For the developers, Teams works... as good as Teams can. So not great, but it works most of the time (for me, anyway). For everyone else though, I hear nothing but issues. Constantly having to restart to make Teams work. And again, this is on Surface devices, so Microsoft is making the app, the OS, and the hardware!
Even aside from the performance, I just think Teams is laid out horribly and it stifles communication. The redundancy between chats, group chats, and Teams channels (which are like a message board?) is just bizarre and constantly causes confusion. It's so much worse than Slack (which we used to use, and I used at a previous job) where all communication channels are listed along the left side, and you didn't have to dig through menus and trees of categorization to get to certain places to talk to your coworkers. And since Teams channels are sectioned off behind another screen from your chats (where you'll probably be most of the time), the only way to be aware of when someone posts in one of the channels is to turn on notifications for it. Which is very annoying!
edit: oh also a recent update made it so when you paste a code snippet into the plaintext editor thing (whatever it's called, you activate it by typing 3 backticks), it strips all the whitespace from the left, meaning you lose all the code indentation. Just great
The chat experience is by far the worst I've ever had to deal with:
- My sidebar is riddled with old meetings chats nobody cares about anymore. Makes it hard to find actual important direct conversations with people.
- The text editor is absolute jank, I've yet to figure out how to get out of a quote after starting one, lists constantly glitch out, it keeps "bold/italic" state like office but with no easy way to remove it.
- Because it connects to sharepoint you get to enjoy all the lovely permission bullshit when trying to share a simple freaking file. Half the time I post a picture it glitches out for me and I can no longer see it. Or I can see it but not if I make it fullscreen.
Honestly the abysmal performance is just the cherry on top...
1) Echo cancellation. This is a solved problem and pretty much every other conferencing app does it right. Microsoft probably rolled their own which is why it does not work right.
2) I have Teams installed on my desktop, Android phone, and iPad. (Unfortunately, my company wants us to use it.) Regardless of the notification settings in the apps, if I was on the desktop but switched my KVM away, my phone and iPad will not notify me of incoming Teams calls, messages, etc.
3) Editing a document using the collaborative environment is painfully broken. Sometimes it will take many seconds to register a keystroke (on a gigabit-class CONUS connection). Sometimes edits will disappear completely, or sometimes just temporarily. Change tracking doesn't work right. Google Docs had collaborative editing perfected over 10 years ago.
4) Moving files in/out of Teams "Folders" can be painfully slow.
5) Interoperability between the desktop Teams app and govcloud/non-govcloud users is hosed, but it seems to work fine on phones and tablets. Desktop users must access meetings via browser if their "home" Teams account govcloud flavor does not match that of the meeting originator, but no such restrictions exist on phones & tablets. WTF?
6) The Linux desktop version of Teams does not operate with govcloud at all.
7) Depending on the platform, users cannot share their desktop when using the browser-based version. Chrome actually supports this better than Edge.
My teams client is CONSTANTLY confused about this "work account home account" garbage. Holy crap Batman it's a disaster.
Clicking on teams links causes my teams client to freeze up with a blank screen sometimes for minutes. So I've been late to many meetings because the Teams client just doesn't connect.
I'm yet to hear a SINGLE instance of someone using teams other than "we already bought it" or "we have some strategic partnership with MS, so we have to use it" – some BS that's shoved down people's throats.
The multi-account stuff is something slack and discord got right from day one. And years into it, MS still hasn't figured this out. It's appalling how bad Teams is, years later.
Anytime I see a teams link in a calendar event, I groan loudly.
Everyone knows that it runs like poop, but there are other priorities, and no performance regression tests.
The only thing that works well is calls, voice and video. I am sure they have plans to destroy that too :-)
But if I’m to go back to Teams, I get a BLOCKING window that lets me know that I’ve been logged out and NEED to log back in.
You can’t interact with the call at all, even though you’re still connected and can hear people talking. There’s no way to unmute and say “i need to drop so that Teams can relog me in”, EVEN THOUGH I’m on the call already…
From the other people’s perspective I just hang up the call without saying anything.
Worst call software I’ve used.
One colleague who’s on a modern desktop with an i7 and 32GB of ram waits the upwards of 20 seconds to load a conversation.
In the past couple of years Teams has sores in popularity and perhaps the dev work has been focused on scaling. It’s clear to me MS need to allocate some developer for getting the fundamentals right.
Originally we only had a few folks using Teams, and the client was pretty snappy and just seemed to work. Then over time more features were added, and things started breaking.
For example:
On my desktop client, images will not load when clicked unless you back out of a conversation then come back in and click the image. This is not something I experience on the web client. Also on the desktop client, I cannot for the life of me do formatting any more. Bullet or numbered lists are out!
The web client seems to work better for me, but will start to chug near the end of the day, which requires a quick reload of the app.
But at least the performance should get better some day. Microsoft has now made the "personal" edition of Teams that is shipping with Windows 11 into one that instead of shipping a browser, uses Edge as a renderer (WebView2). Since that's probably already cached in RAM anyway, it launches near instantly and consumes much less RAM than the clunky edition that doesn't share resources with anything else.
However, MS Teams for Business still does not exist in such an edition although I assume they are working on it.
No one is paying for Teams intentionally, so MS will not see any return on investment in improvements (except for the eventual retention problems that come up when people finally decide they’ve had enough.)
In short, Teams is crap. My daughter uses Google Meet at school and its so fast/fun/easy on an old 8GB laptop.
1) Chats in three different locations. It’s so confusing and causes so much mental overload. Just simplify and out in one place.
2) Speed. It’s begrudgingly slow on my very beefy Lenovo X1 with 32 GB ram and i7 cpu.
3) Screen sharing is abysmal and hogs resources.
4) Intermittent crashes when enabling web cam, requiring me to reboot the entire machine. This happens especially when using the MS Whiteboard inside of a Teams call. Whiteboard is quite nice, but it causes Teams to crash often.
What I like: Files in one place, collaborative editing (#1 killer feature). Everything else is piss poor.
The reason for this is related to the way development of browser-based applications (be it Electron apps or just web apps) is scaled.
In order to make 20+ people work on such a project effectively you need loose coupling, so the codebase is divided into those small, independent modules - each making its own API calls.
And herein lies the crux of the issue. Chrome/Chromium/Electron etc. currently have a hard limit of 6 HTTP requests being processed at any given moment - the rest is queued(or "stalled").
Notice how weirdly slow is gmail to load? It's making a total of 200+ requests. No matter the network bandwidth that's going to take a while.
Same goes for banking apps, or any kind of back office application.
As usual, in order to make development faster they're making the app slower.
I've experienced a myraid of issues that others here have mentioned, not limited to meetings never ending, resources spiraling out of control, poor organization of conversations (no segmentation between 1:1 or group conversations vs. conversations from a meeting).
I wouldn't hold my breath that things will get better. People have complained about Lync/Skypes for a DECADE with little to no improvement...
At one engineering organization, the CEO said we are switching to Teams due to better Office integration.
The whole engineering org, like 30+ people, just ignored it. I was a manager during this time and was also asked to switch my team to Teams. I think I just said everyone had it installed and checked that OKR...
So for like six months Eng was on Slack and the rest of the org stayed on Teams, and then the CEO left and I am not sure if anyone is still using Teams there...
The SSO is so bad as well - the popup telling you to login doesn't have a window title either, or lock to the teams window, so it comes across as a completely anonymous prompt. Phishing attack anyone?
Closing the login prompt only opens it again. I hope youre not offline and on mobile - prompt will open, close, open, close, tens of times per second.
And lets not forget the dark pattern of soft forcing me to login on Windows with a Microsoft account after I successfully logged in. Need to click that text link - the CTA and primary button logs your machine in!
Start writing a message and then choose a message to reply to. Voíla, reply quote comes after the message.
Wysiwyg constantly gets formatting wrong, sometimes without possibility to restore it by deleting text. Its like it gets stuck in a table or wonky css or something.
Deletes newlines of pasted text.
Click a chat that you havent opened in a while and quickly start typing while its loading. Your text will come out garbled as the input gets selected and the text position marker reset to 0 after finished loading the history.
Wanna send an image from slack, to teams? Well you will need to either take a a screenshot or download it - Teams doesnt understand the clipboard if you right click and copy the file.
Neither does copying an image from Teams paste into either Slack or Paint. (99% sure on that last one)
Dont try calling someone when youre already being called on mobile. The app wont let you call, but it fails to tell you that someone is in fact calling you.
If you try sending a voice message when on a call, even when muted, the app bugs out.
I guess theres more to report if only someone would seem to care about the application.
The SSO is awful as hell. I failed to restore password, half of other non-staff members did not got through it either, and came as guests.
When you install Teams, it requires you to register on MS website, -- which many of us also did -- and then you discover it won't work with uni's SSO.
Most people use MS Teams only for the presentations, and everyone constantly gets lost in groups, calls, chats, etc. Teams seems to have uploadeable/browseable slides feature, where viewers can browse PPTs wherever they want. But only one person of 20 students found out how to use it. Others just shared their screens.
So, the whole point of this switch was SSO (which many were unable to use) to somehow protect from academic fraud (write a work for a student and defend it for them).
It’s because leadership in software is rare and vanishing.
That’s the real problem but it’s too broad. More specifically, in the absence of accountability developers will do whatever the fuck they want. If you want better performing software you have to enforce performance metrics as a delivery target.
Most shops are just happy that any product ships at all, which is a shockingly low bar of acceptance. Why? Because in the absence of accountability developers will bitch and cry about how hard life is when any performance target is set of any kind. Accountability requires enforcement and liability.
Normally, in software, leadership is intentionally absent because the goal is to maximize ROI by deliberately not training staff and maximize the frequency of hiring/firing with the lowest possible cost friction. In that essence software developers are overpriced commodities in a process of manufacturing. Unfortunately, the result is a shitty product that nobody cares about.
I have many colleagues who for some infuriating reason send small sentences one after another rapid fire. I get a vibration on my watch for Every. Single. Message. It’s incredibly stressful and makes me think something is on fire, especially if I accidentally turn off personal focus after hours and suddenly get a deluge of messages. I can’t turn off notifications entirely because they aren’t always reliable on the desktop client.
Adding a debounce to notifications was a very popular suggestion on Microsoft user voice but I can’t find it on the site that replaced user voice.
It's probably bc their whole architecture is written C# just to spite.
Entire Windows OS loads in literally less than 5 seconds.
Teams? Takes more than a min, and bave to restart every other hiur so that I don't miss notification. I hear ringtone, I hear beep and see there is a notification but somehow notification isn't freaking visible. Last week I realised that their notification is there you just need to alt tab to see the freaking thing.
Can't believe this is the same company that has built Office suite.
Now i get why in a company environment one wouldn't use free services from matrix/discord or telegram, but at the same time there are self-hosted options or cloud ones that are relatively cheap and still way better than MS/Zoom.A company choosing a service because of promotional plans from big corporations is not a good deal, it's a red flag.
it's a disaster. it's fine for voice/video calls, but it's slow and not fun to use in the app on my dev machine (i7/32GB RAM)
I've used it daily for years and it's never been a good experience - desktop, mobile, web (FF, Chrome, Brave)... they are all trash. Although as others have pointed out, it has gotten noticeably worse over the last year.
Now it's just a buggy dungheap of a product.
Still runs like shit. Quite a feat
I now use the web app exclusively, both because it works better (at all) and because it doesn't act like malware.
So it's not all negative.
They knew the new hires need a couple of years to mature, and Teams are bundled with Office anyway, so they won't worry if someone messes with a release.
Windows design issues?
Coding standards incentivize slow code?
Something I'm missing completely?
Performance feels perfectly acceptable. It’s by no means snappy but it’s not something I wish the Teams devs should focus on instead of other features and bug fixes.
I have never had it take more than a couple of seconds to start, seen no crashes, find audio and video working 100% (at least as good as zoom, for example).
You probably want to get a log of what takes time at startup (if that’s possible). That’s not normal.
Older Intel Macs (where Zoom, Chime and Google Meet runs fine): can't even share a screen. Turning off GPU accelerations may or may not help.
If you type:
- li
it converts to
° li
And you are stuck at a place where it is impossible to make a new line without sending the message %)
I now started making lists with ". " instead of "- "
Hardware will never solve for poorly written software by people who don't know what they are doing. This isn't a technology failure. It's a leadership failure.
We have a decades-long history of IM platforms, and I've never seen one where messages were randomly deleted from DM history or tell me "we lost your picture; please attach it again" when editing a message (extra fun when it was a temporary snippet from the clipboard[0]).
0: Extra extra fun considering Windows doesn't have clipboard history like Linux DEs have for years.
I'm using the Teams Electron app on a Ryzen 5 with 16G RAM and nvme disk, I can't complain about load times at least.
I just wish it had better bluetooth audio support and wayland screen sharing on Linux. Some day maybe.
The most positive thing about Teams is that we finally have an app that EVERYONE uses. From my co-workers, to vendors, to clients. Monopoly is great when it allows me to connect with people easily.
On another note I think Teams is actually an Electron app? I do think it runs better on my Intel MBP than my new Surface Laptop. But it’s still pretty buggy for such a high profile app.
since i'm required to use it on my day-to-day, and use zoom for personal stuff, which is also super broken on linux, i'm back to Win11 now with 100% of dev work in WSL. I guess their strategy is working.
The UI is intuitive. The separation between Chats, group chats and teams is neat enough, and honestly not that big of an issue. It is more than feature complete and more or less does everything. And for the things it does not do, it has 3rd party extensions.
BUT MAN IS A SLOW AND BROKEN.
I actively dislike using it purely because of how slow it is. My PC grinds to a halt and I literally never user the criminal in app-browser. My video calls also crash randomly and everything has a latency of a lifetime.
I also have no idea why MSFT decided to brand the personal-chat-app as teams as well. It is confusing for no good reason.
There is a lot of potential here. But, I genuinely feel like they should spend some time making performance and stability improvements before adding more stuff to it.