- opening Sharepoint pages in Teams' half-baked browser;
- opening Word or Excel in Teams' own half-baked editor;
- Exchange integration is the calendar, period. Nothing else. The only thing actually usable.
Am I missing anything?
The company is falling apart so quickly they are going to have to pay up again before the end of the month.
I've spent a full day attempting to send a webhook in. Teams used to work like slack (a channel admin can create an endpoint; you post to it.) Microsoft deprecated that because it worked. It's now a maze of permissions and it silently fails with no error messages at all.
Scrollback regularly fails and also requires app restart.
I cannot insert images into a channel w/ a customer via drag and drop, but I can paste them by opening them in preview, copying the image, and cmd+v into the channel. I wasted 4 hours w/ support trying to figure out why I can't drag images into the shared channel before giving up. This is typical of the Teams experience.
I could go on. Besides facebook's tools, it is the worst piece of software I've used and a demonstration of monopoly power to distribute total garbage. Slack has issues, but it does reliably do the core thing.
That's primarily why it sucks, and that seems to be Microsoft's standard operating procedure. Everything they put out is in the category of "does everything, but half-assed with a web of fragile "integrations" that break if you look at it funny."
Worse, it's all SharePoint all the way down. Every team (and private channel!) is a SharePoint site, every user's OneDrive in the same tenant is a personal SharePoint Site. Every M365 Group gets its own SharePoint site (and mailbox). Creating a Team also creates an M365 group, but not vice versa.
Heaven forbid you rename something in the stack or you are in for a world of pain.
It's also by design that way. SharePoint storage is expensive, and boy what a disaster it is to ever try and get your data out of it.
Yet, for some reason, companies keep buying it and keep using it, letting Microsoft suck them in and hold them there for eternity.
If you're starting a new company, never, ever, buy anything Microsoft. Just don't go down that road. It's not worth it.
Which means it's time to look for alternative clients. I ws hoping for something like WeeSlack:
https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack
But all I found was:
https://github.com/btp/teams-cli
https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams
Are there really no good Teams clients? Doesn't have to plug in to WeeChat or be a TUI... But something?
That's just a pure lesson in pain.
Webhooks work, but proper bots are borderline impossible; at least without giving you the feeling that you'd rather pull your own teeth out with pliers.
Yeah, there is half assed stuff. But it’s not what most of the big corp uses anyway. So your little dev specific use case isn’t going to get much traction.
Teams does one thing well. It can do group chats and team calls. That’s most of what people use it for. And your corp gets a discount bundle.
The new Outlook app is horrible though.
Once I worked in a company with two brands after a fusion, and all of us had to use both Exchange and Lotus Notes. And I was almost forgetting SharePoint.
But yeah, Microsoft licensing is impossible to understand.
And the UI is terrible, huge balloons around everything. I want density but even at the densest setting it sucks.
Oh and it also fails to update online status. Often I click on a colleague who seems green and only then it updates and it turns out they've been away for 3 hours. Grrr
Teams isn't just mediocre, it's aggressively hostile to basic usability. The camera bar sits at the top of the window, directly blocking where you're supposed to position your camera for eye contact. Chat organisation is broken: you get duplicate groups because the order people were added matters somehow. Notifications phantom in and out. Reactions are buried in an activity feed. Search is useless. You can't reliably paste text without major formatting issues. The mobile app logs you out randomly and doesn’t tell you unless you manually check it. Desktop notifications don't sync with read state. Files uploaded to chat don't appear in the Files tab. The "new Teams" broke half the features that worked in classic Teams. Presence status is a coin flip. Audio settings reset themselves between calls. Screen sharing has a 50/50 chance of sharing the wrong window. The difference between a chat and a channel is arbitrary and confusing. You can't edit messages older than a few hours. Threading is bolted on and barely works.
Performance is inexcusable. Multiple gigabytes of RAM to display text messages and lag constantly on modern hardware. How do you make a chat application lag? It's rendering text, not computing fluid dynamics. Opening the application takes 30 seconds on an SSD. Switching between chats stutters. Typing has input delay.
The real problem isn't that Teams is terrible. It's that "it technically functions" has become an acceptable standard. When you've never experienced better, "it works" seems fine. But Teams is what happens when a monopoly position means you don't have to care about quality. Microsoft has unlimited resources and still ships this.
Even Skype for Business was more stable, and in Skype for Business you couldn't reliably select text. That's how low the bar is.
Yup, we struggle with this. Seems to have to do with needing to pay for seats in order to have file-sharing allowed (but you can still paste Sharepoint/Onedrive links). Can't share files if there's even a single external person in the chat/channel. Forced us to buy another seat subscription. It's great!
This. Opening a chat for the first time in the morning consistently takes 5-10 seconds. Opening subsequent ones takes 2-3 seconds. That is, if they contain plain text. If not, UI keps reflowing and jumping while thumbnails and silly gifs are loaded async, so you cannot even reliably click.
1 - fails 2 - w/ no useful feedback to user; 3 - I couldn't get support to tell me why (fine, small account), but the customer with 900 licensed seats couldn't either
Fortunately, said customer has come to the realization of how very bad it is and is hopefully migrating to Slack.
Likes to open new windows if you click a notification.
It is slow.
The search is not good at showing multiple results from the one chat. Why does it search all the other chats anyway...
Switching accounts constantly is a pain in the arse - I unfortunately have to use four accounts and one sub-account (member of some other org's team or something).
Fine if you live near a datacenter.
In Sweden though, you go through France.
Not ideal.
Without threads, there is no breach of thread-etiquette.
When "channels" are so awkward, nobody uses them. Then there is no constant deluge of middle-age folks creating a Facebook out of work, needing to be reminded that the photos channel is for business-photos, not pictures of their kids.
When emoji support is limited, nobody has to police people pushing the boundaries of what emojis are appropriate.
The software is baffling. But I like it that way.
My favourite one ( still happens ) is having to mute then unmute at the beginning of the conversation otherwise nobody can hear me. It was so common, with people fiddling with their headset, calling again etc that I eventually asked everyone exhibiting audio issues to start with this
Another interesting one is that if you’re not connected properly , you send messages , but never get notified that they never left, and are never notified that you’re not connected.
It’s also a resource hog and will eat your machine for breakfast.
The list goes on and on, it’s very surprising.
Everything in Windows has input delay, ever since at Windows XP, it makes it infuriating to use.
Sometimes, text copied from teams includes `[Sender Name, 2026-01-03, 21:51]` as a prefix—other times not. Sometimes you paste formatted text and it ends up pasted as formatted but inconsistent HTML, including (of course) text color of all things, rendering it black even with the dark theme, and thus unreadable. Other times you copy code, and there's two blank lines between each line when you paste elsewhere. It makes you cry, really.
No more Words? Introducing a worse software than Words...
But the available APIs still suck. For example there is none to just get all recent notifications. I don't know if teams itself has access to more and better apis? If not that would explain a lot.
Teams is supposed to be a professional workplace tool from one of the biggest software companies in the world, but it feels like something a high schooler coded up for fun. Weirdly Discord, a platform explicitly meant for gamers, is a more useful chat tool. I don't like Discord at all, but it's better than Teams.
Some engineers will facepalm super hard but won't be listened to, as usual, and we will enter the next cosmic age of self-inflicted suffering.
Then begins the hunt through chats, meeting chats, group chats, channel chats and the notification pane (which doesn't show every type of notification!?) to find what it was.
Absolutely maddening.
(1) They couldn't imagine anyone ever closing their gloriously developed MS Teams.
(2) Since everyone knows MS Teams and sitting in meetings all day is the one most important thing to get stuff done, they went ahead and made MS Teams a "priority". F using anything else! Maybe if it doesn't release the audio input, it will be 50ms faster next call! That ought to be enough for you!
Usually at big corp I haven’t seen a ceo actually schedule their own calls or deal with day to day bullshit. They have a whole team of staff for that.
Of course I would never choose Zoom or Teams if I had the power, but Chromium does work with both when those are the tools your client uses.
Switching costs are enormous. Your organisation has Teams integrated with your Office 365 licensing, which means you're already paying for it. Replacing it with Slack means paying $8-12 per user per month on top of your existing Office costs, because you still need Outlook, Word, Excel, and SharePoint. For a 500-person company, that's an additional $48,000-72,000 annually for a tool that overlaps with something you've already paid for. Finance departments kill these proposals before they reach decision-makers, regardless of how much time is wasted on Teams' inefficiencies.
The IT burden to move is quickly substantial. Migrating chat history, file repositories, and integrations takes months. You need to retrain users, update documentation, reconfigure SSO, and migrate bots and webhooks. Most IT departments are already understaffed. Unless Teams is completely non-functional, that project never gets prioritised over security updates, infrastructure maintenance, or business-critical requests.
Organisations don't optimise for employee time the way you seem to think they do. The calculus isn't "is this tool good", it's "is this tool bad enough to justify the cost and disruption of replacing it". That threshold is extraordinarily high. People tolerate inefficient tools because the alternative is fighting procurement, convincing IT, and enduring months of migration pain. Lotus Notes persisted in enterprises for over a decade despite being universally despised because the switching cost was too high. SAP is notorious for terrible UX but remains entrenched because migration is a multi-year project costing millions.
Your workflow actually proves the point. You use email as your source of truth because Teams' search and organisation aren't reliable enough. You manually distribute meeting minutes and transcripts because you don't trust Teams as a system of record. You've built workarounds to compensate for the tool's deficiencies and normalised them as standard practice. That's not Teams working well, that's your organisation adapting to work around its limitations.
Let me address the specific issues you haven't encountered:
- Teams' resource usage is measurable and documented. PC World's 2023 benchmarks showed Teams using 1.4GB RAM at idle compared to 500MB for Slack and 350MB for Discord. ExtremeTech's testing found Teams taking 22 seconds to cold start versus 4 seconds for Slack on identical hardware. r/sysadmin consistently reports Teams causing performance problems on machines with 8GB of RAM, forcing hardware upgrades. Microsoft implicitly acknowledged this by completely rebuilding Teams in 2023, promising 2x faster performance and 50% less memory. The fact that they had to rewrite the entire application is an admission that the performance problems were architectural. (it didn't help though)
- Microsoft's own documentation acknowledges search limitations. The search index doesn't include all message content beyond a certain threshold. Results ranking is poor enough that Microsoft published a support article explaining how to use advanced search operators to find messages, which rather proves the basic search doesn't work. The r/MicrosoftTeams subreddit has over 3,000 posts about search not returning results that users know exist. IT administrators on Spiceworks report having to advise users to "use Ctrl+F in the browser if Teams search doesn't work", which is a workaround for a broken core feature.
- Files uploaded in chat messages don't appear in the Files tab automatically. They're stored in a hidden SharePoint folder that most users don't know how to access. Microsoft's official guidance for this is to manually move files to the Files tab or use SharePoint directly. Is that an edge case? Is it FUCK, it's documented in Microsoft's own support articles as expected behaviour. If your organisation hasn't hit this, it's because you're not using Files tabs or you've trained people to work around it.
- Microsoft's Tech Community forums have literally thousands of threads about notification badges showing unread messages that don't exist (5,000+ when I last checked), or notifications not appearing for actual messages. Microsoft's official response, posted repeatedly since 2020, is "we're aware of this issue and investigating". It's six years later now, it's still not fixed. The fact that you haven't noticed might mean your notification settings are configured differently, or you've unconsciously learned to ignore the notification count as unreliable.
- Going back to r/MicrosoftTeams: the community continually documents persistent issues with the mobile app... notifications not syncing with desktop read state, automatic logouts requiring re-authentication, messages appearing in different orders on mobile versus desktop, and the app draining battery faster than comparable applications. GitHub's issue tracker for Teams mobile shows hundreds of unresolved bugs (then again, I suppose what popular app doesn't). You mentioned you don't use mobile, which explains why you haven't experienced this.
- Regarding Chat versus channel architecture, Microsoft's own UX research lead, cited in a 2022 Verge interview, acknowledged that the distinction between chats and channels confuses users but can't be changed due to early architectural decisions. The duplicate groups issue I mentioned isn't a bug, it's a consequence of treating "Alice, Bob, Charlie" as a different entity from "Alice, Charlie, Bob". This is documented in Microsoft's developer documentation as intended behaviour. Your organisation either hasn't hit this scale yet or has developed unofficial naming conventions to work around it.
You've been using Teams for four months. These issues emerge over time, at scale, or in specific usage patterns. When you're managing multiple projects with overlapping team members across different time zones and need to reference decisions made months ago, the organisational problems compound. When you're working on older hardware or need reliable mobile access, the performance issues become blocking. When you need to find a specific technical discussion from six months ago buried in one of 40 channels, the search deficiencies become critical.
The question isn't whether Teams works for your specific, constrained use case after four months. The question is whether it's good software compared to alternatives, and whether the problems people report are valid. The evidence says yes, they are valid. The performance metrics are measurable. The bugs are documented in Microsoft's own forums. The UX problems are acknowledged by Microsoft's own researchers. The antitrust case is real.
Your experience is one data point. It's not invalid, but it's also not representative. Saying "I haven't personally experienced these problems in my limited usage" doesn't refute the documented experiences of millions of users, the measured performance benchmarks, or the systematic issues that Microsoft itself acknowledges. It just means you haven't hit them yet, or your use case is simple enough that they don't matter, or you've normalised workarounds as standard practice.
And, I haven't even started talking about what happens if you dare to work across multiple organisations.
> Replacing it with Slack means paying $8-12 per user per month on top of your existing Office costs, because you still need Outlook, Word, Excel, and SharePoint. For a 500-person company, that's an additional $48,000-72,000 annually for a tool that overlaps with something you've already paid for.
If only in this calculation they'd factor in how much time each employee wastes because of Teams glitches…
There are definitely still breaches of etiquette though, e.g. people frequently tagging a whole channel when they have a support question, even though it contains hundreds of people.
Teams won't even display all office file formats without you having to open the dedicated app…
… I don't need one app to do everything half-assed, I need one app that does exactly what it's meant for well.