Item: Microsoft Teams
Rating: 3
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Microsoft Teams is used mostly by every department in the organization for communicating within the company (voice chat, video chat and text chat). On that aspect we can say it kind of meets the expectations and address the problems of staying in touch given the COVID-19 situation.

Pros and Cons

Good audio quality.
Good video quality.
Possibility to share your entire screen or one specific app.

Better UX/UI.
Improve Bluetooth connection stability.
More responsive.
Reduce the number of clicks to do actions.
Reduce the number of notifications.
Give more flexibility to users.
Get rid of documentation tabs, or make good text formatting options.

Return on Investment

POSITIVE: We can communicate with each other without having to be at the same place, so we save on plane tickets sometimes.
POSITIVE: Meetings can be recorded, so people who missed it can view it at a later time.
BAD: People chat more instead of speaking and quality of communications decreases.
BAD: Teams documentation is badly formatted, hard to find and hard to edit which results in loss of time.
BAD: Teams often has issues, so we often have to wait for people to solve the issues before we can hold the meeting which results in loss of time.

Alternatives Considered

Personally I'm not a fan of applications that try to do everything. I prefer software that are dedicated to one topic, for instance Adobe PhotoShop is a vast and complex solution for editing images.

I think Teams offers comparable quality in terms of audio, video and text chat to software like Skype or Zoom. However, when compared to Jira for planning and Confluence for documentation, Teams doesn't even compete.

Usability

Using Teams is time consuming. Every action requires multiple clicks, notifications are always covering my screen and the interface is poorly designed so the usability is the main area where Teams could improve.

Support Rating

I couldn’t say. IT controls that aspect, so I have no idea. I guess it offers the same support as any other Microsoft product.

Key Insights

Do you think Microsoft Teams delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Microsoft Teams's feature set?

Did Microsoft Teams live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Microsoft Teams go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Microsoft Teams again?

Other Software Used

Adobe Illustrator CC, Adobe PhotoShop, Atlassian Confluence, Atlassian JIRA Align (formerly AgileCraft), Adobe InDesign, Apple iWork, 1Password

Likelihood to Recommend

Microsoft Teams is well suited [to] voice chat and video chat. It helps large team of people stay in touch.

However, all the other stuff Teams is trying to achieve (documentation, planning board, etc.) are poorly developed. On top of that the fact that I always need to go from one channel to another makes me lose precious time. All that is offered through a bad UI/UX experience.

I think Teams should only focus on communication, where it does a good job, and remove all the other features that are better handled with dedicated software like Confluence for documentation and Jira for planning and managing task or Things by Cultured Code for a more simple solution.

A good communication tool with a poor UX, too many features and bad notifications

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Teams