Item: Microsoft Teams
Rating: 1
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My company is an English translation and education company and we contract with other companies to teach English to their employees. Usually these lessons are conducted on the client's company premises, but due to COVID-19, since March the lessons have been taught online. At first we used Webex, but since around May, my company made the decision to use Microsoft Teams to conduct virtual lessons.

Pros and Cons

It does nothing well

Better whiteboard
Improved screensharing options
Work out the login bugs
Fix problems with connecting to users' video
Fix the buggy chat

Return on Investment

Waste of time signing into meetings or trying to share content

Alternatives Considered

Zoom, Skype and Cisco Webex Meetings

It's hard to think of an app that doesn't do a better job at video conferencing than Microsoft Teams. Zoom, Skype, and Webex are the three I'm most familiar with. All three provide far more stabilization, better screen sharing options, better chat functions, and are less difficult to enter the room. Microsoft Teams fails on absolutely every level and has zero redeeming features.

Usability

Because it is a [terrible] app, it is buggy as can be, and it is an absolute headache to use. I have begged my company to switch to Zoom, Webex, or some other option ever since. Every time I try to conduct a lesson through Teams, I encounter no shortage of problems that sometimes cut into my classtime in order to fix.

Support Rating

What support? They have a bunch of help articles and nothing else. There is no support offered, no one to contact.

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?

Would you buy Microsoft Teams again?

Other Software Used

Zoom, Skype, Cisco Webex Meetings

Likelihood to Recommend

I have used many different apps since COVID-19 to conduct virtual lessons, such as Zoom, Skype, Webex, etc. And of all the apps I have used, Teams is by far the absolute worst. The whiteboard is completely useless—provides no useful features and arbitrarily changes the font size and color and gives me no control over it. The chat is very buggy—in one of my classes, students could not even see when I typed things into the chat. Student videos often vanish for no reason. The screen share function is unbelievably wonky. Due to the whiteboard being terrible, I often will share either Photoshop or Word so I can illustrate things to my students. But many times, those apps won't show up in the screen share drawer and so I'll just have to share my entire desktop. This may not sound like a problem, but it is very annoying in case I have to switch to another app while students are viewing my screen, such as if I have to answer a question a student asks in chat. Furthermore, lately I keep getting "There was a problem try again later" when I try to enter the meetings.

Microsoft Teams Review

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Teams