I had the joy of helping with a Teams to replace Slack rollout at the start of the Pandemic. During which I had multiple meetings with Engineers and Product folks at MS. Two reasons struck out as significant problems.
The first was that Teams is Skype and Sharepoint mashed together with duct tape. When you'd ask for improved UX, it would all fall to "Ah yes, the Sharepoint team would have to do X so the other team can do Y. They aren't built like that, though, so you cannot have it". Teams is not one product and will never feel that way.
The second was scarier. I was trying to encourage communities of practice and having open communication by default, with some private rooms when needed. Like in Slack, you have multiple channels rather than disappearing into your own Team. Promoting openness was anathema to their Product people "Why would you want people to see what you say? Privacy is the default". I got the impression MS internally is not a safe space to speak, and Teams has that same cultural baggage.
> Promoting openness was anathema to their Product people "Why would you want people to see what you say? Privacy is the default". I got the impression MS internally is not a safe space to speak, and Teams has that same cultural baggage.
This is really weird to me too and makes collaborating within an org difficult. One of the big advantages of teams should be that we’re all in the same org and get paid and background checked. So there’s a base level of identity.
I can’t tag someone unless they are in a team. So yesterday I was in a thread in an R user group and couldn’t tag someone not in the group even though they had a relevant project. This was stupid.
So I would have to ask him to join the team just to talk on this one thread. And that didn’t happen so the thread was worse off.
That and the notifications are horrible and I have so many from the 30 teams I’m in (partly because of the above problem) I just ignore them.
If someone IMs me, I don’t know it unless I manually go to the pain that shows notifications that is usually behind other meetings.
I suspect no one at Microsoft uses Teams realistically. So it’s just full of met requirements on paper and not in reality.
Another piece of cultural baggage is hiding the organisation of people in meetings. Large enterprises do this because they have subcontractors that they like to pretend aren't subcontractors.
I'm a consultant invited to meetings in a customer's tenant with people from various subcontractors and vendors present.
John: "So, what is your honest opinion about Andrew's statement?"
Me: "I have no idea who you are or which org Andrew works for... so no opinion that I'd be willing to state."
The complete lack of being able to have offtopic/misc conversations has really sucked. When we had slack we had a channel specific to just chitchat and it was always active but very loose and fun.
We now have a "Chit Chat" channel/team but it's so difficult to use in a natural way that now nobody uses it and now we have zero of it.
The first was that Teams is Skype and Sharepoint mashed together with duct tape. When you'd ask for improved UX, it would all fall to "Ah yes, the Sharepoint team would have to do X so the other team can do Y. They aren't built like that, though, so you cannot have it". Teams is not one product and will never feel that way.
The second was scarier. I was trying to encourage communities of practice and having open communication by default, with some private rooms when needed. Like in Slack, you have multiple channels rather than disappearing into your own Team. Promoting openness was anathema to their Product people "Why would you want people to see what you say? Privacy is the default". I got the impression MS internally is not a safe space to speak, and Teams has that same cultural baggage.