with that exact reason why I can't use them and propose using Jitsi Meet instead, and I have never experienced anybody rejecting it yet.
> since it's literally coercing somebody to accept Microsoft's abusive privacy and service policies that explicitly state that unless agreed, their products can't be used.
As an employee, the company sets the conditions and tools to work there.
If communication is to happen on Microsoft Teams, and you refuse to use it, your future employment with them seems difficult. Same as if you refused to show up to meetings, or kept sound isolation headphones on at all times, including when your boss wanted to speak with you. Or you would never use a telephone.
When using enterprise tools, I expect the employer to have accepted the terms of use; most employees can't bind the employer.
I certainly prefer to avoid Microsoft communications tools, but if the work is interesting enough, I guess it's fine.
A lot of places claim things for "security" and violating them is grounds for firing because truthfully or not, they claim circumventing them is exposing data. We used to be able to choose our e-mail client as they had IMAP access. A few years ago they decided to only allow Microsoft's own protocol to enforce Outlook use and disabled IMAP access.
> since it's literally coercing somebody to accept Microsoft's abusive privacy and service policies that explicitly state that unless agreed, their products can't be used.
Sure, but the privacy and service policies are only applicable to your employer's data, it was never your data in the first place.
> I have never understood how that behavior is considered legal
You can't give employees veto power over software choices, an employer that can't choose which software platforms its employees use is not going to be viable.
I’m not quite sure, but the reasoning that some technology is frustrating users and therefore is not calculated in when optimizing cost per seat could apply to every software. In a large enough company there will be always people complaining about this and that. If you google you will also find people complaining about Slack.
I like Teams. Especially the Meeting feature. I like that I can join with multiple devices in a meeting. Sharing stuff in a meeting is also pretty cool and easy. I also like the integration into other products.
The only thing which could be better is performance - even the new WebView2 thing is not enough. But this is sadly common for most tools like this.
I preferred Skype (which Microsoft bought years ago but only killed last year) -- it also, at least in its final iteration, did the share screen thing well and just seemed snappier than Teams.
Microsoft has a blind spot for search in general. Search in Outlook, Explorer and using Windows Start Menu\Task Bar are all useless. It’s been like that for years
1000000% agree. I'm currently interviewing for new jobs and when I hear that they use Microsoft Teams it's always a red flag. Not a deal breaker, but a red flag nonetheless. It is truly awful.
I signed our Slack Enterprise contract this week. Yes, it is insanely expensive. But if time is money, the alternatives would've been far costlier. (Do not interpret this as me having any special love for Slack. It's just the lesser evil in this context.)
While I agree with the general thrust of this. After years of using Slack, which is I wont say much better, I hate Slack. I hate teams more, but I hate Slack. And the other crap I hope I never see in use ever.
In fact I lost real any desire to "work in chat", its never been a good experience its just a place to hide from email. Waste time in chat, make jokes in Chat, bitch to my manager in chat ok. Work in chat? F-that.
The only way you can get work done in a place that uses (abuses) Slack is to turn off notifications and forget it. Its a distraction app and nothing more.
People who have wired in their CI and AWS Alarms and metrics, I feel sorry for you. You took the bait.
So yes teams is a red flag. Slack is a flag of a different color. When you take a companies stack in as a whole, it will (no matter where you are) remind you of how TRULY SHITTY software products are. And that should humble you so you dont go add to the pile.
My pet theory is that companies deliberately stick with terrible chat apps in order to discourage employees from chatting and keep them "working" instead. In my experience, it's not a good tradeoff though.
Is Teams actually worse than Slack? Slack can't even reliably deliver messages.
I've had instances on all tiers of Slack plans on all clients where messages just disappear for days at a time and then come back to gaslight you.
ed: I tried to see if this is fixed and it doesn't look like it. Your IT team might have to write "help" articles like this one. Note that I've had this experience on other platforms.
Uni professor here in Paraguay. My university (which is barely starting right now) got Teams as a package deal that included Outlook email and calendaring, One Drive, and Office 365. There might be other stuff, but these are the ones most visible to me in my role as a teacher. We use Teams not as part of a traditional in-office groupware but as a means to deliver online classes.
The good part is that it's a very good tool for that. Meeting quality is usually good to excellent. Screen sharing works, as well as whiteboards. In case there is disruption or vandalism there are readily available controls to quickly secure the meeting room. Audio quality is good, video too.
Moreover, I use Linux, and I intend to implement the whole MS groupware client-side in my desktop applications, such as Kontact/KMail. Teams is covered by a good webapp wrapper done by Ismael Martínez that behaves like a normal desktop app, with system tray capability included (https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux).
But the really bad part is that this is... a Microsoft product requiring authentication mediated by Microsoft. And (speaking from my particular situation, that is, from Asunción, Paraguay) it's a stinking mess. There are ISPs that fail to authenticate due to an unexplained error (they don't even offer those awful hexadecimal error codes). Some ISP can authenticate using their mobile networks, but residential ones fail. And even when authentication supposedly works, switching from consumer (private) Outlook to corporate Outlook is fraught with various failure points.
Teams works well... once you managed to login. I will never forget that I had to give a substitute class for someone and getting access to that specific classroom took me over 90 minutes between retries, delays, silent fails, etc. The stuff of nightmares.
Another really bad part of Teams is that usability and UX are also nightmarish. You open the app and it is not apparent at all how to create an instant meeting. There is the functionality, but it's not easily discoverable at all. How do you manage the access of people to chat, for example? Some people can use the chat, while others can't access to it. And how to fix that, is by no means apparent. So Teams, while being the sensible solution here and even from a Linux user standpoint is reasonably nice, can be quite painful to use.
Now, about what TFA said, about Teams or Slack costing a tiny fraction of what an engineer earns... let me tell you that in our neck of the woods salaries are really low. If you can manage USD 1K/month, you are quite fortunate. So any "fraction of the cost" taken by either Teams or Slack, is not that tiny. Moreover, at least in educational contexts, Slack is not that well-known (to be honest, it's practically unknown here), so Slack does not have the mindshare that Teams has here.
So, about Teams: the product is there and is reasonably good in its foundations. If Microsoft only could set its mind to smooth the rough edges it could have been a real winner.
Why could they? What are your examples of such app rewrites that had good results? The AI companies themselves don't do that, so what world are you referencing?
I don't have much experience with others, but I can throw out my complaints about Teams:
* Too much resource usage.
* Chat UX is not good. The team/channel concept makes sense, but threaded (and nonthreaded) chats really just have a bad UI, so everyone at my company just uses multi-person chats, which are terrible for managing access, history, etc.
* For the past while I get some extra prompt about "improving my security" every time I punch in my 2FA info that I have to decline on a daily basis.
I don't know whether Teams is worse than Slack. I do know that I loathe Slack, though. Of the software I use almost every day, it is the worst by miles.
Especially if other companies you have to interact with also use Teams, and Teams has the clear lower barrier to entry, let alone document sharing that's integrated into Word and Excel via SharePoint. Sure, it may not be sexy, but it heckin does work.
I think it's gotten a lot better over recent years but in just the past week we had:
A meeting where 2 people somehow weren't able to join. Even after "restarting". One dialed in by phone, the other gave up.
It chose I guess a dock's microphone over a headset mic. Honestly having some kind of tiny local speech recognition model that would say "get you're really quiet/far away/muffled" would be a godsend. That's user error but still. They have the technology.
There's also the problem that it doesn't remember layout preferences so every meeting I have to focus the content, which still doesn't show it full screen.
And unlike discord there's no option for smooth video so good luck.
- A colleague's whole system has been freezing for a full minute every time he joins a meeting. This has been going on for over a year, including after multiple full system resets
- On macOS, I regularly (~once a week) end up in different broken sync states, where message histories for all chats are missing messages from the last few month. The only way to reliably fix this is to remove the whole cache, causing it to resync after a app restart. Due to this, I run a whole Windows VPS, just to be able to "reliably" receive Teams messages from customers.
- In multi-tenant usage, it's incredibly slow to switch between different tenants. If you are semi-actively chatting with users from 2-3 tenants its a big PITA
- If you are an external user to a organization, the default settings are that your Teams session will last ~24h, after which you have to re-authenticate. Teams doesn't give you any good indication that you have been logged out, unless you actively check, in which case you might be shown a warning banner after ~a minute delay (if you are lucky).
---
I'm usually one the more defensive side of cargo cult hate against software (e.g. I think a lot of people dislike JIRA to an unjustified degree, and mostly due to badly hosted or configured instances), but Teams is one of the few where it's absolutely deserved. I think it's a prime example of how Microsoft as an organization has forgotten how to build good desktop software.
Only upside is that it's a good bonding ritual with customers, as the Teams suffering is a universal feeling.
my coworkers are always complaining about how much trouble they have with it, not being able to copy and paste into chats, freezes, crashes... never happens to me.
Snap opinion made by a software dev who thinks the entire world revolves around software development and this dev's workflow.
There's any number of reasons an org would choose teams over slack, or any Microsoft product over an alternative, even your example of the cost shows a clear lack of knowledge of information outside your narrow scope.
How do you know your org is paying the price you found on a website?
You realize there are other vendors people pay infrastructure contracts through who bundle Microsoft products in their contract?
Then give devs slack or an equivalent alternative? The point the author making is that forcing devs into Teams, because the org uses it, is a red flag. And they’re right.
It’s an indicator that developer experience pales in comparison to bean-counting, and that is an indicator that the business focuses on ROI in the wrong areas.
I’m sure there are finance teams that love it. I work in marketing and I sure as hell don’t, after it using it in two different full-time roles.
Yours seems to be the only comment in this threat with some real-world experience outside of software dev. I work in a large-ish company that does trade and manufacture. Most people here only know Microsoft products like Word and Excel. They have no concept of SharePoint, they barely know what OneDrive is, and there seems to be no way away from Excel.
The IT department has erected some network shares where all people just dump their files into folders and SharePoint actually seems like an improvement here, though I'm still on the fence about that. My own IT department seems to hedge a grudge against that too. But clearly, raw network shares can't be the solution either.
I've been a Linux fanboy pretty much my entire career when I worked in software dev, but since I've switched, I see the advantage and simplicity of all-in Microsoft. All our contacts use Teams as well. Other merchants, vendors, suppliers everyone uses Microsoft for E-mail and Teams for chat. If I wanted to introduce something like LibreOffice, Slack, Mattermost or RocketChat then I would face insurmountable obstacles within my own company. So why bother? If it works don't touch it.
What I conclude from an organization using Teams is that they're running Microsoft stack, which affects my opinion far more negatively. Microsoft sales are powerful. If you use Teams, there's a chance that:
- You use Windows for OS
- You use Sharepoint for documentation
- You use Outlook for Mail
- You use OneDrive for storage
- You use Azure for hosting
- You use Copilot for LLM
- You use GitHub for scm
- etc
all of those are things I actively want to avoid. they're all sub-par, they're all managed by button-clicking pseudo-sysadmins, they're all red flags.
You would severely limit yourself if you're strict about your list without nuance. GitHub is pretty much bog standard in most companies unless you're working for the few using mercurial, etc.
I work in a MS stack and most of your list is untrue for my case. We use slack for messaging, Confluence, Wikimedia, and GDrive for documentation, Google Mail for email, I develop primarily dotnet/C# apps on a MacBook pro M5, have access to all major LLM providers and primarily use Claude and antigravity.
There only thing that checks of your list is Azure hosting.
On a personal note, it has been by far one of the best place I've worked at. The dotnet ecosystem is so well developed and rich, I expect to be paid a huge premium if I ever have to deal with Java again.
GitHub is not git. GitHub is not an alternative to mercurial or svn.
This is like saying Facebook is the alternative to http.
The Facebook comparison is on spot: Both GitHub and Teams have become social networks. Even better if inferior, they solve visibility and connection issues. Actually Microsoft keeps the friction for people without an account just high enough that you want to use it in a business. What we need is that those services are regulated more like Telefone networks allowing federation.
The four companies that I've worked for here in Europe all used GitLab, btw.
How many times has Gitlab deleted their production databases and had irrecoverable data loss? I remember twice.
I'm not making a recommendation.
You can also run your own.
Which is its own flavor of red flag.
100%. We're a total Microsoft shop and it's all so mediocre. We started with Azure AD and slowly replaced all our AAA solutions with Microsoft ones. The Microsoft ones are cheaper (packaged together) and better integrated but in terms of user experience they're really mediocre.
The only thing that was not really worse was email, we came from lotus notes which was a crashy piece of shit.
But our messaging, storage etc solutions all were a big step back when we went to Microsoft.
> we came from lotus notes
in a DeLorean?
Haha yeah it's ancient I know.
We used it until about 2019 :S
The reason was that during the years a lot of people had been 'creative' and built tools in its database/scripting language. Many of these tools had been abandoned but still had wormed their way into critical business processes. It took us years to decommission most of them and in some cases rebuild them with modern tech.
I really miss Lotus Sametime though. It had so many features that Teams doesn't.
- Show my online presence status to everyone except person X
- Send me a popup when person X comes online
- Disable message read receipts for person X
- Custom emoji
Well lots of stuff like that. Really handy in avoiding toxic colleagues if you're neurospicy :) Or to catch them first thing when they came online because you need something from them. It was also much more fun in sametime than Teams.
Teams also keeps a 100% persistent record of everything you say even if you delete it. In Microsoft Purview. It's definitely your enemy.
The "comes online" alert is possible if you choose to be notified when the person becomes available, but it's capped at stalking 15 people I think. Not the best but achieves that goal.
That's ok, I never stalk more than 15 people at a time anyway :) :) :)
But it was damn handy sometimes. Teams doesn't have this feature.
What was more of a lifesaver was the not showing status to some people though. There was one guy who would consider me his personal support person and this was really annoying. I know it's not normally considerd a good thing to solve a human problem by technical means. But for me it works just fine and much better than taking it up with the person themselves.
In our european company (insurance/gov space) we use Teams, Outlook, Sharepoint as side products of Office, largely to get the official editing tools for the documents our clients provide. Depending on who you are in our company, you are using either Mac or Windows, although we are slowly shifting to OpenSUSE. Azure and GitHub are completely out of the question, and OneDrive is only used in the context of Teams/Sharepoint. Sharepoint, too, is only used by half the company for whom it is relevant.
Security-wise most of our data is with our customers on european servers (Word/etc. are not linked to OneDrive), except billing.
Serious question: what's your preferred alternative to SharePoint? We have an eclectic portemonteau of software, bookstack for docs, outlook and ms-365 for office etc. We're not a software company, think more mercantile and manufacture. We have a lot of stuff in excel, price calc, processes etc. I don't see a way away from excel. Currently we have all xls files on network drives, which is hard to maintain. Even though I'm not a Microsoft fan, I find myself pushing for SharePoint, simply so we can use the integrated share features in word and excel. LibreOffice and Collarbora don't seem to be there yet, even if I could convince people to switch from excel to Calc (and of our Ancient Wisdom Sheets would even work in LibreOffice).
a shared drive is much better than sharepoint. I don't see how sharepoint can make it easier. the best alternative is using google workspace instead. it doesn't make you sign in four times a minute.
Google is completely out of the question. As I said, we cannot switch away from Excel, whether I like it or not. Google Sheets is not a viable option: Everyone in the company knows Excel.
Network shares aren't bad per se, but they encourage people to place multiple files with the same name and then a V4, V5, V6 etc suffix. People have to download or check out the Excel files if they want to work with them, delete their local copies when they are done, and make sure they always check out the most recent version. If multiple people have to edit an Excel file, they have to synchronize so they don't override each other's files. So yeah, network shares aren't bad per se, but they aren't ideal either. SharePoint has a clear advantage here.
I'm not usually someone who advocates for Microsoft, on the contrary actually, but in this case I don't see a really good alternative.
If you have a better workflow, please explain it to me.
> Everyone in the company knows Excel.
What’s the big difference between Excel and Sheets?
> What’s the big difference between Excel and Sheets?
Last time i looked, ability to handle more than a couple of thousand cells.
Tell me you've never worked outside tech without telling me you've never worked outside tech...
I mean outside of tech, Teams, Meet, WebEx are all “Zoom”.
So if you can’t tell the difference between those products how can you tell the difference between Excel and Sheet?
Not only is that certainly not a fact, as the sibling commenter said, I find it striking how you're seemingly purposely missing the point.
They KNOW excel, they know where which buttons are, and the business logic and price calc are done in excel. These people aren't mentally challenged as you seem to think, they will know if their excel suddenly looks differently, offered by Google instead of Microsoft and in a browser instead of a native windows app.
So if you have nothing to contribute except power user arrogance, I will no longer interact with you.
> I find it striking how you're seemingly purposely missing the point.
Lol. You answer rude and get a rude response and then give up.
> They KNOW excel, they know where which buttons are
That’s not knowing excel though.
You’re not making the claim that people writing complex formulas with named ranges have an equation that doesn’t work in Sheet.
Sure, not specializing in computers doesn’t make you mentally challenged but it doesn’t make you proficient in it. If the reason somebody can’t use something is cause it “looks different” how have they survived the last 2 decades of Microsoft changes?
Never let it be said I give up easily ;)
But the excel-boundedness is exactly my point. Several sheets are so large they have been split into three files, referencing each other or external sources via power query. I'm not even saying it's good like it is, but it's just the status quo. I don't see any viable way to turn away from Excel in the short term, which is why I seek solutions.
And knowing where which function or button is in Excel IS knowing Excel, and programming formulas, VB macros and power queries is knowing Excel too. It has been a cornerstone in this company for the past 20 years. These people aren't IT people, Their core skills and how they bring value to the company lie somewhere else, and that's perfectly fine too. but I cannot expect them to just change the software they're been relying on for years just because I say so.
That's not at all a fact.
> - You use GitHub for scm
- You use Azure DevOps for SCM
- You use Windows for OS
Personally I run linux but most of the company is on Windows, sure
- You use Sharepoint for documentation
No, we use Nextcloud for docs and most storage
- You use Outlook for Mail
No, Mxroute. Which actually caused quite a bit of problems with Teams original because it REALLY expects you to use exchange
- You use OneDrive for storage
For large files only, or files that are shared in chat
- You use Azure for hosting
Nope, Hetzner
- You use Copilot for LLM
Come on, not even Microsoft uses that
- You use GitHub for scm
Yep and for all the complaining here, I've literally never had any noticeable downtime or issues. I don't use it for CI though
Not necessarily. We are a Linux company, which just happens to use github business and ms teams, because it's so much cheaper for smaller companies.
You’ve missed Office suite.
I know people love Excel and Word, but I just don’t get it. What even is Word? The web thing? Teams Word? The app?
Whichever Word last touched it, formatted it. This breaks it in the other versions.
How is this is a thing? It’s so awful.
I my experience, it's often that Excel is an absolute necessity. Try telling people who work in finance or accounting that they will have to use Google Sheets or another alternative and you'll have a picket line out front of the office within a week.
I've never met anyone who was a die-hard for Word, I'm sure they exist but they can't be a large contingent of users.
Excel is a lot like Photoshop. Everyone hates the parent companies, but there just aren't good alternatives for either one.
For many, Excel is sufficient reason to have a separate Windows computer or the determining factor in using Windows; Mac Excel is not the real deal.
Every single time I talk to an auditor or security team:
Them: Are you a Mac or Windows shop?
Me: 100% Mac, except for the Finance team...
Them: sigh Yeah, same here.
I documented a recent experience joining another company's Teams instance:
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To log into the Teams website on my Mac:
* Use Passwords to log into Okta.
* Use Okta Verify + Touch ID for MFA.
* Log into Teams with Okta.
* Install Microsoft Authenticator on my phone because Okta’s SSO isn’t enough for MS.
* Log into my work account in Microsoft Authenticator. (Bonus: typing an Okta password into some random app’s webview gives me the warm fuzzies!)
* Bounce to Okta Verify + Face ID on my phone for MFA.
* Scan the QR code on my Mac with my phone.
* Enter the 2 digit code shown on my Mac to double-plus authenticate with Microsoft Authenticator.
As punishment for doing all this correctly, finally have to use Teams.
---
This is 100% accurate. Halfway through the hoopjumping, I realized it was ridiculous and started over from scratch so I could record each step of it.
I'm certain some step in there is necessary to support Outlook Express, and they can't clean up the process without annoying some bank paying for enterprise support of their Windows Server 2003 setup. These are the downsides of eternal backward compatibility.
Don't forget that you need to randomly login again for teams, again for outlook, and for whatever reason the onedrive website will not open unless you try multiple times.
I’ll touch on two areas that the article and many comments didn’t mention. We switched from Slack to Teams at a previous company.
- The loss of institutional knowledge was absolutely punishing and costly. Overnight, we lost access to an easily searchable knowledge base. A solution was available, but the search was awful and you had to know what you were looking for. While this isn’t really a fault of Teams and the vendor lock-in trap was unavoidable, the sheer monetary amount in wasted effort must have been massive. Additionally, many teams began to default to closed channels. Even future info was difficult or impossible to search.
- The loss of community was palpable. This was mid-pandemic and the formerly in-person work environment was all online. The Slack UI lends itself much more towards “casual” conversations in general chat rooms. It’s a bit difficult to put into words, but posting a funny link or a picture of your cat in Slack feels personable, while doing the same in Teams’ threaded UI feels one step away from writing an email. Even the reaction emojis were bland. It’s difficult to keep people engaged and sticking around if they don’t feel part of a team or community.
Do people actually rely on their chat groups as a knowledge base? If tomorrow I come to work and all my chats are wiped I wouldn't even budge .
I see chats purely as an ephemeral way of coordination.
There are plenty of serious businesses doing serious things, complex things, that use microsoft teams for chat. My work uses it, it kinda sucks, but honestly there's way more things to bikeshed than chat apps. You can send text messages and make video calls and do presentations in microsoft teams.
From the article: "...file sharing involves SharePoint for some reason, and search is abysmal."
Search in Teams is like a really bad joke, practically non-existent.
The usability in Teams always feels bad to me, like it was designed and developed by someone trying to be fancy without being usable.. Text content in chats is in a strange light gray color, messages are collapsed by default so you have to expand them to read anything longer than a few words, then requiring a "title" for every message.. Slack just feels more natural to me, more thought-out..
What are you talking about? Messages don’t need titles? They aren’t collapsed? Are you confusing posts with chat messages?
> Are you confusing posts with chat messages?
Op was talking about both: private chats at first and then Team group posts on the titles part..
I can also validate those grievances.
My company is using Teams. I chose it, and I do regret it but we're not using anything else from Microsoft and I've gradually reduced the surface to where we are just using it for messaging/large file storage, both of which it does fine actually.
My reasons:
- critical reason: it was half the price of anything else which was important when we were starting, less so now
- probably much less than half the price when factoring in storage allowances actually
- critical reason: it has built in translation without extra charge
- the only real alternative close to the price and with translation was Google workspace and I've had such bad experiences with Google that I'm still glad I didn't choose that
- inexperience: it was sold to me as a messaging and storage app that also came with a suite of other apps (which have ALL turned out to be useless) and I didn't know I was inheriting a heaving mutated behemoth built on the stinking undead corpses of SharePoint and AD.
So yeah, wish I'd had more info at the time. But at this point now that I've limited the surface we're using and it's all settled in, the only real problems we have are the tedious 2fa issues that crop up whenever a new person joins.
Same question I've had in the other comment. What is your preferred alternative to SharePoint? Because we do need document sharing, and I don't see a viable way away from Excel for us. Right now we're sharing Excel files on network drives, which is horrible for versioning files, so I'd rather prefer something like SharePoint, but not from Microsoft. LibreOffice and Collabora don't seem to be there yet.
Personally, I am not a big fan of Microsoft, but in this case, my company is so entrenched in Excel that I don't see any alternative.
Yeah I don't yet have a great solution to that. We're not versioning docs well. I'm trying to drive adoption of nextcloud office (which is collabora I think) but haven't succeeded so far.
Of course it is. And from a user's perspective, I often hear people saying they are 'forced' to use it because their employers want them to, otherwise they risk being fired, but I have never understood how that behavior is considered legal, since it's literally coercing somebody to accept Microsoft's abusive privacy and service policies that explicitly state that unless agreed, their products can't be used.
I have never used Zoom or Teams in my life since I never agreed with their ToS&PP, and I've never been in a situation where my career would depend on it (I'm self-employed). When somebody asks me to join these, I nicely respond with that exact reason why I can't use them and propose using Jitsi Meet instead, and I have never experienced anybody rejecting it yet.
> since it's literally coercing somebody to accept Microsoft's abusive privacy and service policies that explicitly state that unless agreed, their products can't be used.
As an employee, the company sets the conditions and tools to work there.
If communication is to happen on Microsoft Teams, and you refuse to use it, your future employment with them seems difficult. Same as if you refused to show up to meetings, or kept sound isolation headphones on at all times, including when your boss wanted to speak with you. Or you would never use a telephone.
When using enterprise tools, I expect the employer to have accepted the terms of use; most employees can't bind the employer.
I certainly prefer to avoid Microsoft communications tools, but if the work is interesting enough, I guess it's fine.
A lot of places claim things for "security" and violating them is grounds for firing because truthfully or not, they claim circumventing them is exposing data. We used to be able to choose our e-mail client as they had IMAP access. A few years ago they decided to only allow Microsoft's own protocol to enforce Outlook use and disabled IMAP access.
> since it's literally coercing somebody to accept Microsoft's abusive privacy and service policies that explicitly state that unless agreed, their products can't be used.
Sure, but the privacy and service policies are only applicable to your employer's data, it was never your data in the first place.
> I have never understood how that behavior is considered legal
You can't give employees veto power over software choices, an employer that can't choose which software platforms its employees use is not going to be viable.
I’m not quite sure, but the reasoning that some technology is frustrating users and therefore is not calculated in when optimizing cost per seat could apply to every software. In a large enough company there will be always people complaining about this and that. If you google you will also find people complaining about Slack.
I like Teams. Especially the Meeting feature. I like that I can join with multiple devices in a meeting. Sharing stuff in a meeting is also pretty cool and easy. I also like the integration into other products.
The only thing which could be better is performance - even the new WebView2 thing is not enough. But this is sadly common for most tools like this.
I preferred Skype (which Microsoft bought years ago but only killed last year) -- it also, at least in its final iteration, did the share screen thing well and just seemed snappier than Teams.
The last time I was part of a Teams environment (late 2025 or early 2026), search literally did not work.
I could see the keywords right there in the chat, enter them into the search bar, and get back 'no results found'.
(This was across at least a period of months too, not just an intermittent bug)
Microsoft has a blind spot for search in general. Search in Outlook, Explorer and using Windows Start Menu\Task Bar are all useless. It’s been like that for years
1000000% agree. I'm currently interviewing for new jobs and when I hear that they use Microsoft Teams it's always a red flag. Not a deal breaker, but a red flag nonetheless. It is truly awful.
Written by someone who's never seen a major enterprise Slack bill
I signed our Slack Enterprise contract this week. Yes, it is insanely expensive. But if time is money, the alternatives would've been far costlier. (Do not interpret this as me having any special love for Slack. It's just the lesser evil in this context.)
While I agree with the general thrust of this. After years of using Slack, which is I wont say much better, I hate Slack. I hate teams more, but I hate Slack. And the other crap I hope I never see in use ever.
In fact I lost real any desire to "work in chat", its never been a good experience its just a place to hide from email. Waste time in chat, make jokes in Chat, bitch to my manager in chat ok. Work in chat? F-that.
The only way you can get work done in a place that uses (abuses) Slack is to turn off notifications and forget it. Its a distraction app and nothing more.
People who have wired in their CI and AWS Alarms and metrics, I feel sorry for you. You took the bait.
So yes teams is a red flag. Slack is a flag of a different color. When you take a companies stack in as a whole, it will (no matter where you are) remind you of how TRULY SHITTY software products are. And that should humble you so you dont go add to the pile.
My pet theory is that companies deliberately stick with terrible chat apps in order to discourage employees from chatting and keep them "working" instead. In my experience, it's not a good tradeoff though.
Is Teams actually worse than Slack? Slack can't even reliably deliver messages.
I've had instances on all tiers of Slack plans on all clients where messages just disappear for days at a time and then come back to gaslight you.
ed: I tried to see if this is fixed and it doesn't look like it. Your IT team might have to write "help" articles like this one. Note that I've had this experience on other platforms.
https://teamdynamix.umich.edu/TDClient/30/Portal/KB/Article/...
It's for squishy people
Uni professor here in Paraguay. My university (which is barely starting right now) got Teams as a package deal that included Outlook email and calendaring, One Drive, and Office 365. There might be other stuff, but these are the ones most visible to me in my role as a teacher. We use Teams not as part of a traditional in-office groupware but as a means to deliver online classes.
The good part is that it's a very good tool for that. Meeting quality is usually good to excellent. Screen sharing works, as well as whiteboards. In case there is disruption or vandalism there are readily available controls to quickly secure the meeting room. Audio quality is good, video too.
Moreover, I use Linux, and I intend to implement the whole MS groupware client-side in my desktop applications, such as Kontact/KMail. Teams is covered by a good webapp wrapper done by Ismael Martínez that behaves like a normal desktop app, with system tray capability included (https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux).
But the really bad part is that this is... a Microsoft product requiring authentication mediated by Microsoft. And (speaking from my particular situation, that is, from Asunción, Paraguay) it's a stinking mess. There are ISPs that fail to authenticate due to an unexplained error (they don't even offer those awful hexadecimal error codes). Some ISP can authenticate using their mobile networks, but residential ones fail. And even when authentication supposedly works, switching from consumer (private) Outlook to corporate Outlook is fraught with various failure points.
Teams works well... once you managed to login. I will never forget that I had to give a substitute class for someone and getting access to that specific classroom took me over 90 minutes between retries, delays, silent fails, etc. The stuff of nightmares.
Another really bad part of Teams is that usability and UX are also nightmarish. You open the app and it is not apparent at all how to create an instant meeting. There is the functionality, but it's not easily discoverable at all. How do you manage the access of people to chat, for example? Some people can use the chat, while others can't access to it. And how to fix that, is by no means apparent. So Teams, while being the sensible solution here and even from a Linux user standpoint is reasonably nice, can be quite painful to use.
Now, about what TFA said, about Teams or Slack costing a tiny fraction of what an engineer earns... let me tell you that in our neck of the woods salaries are really low. If you can manage USD 1K/month, you are quite fortunate. So any "fraction of the cost" taken by either Teams or Slack, is not that tiny. Moreover, at least in educational contexts, Slack is not that well-known (to be honest, it's practically unknown here), so Slack does not have the mindshare that Teams has here.
So, about Teams: the product is there and is reasonably good in its foundations. If Microsoft only could set its mind to smooth the rough edges it could have been a real winner.
Why can’t they rewrite Teams as native apps using AI? How in the world of AI can Teams still be such a total shit memory/CPU hog product?
They are moving in the other direction, having recently decommissioned native Outlook for a webview-based implementation.
Why could they? What are your examples of such app rewrites that had good results? The AI companies themselves don't do that, so what world are you referencing?
I love when people shit on teams and provide no basis for why it’s so much worse than all the other chat offerings other than it being teams.
It switches to a randomly chosen microphone when I connect. Why can’t it default to the microphone on the device I’m using?
Try get transcription to work. What the hell is all that about?
And these are things that happen once you have got the call going. Half of all calls start with a debrief on WTF happened this time we tried to talk.
And then there is the document structure. Try adding a long file name, or dealing with the random upload fails.
I don't have much experience with others, but I can throw out my complaints about Teams:
* Too much resource usage.
* Chat UX is not good. The team/channel concept makes sense, but threaded (and nonthreaded) chats really just have a bad UI, so everyone at my company just uses multi-person chats, which are terrible for managing access, history, etc.
* For the past while I get some extra prompt about "improving my security" every time I punch in my 2FA info that I have to decline on a daily basis.
I don't know whether Teams is worse than Slack. I do know that I loathe Slack, though. Of the software I use almost every day, it is the worst by miles.
Especially if other companies you have to interact with also use Teams, and Teams has the clear lower barrier to entry, let alone document sharing that's integrated into Word and Excel via SharePoint. Sure, it may not be sexy, but it heckin does work.
I think it's gotten a lot better over recent years but in just the past week we had:
A meeting where 2 people somehow weren't able to join. Even after "restarting". One dialed in by phone, the other gave up.
It chose I guess a dock's microphone over a headset mic. Honestly having some kind of tiny local speech recognition model that would say "get you're really quiet/far away/muffled" would be a godsend. That's user error but still. They have the technology.
There's also the problem that it doesn't remember layout preferences so every meeting I have to focus the content, which still doesn't show it full screen.
And unlike discord there's no option for smooth video so good luck.
Also they removed the Linux native app.
- A colleague's whole system has been freezing for a full minute every time he joins a meeting. This has been going on for over a year, including after multiple full system resets
- On macOS, I regularly (~once a week) end up in different broken sync states, where message histories for all chats are missing messages from the last few month. The only way to reliably fix this is to remove the whole cache, causing it to resync after a app restart. Due to this, I run a whole Windows VPS, just to be able to "reliably" receive Teams messages from customers.
- In multi-tenant usage, it's incredibly slow to switch between different tenants. If you are semi-actively chatting with users from 2-3 tenants its a big PITA
- If you are an external user to a organization, the default settings are that your Teams session will last ~24h, after which you have to re-authenticate. Teams doesn't give you any good indication that you have been logged out, unless you actively check, in which case you might be shown a warning banner after ~a minute delay (if you are lucky).
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I'm usually one the more defensive side of cargo cult hate against software (e.g. I think a lot of people dislike JIRA to an unjustified degree, and mostly due to badly hosted or configured instances), but Teams is one of the few where it's absolutely deserved. I think it's a prime example of how Microsoft as an organization has forgotten how to build good desktop software.
Only upside is that it's a good bonding ritual with customers, as the Teams suffering is a universal feeling.
my coworkers are always complaining about how much trouble they have with it, not being able to copy and paste into chats, freezes, crashes... never happens to me.
Snap opinion made by a software dev who thinks the entire world revolves around software development and this dev's workflow.
There's any number of reasons an org would choose teams over slack, or any Microsoft product over an alternative, even your example of the cost shows a clear lack of knowledge of information outside your narrow scope.
How do you know your org is paying the price you found on a website?
You realize there are other vendors people pay infrastructure contracts through who bundle Microsoft products in their contract?
Stay in your lane.
Then give devs slack or an equivalent alternative? The point the author making is that forcing devs into Teams, because the org uses it, is a red flag. And they’re right.
It’s an indicator that developer experience pales in comparison to bean-counting, and that is an indicator that the business focuses on ROI in the wrong areas.
I’m sure there are finance teams that love it. I work in marketing and I sure as hell don’t, after it using it in two different full-time roles.
It’s as much as a red flag for me as the author.
Yours seems to be the only comment in this threat with some real-world experience outside of software dev. I work in a large-ish company that does trade and manufacture. Most people here only know Microsoft products like Word and Excel. They have no concept of SharePoint, they barely know what OneDrive is, and there seems to be no way away from Excel.
The IT department has erected some network shares where all people just dump their files into folders and SharePoint actually seems like an improvement here, though I'm still on the fence about that. My own IT department seems to hedge a grudge against that too. But clearly, raw network shares can't be the solution either.
I've been a Linux fanboy pretty much my entire career when I worked in software dev, but since I've switched, I see the advantage and simplicity of all-in Microsoft. All our contacts use Teams as well. Other merchants, vendors, suppliers everyone uses Microsoft for E-mail and Teams for chat. If I wanted to introduce something like LibreOffice, Slack, Mattermost or RocketChat then I would face insurmountable obstacles within my own company. So why bother? If it works don't touch it.