Tell me about it.
We moved from Slack to Teams to cut costs. Common story.
Leaves a LOT to be desired.
1. The UI took the fun out of well, whatever, Slack was/is. For some of the common interest channels at work, I see less people going to them.
2. I'm in a group where we frequently need to share images (mostly plots) among the members. Sometimes they just disappear. Yes. You upload an image during a conversation, come back to it a few min later, its not there, and the person at the either end of the chat hasn't seen it either. Guess what OS I'm on: Windows 10 Pro.
Because of this I've resorted to using the web version of teams occasionally, which doesn't seem to suffer from this issue.
3. This one is actually baffling: when I try to upload an image in 2 different conversations (one after another), the second one complains the file already exists. This is during upload.
4. Inconsistent UI: did you know you could reply to individual messages from the Android app for Teams? Doesn't work on web or the windows desktop client. So when I am catching up on a conversation, I occasionally switch to the mobile app to reply to specific messages.
So that's my workflow: the Teams website opened on my laptop browser for most of the messaging, Teams running on mobile, in case I need to reply to specific messages, and Teams running as an application on my laptop for video/screen sharing calls.
5. You cannot specify a Download folder. Yes that's a thing in 2020. [1]
> when I try to upload an image in 2 different conversations (one after another), the second one complains the file already exists
That's because, bafflingly, it uses a local directory-cache for files. Think of it as the "Downloads" folder for a browser. Any time you upload, Teams will try to save it to your local cache first; if it finds the old file, it will whine like that.
Any time you want to upload a file, you should really not do in Chats but in Channels, which have a separate area for each Channel (backed by Sharepoint). Except in some companies (like where I'm now) people for some reason use Chats almost exclusively instead of Channels, so the whole thing becomes awkward: go to the channel, upload, get the link, paste the link in chat.
If anything, this points to poor use-case study and/or execution. There is a case for channels and for individual chats: details of how files upload happen should be dealt with under the hood.
Frankly, it feels odd even talking about this issue; we are discussing file uploads, worth a few kBs, in a messenger. This really, really, shouldn't be a problem :-)
you should really not do in Chats but in Channels, which have a separate area for each Channel (backed by Sharepoint)
people for some reason use Chats almost exclusively instead of Channels
The fact that there even needs to be such a distinction is itself a problem. They're both conversations, except with some slight differences? That's just asking for confusion.
5. You cannot specify a Download folder. Yes that's a thing in 2020.
Considering that browsers have also adopted this "modern stupidity" for a while, I'm not so surprised, but the lack of a "Save As" option definitely perplexed me the first few times I've tried to download something --- clicking Download and expecting at least a choice, but seeing "download complete" makes me think where did it go!?!?
The response to that feedback item is baffling, but it's definitely not an uncommon thing for a big bureaucracy like MS. The actual code change probably takes minutes, but the mound of process associated with it causes these sorts of anti-decisions to occur.
Sadly the decision to switch products is usually made by the finance side and stuffed to the tech side, and tech side VPs/Directors are happy to enforce that because they don't use Slack/Teams very often.
That's true. And that is also probably why things mightn't improve soon - if the only metrics MS tracks is Teams adoption, I'm guessing its looking good right now. If they aren't counting how many of these cases are "frugality-driven", they are going to be blind to the UX problems.
Leaves a LOT to be desired.
1. The UI took the fun out of well, whatever, Slack was/is. For some of the common interest channels at work, I see less people going to them.
2. I'm in a group where we frequently need to share images (mostly plots) among the members. Sometimes they just disappear. Yes. You upload an image during a conversation, come back to it a few min later, its not there, and the person at the either end of the chat hasn't seen it either. Guess what OS I'm on: Windows 10 Pro.
Because of this I've resorted to using the web version of teams occasionally, which doesn't seem to suffer from this issue.
3. This one is actually baffling: when I try to upload an image in 2 different conversations (one after another), the second one complains the file already exists. This is during upload.
4. Inconsistent UI: did you know you could reply to individual messages from the Android app for Teams? Doesn't work on web or the windows desktop client. So when I am catching up on a conversation, I occasionally switch to the mobile app to reply to specific messages.
So that's my workflow: the Teams website opened on my laptop browser for most of the messaging, Teams running on mobile, in case I need to reply to specific messages, and Teams running as an application on my laptop for video/screen sharing calls.
5. You cannot specify a Download folder. Yes that's a thing in 2020. [1]
But, yeah, "costs". I miss Slack.
[1] https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...