Microsoft Teams Transition hasn't been awesome, but it's not a bad product.
August 07, 2019

Microsoft Teams Transition hasn't been awesome, but it's not a bad product.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Teams

We are using Microsoft Teams for generic peer:peer communication, cross-team/department collaboration, and for video conferencing/online meetings/screensharing. Because we have offices in many difference countries and across many different timezones, Teams allows us to easily communicate with each other.
  • Easy management of functional teams/groups within Teams
  • Easy to start a meeting from anywhere
  • Easy to navigate
  • Integrates seamlessly with office365
  • Doesn't allow for pausing screen share during a meeting
  • Doesn't allow users to use a phone to call into a meeting. I have to join twice, once from my phone and once from my computer so that I can present on the call and also use my headphones with my phone.
  • Doesn't respect my computer's DND settings. Notifications from teams still appear while I'm in DND and sharing my screen via different web conferencing tools.
  • Very difficult to clear all notifications in activity.
  • File sharing is difficult. I don't want all of the files I share to be saved in a one drive folder. I constantly run into issues with sharing a screenshot with multiple people, via multiple threads, and being asked if I want to replace or duplicate the file.
  • It has enabled us to more quickly initiate meetings, whereas before we had to send a meeting invite via outlook to trigger a meeting request with our web conferencing software. This has led to higher efficiency across the business.
Overall, it is easy to navigate and usability is great. The constraints around sharing files, managing notifications are lacking, and attending meetings via the mobile app are lacking.
I've only had to look into support recently, to figure out why the Teams desktop app crashes continuously on the OSX Beta Catalina. Thankfully, I was able to determine via one of the support forums that having a headset plugged into the computer causes this behavior and I was able to resolve the constant crashing. I found the support forums to be very valuable in this case.
Teams is like 100x better than Microsoft Lync for Mac. I also like how easy it is to manage threads and replies in Teams, similarly to Flowdock and Slack. I think that Slack offers better integrations, makes it easier to share files, has a better UI, is overall easier to use, but doesn't have as good web conferencing as Teams.
Microsoft Teams works well in regards to quickly setting up a meeting with a group, regardless of location, and collaborating. It is easy to navigate and I never have issues messaging people quickly. It can be frustrating when I am hosting a meeting on my laptop and have to also join the meeting from my phone, to avoid using my laptops native input as the microphone, and so that I can have better control over muting and my audio is a higher quality. It is not a good as other conferencing tools such as Zoom and GoToMeeting. The mobile app meeting layout is also not ideal, as the microphone and video buttons are so close, and sometimes lead to me turning on and off my video randomly instead of muting/unmuting. I actually have to lock my phone, which allows me to use the native iPhone mute/unmute call buttons to avoid this issue.