I dream of a Teams release
- That doesn’t take like 15 seconds to start on an i7 8700 + Samsung 960 Pro + GTX 1080 Ti + latest Windows 10 workstation.
- That doesn’t take an extra 3-5 seconds to scroll up just one page.
- That, when I start Teams on a different comp that hasn’t run it for a while, doesn’t load all the new messages one by one, so that I have to wait sometimes minutes for it to finish scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, instead of just loading the most recent messages.
- Where presence isn’t so inconsistent, and doesn’t take like 5 seconds to update, and only after I open chat for the person. Some colleagues are constantly shown as away, even when all their devices are turned completely off.
- That doesn’t put me in away status, if the window is not active (but I’m using the comp).
- That puts me into DND instead of busy, when I have a meeting scheduled in Outlook, so that I don’t get distracting/embarrassing toast notifications about private messages on the TV while presenting. Or which has an option to omit notifications in busy, too. Or where turning off all notifications isn’t the only remaining option for such cases.
- Where team messages don’t show as an “activity”, constantly spamming those numbers, sometimes getting stuck even long after I read the messages already. What’s so active about them anyway, let alone “more active” than private chats, of which I don’t get such notifications?
- Where I can disable picture upload, like in the rest of Office.
Where I can edit the last message with Up or Ctrl+Up, like in any other chat app.- Where “Reply thread” doesn’t have a single key for shortcut, so that it works when the compose box is active (i.e. 99% of the time).
- Where threads aren’t so emphasized and those useless “reply” buttons don’t take up like 30% of all screen space. Why is the whole message window so cluttered anyway? I’ve just counted, a convo where there’s zero links, images, or smilies, the interface shows just seven messages, all having just a single line. (Notepad++ can show 50 lines with the same font size).
- Which doesn’t have like zero customization options, lacking even basic things like text size.
- Where I don’t have to “follow” each and every new channel manually to receive notifications.
- Where pasting links in the message box doesn’t randomly freeze the UI for like 5 seconds (because they apparently perform thumbnail rendering synchronously, gg).
Which is part of the Office 365 installer.Which also has a Store version, so that I can actually use it on a Surface Go, Microsoft’s own device.Update: added- Where opening certain teams’ channels doesn’t randomly collapse all other teams’ channel lists.
Where toast notifications don’t completely ignore Focus Assist (Microsoft’s own friggin’ thing), e.g. when playing games.Update: added- Where a new team doesn’t occupy a new email alias on your Exchange instance. As if Planner doing the same stupid shit wasn’t enough. For a long while it was even added to GAL by default, so our GAL was flooded with stupid aliases. Now they at least make it hidden by default, but it still occupies email addresses, so welcome to the world of alias conflicts when you want to create an actual email group or something.
It’s so friggin’ apparent that it’s nothing but patchwork, thrown together in a hurry to compete with the ever growing players such as Slack, Discord et al. Ridiculous, and pathetic at the same time. And I see next to zero improvements over the years, and it gets harder and harder to argue in favor of Teams when management asks again, why don’t we just get Slack. Seriously, why don’t we?