Microsoft Teams After Four Weeks of Use

When this journey started is was documented in a couple parts:  Part 1 and Part 2.

It’s been four weeks now since we switched over from Slack to Teams. The new car smell of Teams has gone away. It’s still a Preview, so some bumps are expected. Missing features are expected too. The surprise has been how little open dissent there has been given that we all were heavy Slack users for a long time. More feedback from my team was required so I created a “Things I Hate About Teams” channel – surely that channel name would elicit the silent majority to speak up. However, there has been continued silence with only a few complaints here and there. Here are some of those things we have encountered over this past month. We know that a few of these missing features are on the roadmap:

It’s still a Preview. This is heard at least once a day in water cooler conversations, but it has not dissuaded us from using Teams. The “it’s still a Preview” line is primarily used when Teams has to be restarted. It’s still a Preview, and being an early adopter is in our DNA so this does not faze us. To put this into some perspective, I run Teams 10+ hours/day and I have to restart the app 3-4 times a week.  Your mileage may vary.

Conversations in Channels. Something we witness every time a Slack user first starts using Teams is how they inadvertently create multiple conversations in a channel when they meant to reply to a specific conversation. This is not entirely unexpected given Slack’s flat channel approach. In Slack, when you want to contribute to the channel, just open the channel and start typing your message. In Teams, if you want to contribute to a conversation in a channel, then you need to reply to that conversation. Conversations have been working well to organize multiple threads within a single channel. Ironically, as this is being written, a developer who just came back from vacation was praising having his channels organized into conversations so he could rehydrate the discussions quickly. Additionally, he preferred consuming historical information in Team channels and conversations versus having dozens of emails. Should Teams have the ability to have channels behave like Slack does (meaning without conversations)? At first, we thought so because we missed the simplicity of just splatting messages into the channel and wanted Teams to behave more like Slack. But after using Teams, the transition has been made and most everyone prefers having conversations as a first class citizen inside of channels. This has been the biggest love/hate discussion item about Teams – most seem to accept and like the concept of conservations, but a small minority are holding onto how Slack does it and prefer a flatter approach.

More mobile integration.  Maybe it is because Skype has spoiled us, but not being able to take a call from the Teams mobile app when a Team call is initiated is a big missing feature. Our Android and iOS users have been using the mobile apps otherwise without any notable complaints. This is not a feature Slack had and we were using other tools to supplement (such as Skype and Skype for Business). Teams does this on the desktop app and it works well. Sometimes there are hiccups (it’s still a Preview), but sound quality and desktop sharing are always top notch otherwise. We are actively trying to consolidate tools and simplify what people are using, so we want to see the Teams app on par with Skype.

Mac. We have people who swap between Windows 10 and macOS and use Teams on both. The Teams experience is the same on both.

Meetings. It’s super convenient to create a meeting in Teams that embeds a link in the invite to join the call. However, we are unable to add a physical room resource to the Team invite so we cannot book a room with the same invite. Sometimes part of the team is physically together so a room is necessary. It would be preferable to be able to manage the meeting recipients from either Outlook or Teams (right now it is just Teams). Having an add-in to Outlook (like Skype for Business) would seem to be a good way to go. This would be a way to add people who are not in the team to the discussion. We know that Teams is not Outlook, but Teams meeting capabilities feel lacking because they are super streamlined. Within Teams or Outlook, it would be great to add an email address of anyone to a meeting (either internal or external to the organization).

Virtual whiteboard. We started trying to use OneNote in Teams one on one chats in lieu of putting a camera on a real whiteboard. Each person can contribute using a stylus, and while this is cool and that it is OneNote to be retained for posterity, its simply not fast enough for a conversation to not be interrupted by the synching technology. OneNote is quite fast on its synching, but collaboration between the team on a shared whiteboard with sub second responses is needed. Saving that whiteboard off at moments in time as part of a meeting sounds useful (and OneNote can be the destination for that). We have direct experience building solutions like this, so we know this can be done in real time. Working with UX designers day in and day out, this would be the killer Teams feature I would use all the time.

More options than Like. We are replacing more and more email with Teams usage. We all hate the million “thank you” and “congratulations” responses we have seen in email. Rather than just being able to “like” a message, it would be interesting to augment that list with other types of responses. “Like” is a bit watered down and is basically a “I agree and acknowledge this message”.

Feedback via survey. Having an integrated survey to solicit feedback from a team would be useful. This could be as simple as a “where do you want to go to lunch” with some options, or could be something relevant to a key decision on a project. This could be done in-line to the channel to be part of a team’s history. I was accused of being lazy when sharing this feature internally – I’ll own that.

Activity message tagging. Many of us use email as a queue of work items. I often read an email and then mark it as unread when I cannot act upon it immediately. In Teams, Save is the equivalent. Saved messages are tucked away under your profile, which feels “out of the way”. Perhaps these should be discoverable within Activity. Also, Outlook has spoiled us with the multitude of ways one can categorize emails. With Teams replacing so much email traffic, not having an options other than Save feels like we are missing capabilities.

Notifications and their icons. Icons are used with notifications to denote why you received a notification. The icon when you are referenced by name, for example, is different than if you received a notification because you belonged to a team. These same icons are used within conversations, which is brilliant because it allows you to quickly scan a conversation to see what you should pay attention to. Additionally, when a conversation gets long it auto collapses, but the icons remain intact on the collapse portion of the conversation. This has worked quite well for us.

Comparisons are fun to do, such as tapping a potentially religious devotion to Slack in a comparison to Teams. If one simply takes the out of the box features of Slack and compares only those features to Teams, it is likely that Slack will win that battle. Slack is the lense that people have, so its easiest to use it when looking at Teams. But for us, that means you are blinding yourself to the benefits of Teams. Here is a brief recap of benefits important to us:

• Teams is free. We never paid for Slack because it would have been expensive, and a Slack license per user is more than an Office 365 license per user.
• We use a lot of Microsoft products, and are using Office 365. All the centralized management of people and groups we already do in Office 365 was immediately inherited in Teams. This was always a hassle in Slack.
• Conversations rule. This level of organization inside of channels is imperative to replace email and keep conversations intact over time. Slack does not do this for us, and we did not know we were missing it until we started using Teams.
• Integration is excellent. In a team we have quick access to relevant file storage, OneNote Notebooks, build publishing from Visual Studio Team Services, etc. This list of integration pathways feels much longer than what we will ever need, and it’s still a Preview.
• One app to rule them all. Teams is almost there yet, and we are looking forward to using less Outlook, Skype, and Skype for Business and do all that work in one place.

If you are not already an Office 365 subscriber, then you will probably not switch to being one because of Teams and will be using Slack.  However, if you are, then you should give Teams a serious shake. We did and we are not looking back. Looking forward to the next Teams release.