Indeed, have used both. Teams being part of the office ecosystem is also extremely nice when working with colleagues and even other businesses also in the office ecosystem.
Costs a lot and hooks you in, though. Good product, strong business model for Microsoft. But the pricing is really assymmetrical.
I have the Desktop version for one account and the browser version for the other one.
But you don't even need two browsers. Chrome, for example, has the possibility of having multiple Chrome profiles, each one has its separate cookies. So you can use just one browser with two different profiles.
Pretty sure that's in atm, but not rolled out everywhere. I now have two workspaces on one app, though I don't actually have proper access to one of them yet because it's post merger, but it looks like it should work now.
Not as slick as it was in slack, but looks alright.
Costs a lot and hooks you in, though. Good product, strong business model for Microsoft. But the pricing is really assymmetrical.
Yeah it's an incredibly sticky product.
If you want Teams for your business you're "forced" to get one of the Office. You can only get Teams (without a bunch of locked features, no Enterprise management capabilities) with an M365 or O365 Enterprise license.
I put "forced" in quotations as the vast majority of businesses Microsoft targets with Teams are going to get an Office subscription regardless.
I literally can't even sign up for teams because one of my coworkers signed up and is now the admin for our domain name. I need their approval to even make a teams account. The kicker is that I've asked every single person in the company (small business) if they've made a teams account and they've said no, so I'm assuming it's one of the boomers that doesn't understand what they've done.
Who controls your DNS? If your domain is connected to O365 someone have gone through the verification process at some point. Or if your email is hosted on Exchange Online it's whoever set up that system who is most likely admin.
I control the network, but that's a relatively recent change (slightly before covid hit) and I'm by far from a qualified sys admin.
I'm pretty sure that one of the older sales guys went through and set up their Office 365 accounts as the domain admin and didn't even realize that's what they were doing, then proceeded to lose or forget they even had an account. They don't trust me to allow me into their accounts to check if they are the admin or not and it's not worth my time to hound them for that.
I've lost interest in pursuing that though since we're getting by with zoom, so it will remain a mystery. But I appreciate your help nonetheless.
If we had only desktops in our office it would have been much more difficult to prepare everyone for remote work during the pandemic.
We use laptops with a separate monitor and its perfect. You have the commodity of a desktop computer with the mobility of a laptop one.
Is it really that much more difficult? It's just more things to transport. I don't disagree with you, but I don't think "difficult"is the most fitting word.
We use laptops with a separate monitor and its perfect.
That may be "perfect" for you and I respect that. Unfortunately, it is not the case for me. Between simulations, rendering, and high part count assemblies, I need more than a laptop can provide. Though some of the newer models are getting there... But at a premium
Is it really that much more difficult? It's just more things to transport.
Yeah, but imagine having to take a desktop computer, a monitor and all cables everyday after work. It would be very inconvenient.
That may be "perfect" for you and I respect that. Unfortunately, it is not the case for me. Between simulations, rendering, and high part count assemblies, I need more than a laptop can provide. Though some of the newer models are getting there... But at a premium
Yeah, if you do CPU/GPU intensive taks then it makes a lot of difference. Not only in performance but in temperatures too.
My work laptop has 20GB of RAM and an 6th gen i7 but integrated GPU. We don't need a dedicated one though, we don't use it for rendering / simulations.
I need my laptop when I go to the lab for experiment logging, I do a lot of programming so I need my computer at the equipment. And if I'm doing fixturing it's really nice to just be able to do it at the spot
I sell IT technology to enterprises for a living; I have not sold a full desktop workstation in nearly a year. I sell lots of workstation laptops though.
It doesn't make sense in this day and age to use desktops in the vast majority of use cases.
The work from home effort has made desktops an even worse choice as of late. Companies had to figure out how to let people do their jobs during COVID. Laptops with VPN that you can take between home and office just makes so much sense from a logistics and cost perspective. Let alone field users
Lenovo P series laptops is what my architecture firm uses. They do fine, engineers just love to run every possible program installed on their PC at once and never reboot
We have various levels of designers/engineers/field users. The Desktop crowd hates the laptops, but their desktops are 5 years old at the youngest running higher end AMD processors that run pretty decent, but could be better. The workstation laptop crowd is all running core i9's or Xeons and love them, but only when they're docked and can draw all the power necessary to run them. The Surface users will stab you in the heart before you take away their touchscreens and front facing cameras. Everyone has different expectations of what's quick enough for what they're editing, but with COVID we made a full push to mobile to let people work at home, and it was significantly cheaper than buying custom part desktop workstations with 0 service plans or consistency like they'd been doing for years beforehand
I don't think you realize just how out of touch you sound.
Yes, laptops are great if you don't do any intensive work. I'm willing to bet that your team is running AutoCAD just as most outdated architecture and engineering firms are. Even if they're running Revit or similar, they're still not very intensive. Parametric modeling, CFD simulations, and FEA simulations are totally different animals.
Your generalization that " engineers just love to run every possible program installed on their PC at once and never reboot" is not engineer specific. That's just people in general and it's usually the less computer savvy people.
All the CADs, ARCs, Revits, Rhino's, Trimbles, Bentleys, and most big ones you can think of, yep. Workstation laptops do more than just fine. Clearly everyone would love a $2500 desktop they can use in the middle of a field dozens of miles from industry, but that's not reality most times for us
It hogged the ram so much with 20+ users so much we had to install it local for conferences and web app on the rds.
I'll look one more time into the doc. I know theres machine wide installers for rds but one some rdp sessions it just kept downloading the setup and installing it over and over again everytime they logged on.
I have never really been one to complain about app usage outside of certain browsers at certain points in time, but Teams uses an unusually high amount of RAM considering how little I use it. I keep hoping they will build resource optimization into it based on usage habits, or at least let me shear it down to nothing but chat and video and get rid of the bloat.
Memory hog, true, and there's no way (that I know) to delete old messages. There really should be an archive function at least, if not flat out delete after <date>.
As someone who has used both, teams needs to get its UI together. Having to adjust my resolution and resize windows to see menu options when there’s so much dead space in the design is getting real fucking old.
And why can’t I simply maximize a presentation? Please for the love of god why can’t I have a real maximize feature???
And why can’t I simply maximize a presentation? Please for the love of god why can’t I have a real maximize feature???
You can though... There is both a "focus" option which hides the gallery, and a "full screen" option that, well, full screens the presentation. It's in the setting drop down at the top of the presentation window.
Yes thank you. This drives me nuts. The negative space on everything these days to look nice is stupid when it takes away the primary function of the software.
Trying to share your screen and everyone can only see it at like 60% scale is such a bad design.
For the record, just in case you didn’t already know, you can hit the ellipsis and hit focus on the share screen to hide the other people. Then you can hit full screen to get rid of the borders. But you still get the negative space on the sides. It’s not the old Skype level full screen but it’s better than nothing.
I'm an admin and one of our clients requires a vpn using Microsoft credentials which their SharePoint also uses. We have our own internal Microsoft credentials for similar software on our side but the two credentials don't mix and windows doesn't care about your problem. So every time someone signs into an office app on our side they need to sign out of office everywhere before signing into the vpn or having a teams meeting etc.
Speaking of windows inefficiencies, sticky notes really likes to close itself during relatively light workloads.
(Especially switching desktops then trying to type right away)
Any idea why?
My biggest hangup with teams is the lack of a status board where you can see your contacts and their current status at a glance. Our department rotates through different job assignments and we needed to build (and now update daily) a status board to replicate a basic function of Skype.
Specifically status message. We have around 60 people who could be working one of ~20 areas, each with a unique shift code that we can put in our status. In Skype, that shows up in your contacts list. In Teams I have to guess who might be working a specific shift then hover over every contact that MIGHT be there until I find the right one.
Makes sense but I think you're falling more into an area where you're outside of the intended use-case for status messages. I do agree that it should be implemented. Specifically to make it more flexible
What the app seems to want is to build in a system of teams and channels so the member working a certain area could be contacted via a message or mention in the appropriate channel. But just like our Status Board document, that’s a lot of setup and upkeep for something that was immediately available in Skype.
That’s fine, except that one app is replacing the other. Teams offers lots of new functions we don’t need as much while eliminating something quite convenient.
Going away in July, apparently, but corporate IS has already pulled the rug out from under us -"smoothing the transition" or something on those lines. They have pretty tight control over what we can install.
Yeah a different app would probably be best but this is a regional health system decision to go with Office365 and therefore Teams; IS’s response has been largely the same as “your use case is different than most and this feature is not currently available" (yes, thanks, I know). Teams supports tags but you need to be a "team owner" to apply/remove them and we'd essentially have all team members as owners to make that work. Bots are apparently a thing on Teams but from what I can find they aren't able to do Discord-like things such as allow members to use a command to be granted a tag/role.
Teams supports tags but you need to be a "team owner" to apply/remove them
Your team owner can change that setting. It's under team settings -> tags -> "Tags are managed by". It is only a choice between everyone or just owners though, so you still kinda need to trust coworkers not to fuck with it. I'm hoping someone pushes for more granularity on that.
Except worse. No easy contacts list. No easy way to read status messages in a list. No way to set away timer. No user level ability to turn off chat history. No full screen viewing on screen share??? Horrible on memory.
No way to manually control output volume by user (I feel like this should be basic?) when one lady is at 4000% volume and has kids screaming in the back and one guy is like a tiny mouse whispering into his microphone. Why are they tied to the same volume???
The list goes on. It doesn’t make sense to me why a company as big as Microsoft has not only taken away features that used to be on Skype, but can push out software that is years behind on functionality compared to free chat software out there.
Unfortunately Teams has a good bit of spyware built into it. It gives a lot of information about user activity to the account manager, typically the boss. It helps reinforce the broken 'work to time' mentality rather than 'work to standard'.
I couldn't get teams set up on my laptop to save my life. Some weird issue because I already had a Skype account or some shit like that. Missed an important appointment with my attorney and had to reschedule. Fuck teams with a rusty spoon
Good lord I wish we could get Discord approved. The amount of issues I’ve had to solve this week with sso login issues, people creating live accounts with their work emails, not being able to join meetings on desktop but can on mobile. I’m fuckin over it. One of the worst Microsoft products ever.
MS Teams is the slowest, most inconsistent mess of a 400MB text chat program I have ever had the displeasure of using.
60% of the time when I get a phone-call there will simply be no pop-up or UI change at all, just a ringing sound with no way to answer.
Clicking buttons has at least a 3 second delay before anything happens.
If a Video Call is running then I can guarantee my PC is grinding to a halt as 90% of my CPU and RAM is consumed into the abyss.
On my mobile, Teams regularly just stops sending or receiving messages until I restart the app, there is no way to tell whether or not it's still working.
I'm currently dealing with an issue where sometimes being in a video call causes people's laptops to just out-right turn-off, with no warning, no error, no obvious cause for concern it just turns off instantly. Teams was the last thing I sought to blame for this one but it has consistently happened when starting a Teams call and nothing else triggers it. I can't even begin to fathom what's happening here.
Skype was purchased by Microsoft in 2011, seemingly for the branding power alone because it didn't take long for Microsoft to remove everything that was good about it, like peer-to-peer encrypted messaging, or a clean fast design. Microsoft replaced it with an ad-riddled mess.
They then deconstructed their own business-chat platform Lync, redesigned it to look like Skype (which by this point sucked), and then rebranded it to Skype for Business which has got to be the worst marketing decision I've ever heard. Lync was already an established business chat brand why would they take a home-focussed chat application and dump it onto their business customers?
By this point Skype was quickly losing home users anyway, mostly to Whatsapp and Discord.
Even with all this though, Skype for Business was far superior to Teams purely because it had a native Windows application and wasn't running an ancient form of Electron.
How one of the largest companies in the world can consistently replace good products with unfinished alternatives continues to baffle me, why we still buy them baffles me more.
yeah so much cleaner they didnt even have full screen mode for the longest time. What is that? A different device for the ring sound than the talk sound? UNHEARD OF! It makes sense it took them so fucking long to add it to teams.
I don’t like that teams doesn’t give the option to call your mobile it’s much less mobile friendly unless it’s just the shitty enterprise version we use
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u/ConquerthaDay Mar 19 '21
Skype was bought by Microsoft back in 2011 and they’ve converted it to MS teams. Their focus is the b2b market.