This is gonna sound like a troll post but i assure you it is not.
I don’t have a coding background but I’ve used Teams in a lot of workplaces and really only encountered like 2 issues entirely.
Either I got seriously lucky or it was before enshittification.
Why do you yourself dislike it? Is it UI? Performance?
I should also say I use Teams for basic purposes like messaging and uploading files, I literally don’t touch anything else and performance hadn’t been an issue. (Likely because I’ve been given thicc-ass workstations in the past)
Inability to multitask. Find the file or chat link you want and need to go back to the meeting you were up? Spend 5 minutes digging back into where you were.
Six levels deep in a teams group file storage and open a file to view? Clicking the big obvious “close” button on the top right of the opened document now takes you back to the top level. Enjoy digging back in again!
Oh, you really just want to close that document and remain in the folder you were just in? Well that’s easy. Just ignore that big tempting close button and click the tiny “<” button on the left, no problem. You’ll probably remember that after reflexively clicking that close button at least once, so enjoy all that!
Bad UI/UX.
When I screenshare code with my colleages, the 1 fps can be irritating. You miss subtle editing, scrolling, etc in those 1 s.
I can ignore most other things. We only use it for online meetings and screen sharing.
Which makes the new apparent calendar and appointment integration somewhat irritating. Microsoft loves to push their shit.
1fps?
It defaults to 30fps, so if you’re getting 1fps there’s a different problem going on like a lack of internet bandwidth or a slow computer. This is not a fault of teams.
I deliver day-long training sessions via screenshare all the time and have no issues with people not being able to see my screen and my cursor moving around just fine.
You’re right, it can’t be 1 fps. Maybe 10? I’ll have to check next time.
What annoys me is that they seem to just ignore any requests to fix things that are broken. For instance, I don’t want to see everyone’s incoming video by default. I have to turn it off for. Every. Single. Meeting.
And I’m hardly the only one. Here is an example of someone asking for this, back in 2020:
I suspect that Microsoft views Teams users as basically hostages since it’s often something forced onto a big user base at many companies. If you hate it? Too bad: if you want to stay employed, you’ll just use it.
Microsoft is awful at that… and that’s why my windows machines are all on 10 - for some reason (to general objections) Windows 11 doesn’t let you dock the Taskbar to the side of the screen. I usually use two monitor setup for working and I demand the right to lock the Taskbar on the border between my two screens.
Also, they’re bundling AI slop into everyone and nobody likes any of it.
IMHO it just tries to do everything and fails at that. It’s not horrible, but not great either.
Chat and calls should be the focus, but even that is buggy. In the “teams” feature I personally have zero overview and I miss a lot of stuff. But that might be user error
Lets see, half my team randomly doesent recieve notifications/get notification audio at times. Sometimes youll get a notification that theres a new message in a channel but it doesent show up until you restart teams. Today specifically my mute button was desynced with the application mute and inverted. Sometimes audio devices wont work at all first time you join a meeting until you replug the audio devices (not an os wide issue) the status icon has a mind of its own and will say people are away or completely not available even when they are actively using the computer theres also no way AS ADMINISTRATOR to change how the icon behaves. Only Microsoft is allowed to dictate that. Not nearly enough controls as admin to define visibility in things like timeoff requests, shifts, etc. Instead of having a simple notes tab you have to use some form of OneNote shoved into the software which slows it down, overcomplicates it and sometimes wont even sync changes. Theres more thats just off the top of my head
It’s unnecessary. We already had Skype and Microsoft could have built upon that. Instead they created a whole new app and introduced new issues.
My biggest issue now is that they keep releasing new feature updates but haven’t addressed a bug that has been going on since “New Teams” released where the fucking app closes itself and doesn’t reopen. Absolute garbage fucking piece of shit app. I’m sick of it and them not doing anything about it.
I’m also sick of the way they released this “New Teams” as a brand new app and didn’t properly shut down the old Teams. Also, if you work with installing Teams on the backend, especially for Azure Virtual Desktops, you will learn why people hate it. There were like 9 different installers for the same fucking app and it would no longer function after 3 months because it wanted a new update and Microsoft didn’t provide any easy ways to update it so we either had to make scripts that didn’t work or manually go and uninstall/install the new update, at least in our environment.
In short, fuck Teams.
It demands too much screen space. you can’t rum less than full screen without losing important things. Even full screen I often can’ see the presentation clearly because it shrunk the presentation in favor of avitars / videos of other people.
now that I’m old I cannot see tiny text like I used to. I thus get really mad at useless spate while I’m strurgling to read the presentation. you will understand when you turn 45 too.
Can I tack on that whoever decided that minimizing teams should make it into a tiny fucking window with a confusingly labeled button to make it big again should fucking die? I loathe apps that minimize to tray or minimize to some bullshit always on top pop-up (unless there’s a clear setting to control that behavior - then whatever, we have different preferences but it’s fine).
This is actually a problem with a lack of presenter training, not technology.
When presenting slides, text should be formatted for mild vision impairment. When screen sharing, you should either lower the resolution of your screen, or share only a single app and make it not take up your full monitor, or boost your text size.
In your case, even if Teams allowed it go properly full screen it may be enough for your needs, but there are people who it would not be. There are people who operate “zoomed in” all the time on a PC due to their vision impairments. Catering to these people makes content accessible to everyone.
The other big part of this is colour/contrast choices, since those are also common vision impairments.
There is a tradeoff. When someone is sharing a screen I want to see more of their screen. A powerpoint should 10 lines mx of large font. A screen share often needs me to see what they do and zoom in loses useful lines - to teams things I don’t even care about.
You don’t care about them, but they’re very useful to other people.
The thing you need to remember is that not every single feature or UI design choice is about your specific use case.
I can still hate choices that are hostile to my ability to use teams. I still miss lynx which did much better for my needsi
I hate that it doesn’t have some key features, like the ability to easily annotate on the screen as a viewer. The presenter (host?) must allow it first, which for me often results in frustration as I try to guide them to the top tool bar to find it.
They also don’t have custom emojis like my beloved Slack. And dear god Teams sends you a desktop notification every time someone reacts with an emoji, I disabled that quick.
I also hated how they did groups/channels, also called Teams, a name I hate (why have a feature with the same name as your product?). It was like a shitty forum board, where someone would post a topic and everyone commented underneath it, made it impossible to scroll through. They changed it recently though for a much more user friendly UI.
My favorite Teams feature is that I can mute other participants on a meeting. I can feel the Thrill course through me every time.
Current pet peeve: I’m in a meeting, and I click to switch to another app to check something, then I click the Teams icon to switch back to Teams. Clearly, in this case, I want to get back to the meeting.
Instead, it shows me the calendar view. WTF, Microsoft?
Isn’t the meeting just a different window? Sounds like you have an issue with your windows manager instead.
Yes, it’s a different window.
The issue is that it’s not the first window that Teams selects when I click on it.
Blame it on the macbook if you like, but IMO Teams is at fault.
If that’s program defined behaviour then yes that’s definitely a Teams problem. Stuff like this is why I hate grouped icons though, I just don’t have the issue because I have seperate task bar slots for both windows.
I don’t have this issue in any other apps, so yes, def a Teams thing.
What OS are you using? AFAIK there’s no way to pin the separate Teams windows to the Dock in osx.
Teams for chat and video is generally OK but when managers start trying to do scheduling, task lists, and kanbans in it it becomes annoying in my experience. A software should have a definitive scope and not try to be an everything tool. If you want that interconnectivity then it’s better to implement a standard which works with another tool that is designed for that purpose instead of tacking on a bunch of shit.
Honestly it’s never been too bad for me.
except that time it randomly turned on my microphone during a meeting, when I was casually chatting to my brother about the beneficial value of replacing antidepressants with a microdose of shrooms 😬
or when it wants to open docs in Teams instead of opening it in the actual program. It always opens so slow, just so I can close it.
or when it tried to force its update on me, and took me from black background to white, and suddenly the background matched my rage; white hot and seething
My workplace used g suite then got acquired and spent six painful as fuck months transitioning to SharePoint and teams.
Half the shit in teams doesn’t work and I’m still bitter about wasting time transitioning. My favorite three current issues.
From the SharePoint homepage there’s a nice little search bar, you can type in your query and get literal garbage back. If you click “search more” to get it to stop being a modal window then the search results are accurate - Teams does this shit all the time… stuff that should be the same everywhere is just randomly implemented differently on different pages.
I currently have a little error bar in Teams - it says the web view version of edge is incorrect for this version of teams. If I click it (and there’s little motivation for me to do so since everything seems to be working) then it opens a pane to a web page, redirects half a dozen times, then lands on a page that says “You already have this version installed”. The next time I open teams the error is back.
If someone links to a SharePoint document in a teams chat I’ll often get a “You need to be signed in” link unfurling and hovering over the link yields the same message. If I click on the link it’ll realize I’m signed in and stop showing that error for a while. Please bear in mind that my teams account and SharePoint account are theoretically the same account. I have the same username and password to enter into both services and can’t update information for them independently… if on Microsofts backend if they’re technically different accounts then I, as the user, should never fucking know that. Fix your shit.
Bonus one for privacy. If you’re in a meeting and muted Teams still demands mic access. If you haven’t unplugged your mic or triggered a hardwareish switch then Microsoft is still listening to you… services usually keep listening so that’s not super different. But Microsoft actually exposes that it’s still listening! If you or someone else has auto-captioning turned on then the autocaptions may capture and transcribe your speech when you’re muted.
I was very amused to read about my coworker watching an oblivion lore video when we broke for lunch in a day long meeting last week.
Teams just fucking sucks at everything, there’s nothing they do that most of their competitors all do at least as good.
For the mic mute issue, I guess it’s so they can show a little popup saying you are muted when they detect a signal coming in
That’s likely correct… or they just want more training data.
For the web view one, I was told by IT that it was my fault I’d updated Teams, they had to go into windows add remove programs and update edge web view manually… but I have no recollection of this …and even theoretically if I did, how does an entirely ms stack get into this state except through Teams being a shitty citizen
How dare you update a self updating web wrapper!
The amount of employer tracking that’s possible there makes me always feel that I’m being watched and metric’ed on my ‘productivity’
Compared to skype, irc, slack, xmpp, and any other chat/phone software I’ve used its unreliable spyware.
Spyware in that it’s used to force idle status used by middle managers to make assumptions about when and how you work.
Unreliable in that it stops showing system tray message status when it updates without alert, using vdi/Bluetooth headsets are a crap shoot if audio will work or not, and destroys history by allowing corpo policy to remove messages after X days.
Teams is an abomination of Skype for business, lynx, and SharePoint. If you have ever used any of those then you know how bad that is.
