{"id":8475,"date":"2021-03-09T10:39:54","date_gmt":"2021-03-09T15:39:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adamchandler.me\/blog\/?p=8475"},"modified":"2021-03-09T10:39:54","modified_gmt":"2021-03-09T15:39:54","slug":"rant-microsoft-teams-for-macos-needs-help","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adamchandler.me\/blog\/2021\/03\/09\/rant-microsoft-teams-for-macos-needs-help\/","title":{"rendered":"Rant: Microsoft Teams for MacOS Needs Help"},"content":{"rendered":"

Consider this a follow-up to my July 10th post about Microsoft Teams<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Microsoft Teams has surpassed Slack in daily active users purely because the majority of corporate America is already subscribed to Office 365 and MS Teams is included for free. This adoption rate has been detailed in other blogs already but Slack has been under threat by this for a while and I\u2019m sure a lot of this may have contributed to why they sold to Salesforce. Slack is not a failure but the juggernaut that is Microsoft ate their lunch by giving away a copycat to their customers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I started using Slack for my office collaboration in 2016. In 2018, my day-job asked me to stop using Slack despite the fact I was using 2 Factor Authentication and complex passwords. I fully understand their position in asking I stop using it. If I were in their shoes, I\u2019d do what they did and ban HipChat, Slack and a few others in favor for, at the time, Skype for Business & Microsoft Teams.<\/p>\n

Skype for Business was deprecated in 2020 so in 2019, we moved fully over to Microsoft Teams and it did, as a 4500 person company reduce the amount of emails I received. It worked to gobble up the back & forth, mundane and noise. I continue to have very serious concerns about messaging apps over email because the data (conversations, files, decisions) are locked to a proprietary platform with no open data standards being followed. Meaning, if Microsoft deprecates Teams or we stop paying for Office 365, every corporate decision made is lost forever. How will auditors follow a paper trail of millions of short messages and no subject-line or To\/CC fields? That\u2019s their problem but I personally just want to find something I sent \/ wrote 2-20 years ago easily like I just did when it came to my first email from Slack when I joined in 2016. Finding that out in Slack would have taken hundreds of scrolling motions on my trackpad and server-fetching of old messages to find my \u2018first\u2019 slack post. My Inbox told me in 5 seconds when I joined. That\u2019s why I\u2019m bullish on email as the last true open standard that will (I guarantee it) outlive both Microsoft Teams and Slack.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Luckily, my organization has gotten wise and is officially adopting Slack in June. Unfortunately, they\u2019re doing it in a way I full disagree with and the reason why could be cost, politics or data security but our Slack implementation is a half-breed. It\u2019s Slack for messaging yet files you post in Slack still get saved to SharePoint and if you initiate a call in Slack or meeting, it jumps you to Microsoft Teams for that audio\/video portion. You\u2019re expected to chat about the meeting in Slack while you\u2019re in a call in Teams. I have zero insight into why we\u2019re doing the hybrid model, I\u2019m pretty low on the org chart.<\/p>\n

\u2026this is not why I\u2019m ranting and there\u2019s nothing I can do to change their decision\u2026It is what it is.<\/p>\n

—-<\/p>\n

Microsoft Teams is a bad piece of software on the Mac. The MacBU has a storied 30 year history of world-class Macintosh software. They prided themselves on shipping features for Mac first before Windows got them like immersive reader, the ribbon view and complex charts & graphs. The MacBU had their own office space, organizational structure and release cycles. They were a profitable group within Microsoft and they were often first to support a lot of new technologies with the only one I had a gripe with before today being it took them a decade to add multi-core CPU support to Microsoft Excel. My organization regularly passes around 150 megabyte Excel files and to see just one of my 16 cores executing a pivot table command or formula while I see a visual beachball always annoyed me. They eventually (I think in 2018) added multi-core support to Excel. In fact, after writing this, I wonder if the Macintosh Business Unit @ Microsoft is even responsible for MS Teams on Mac at all? It\u2019s not fair in my title to throw them under the bus because I just assumed they were the only group shipping Mac software but maybe MS Teams functions independently of MacBU?<\/p>\n

Microsoft Teams, like Slack and Discord uses Electron. \u00a0This is already a crime but Microsoft Teams fails in a few very glorious ways<\/p>\n