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Good team collaboration, but the internal integration and navigation remain messy
August 02, 2021

Good team collaboration, but the internal integration and navigation remain messy

Stefan Boeykens | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Teams

Since we have transitioned from plain Office licenses to an Office 365 subscription, we have started to adopt Microsoft Teams. It has become, at least partially, an improved way to centralise ourselves per project. It brings together team members, meeting notes, files and online meetings in a single environment. But this change is only partially implemented in our company.
  • Integration with Office applications (Word, Excel)
  • Integrated meetings
  • Centralising per project
  • It remains a confusing mixture of apps
  • Each individual component has better industry replacements (apart from Excel probably)
  • It is heavy on CPU, certainly on macOS, but also on Windows.
  • Integrated meetings
  • One license including Office tools
  • Works cross-platform for all people and devices
  • Single license type for all usage
  • gradual improvement on better digital collaborative work
  • Still a confusing mess of bringing everything together coherently
With the single Office 365 license we needed anyway, we found no further reason to also continue using Webex, Gotomeeting or Zoom (we had a Webex licence for a while). Thankfully, the Microsoft Teams meetings proved to work well and reliable, especially during COVID times, but we were applying them already before. Screen sharing, chat, file sharing work well and performance seems fine in our usage scenarios.

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

Yes

Are you happy with Microsoft Teams's feature set?

Yes

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?

Yes

Would you buy Microsoft Teams again?

Yes

If you are organising yourself around MS Office applications it has become the standard way in many companies to work and collaborate. We are often invited by other companies for meetings and projects, and Microsoft Teams is widely adopted. There is a lot of opportunities to link and integrate with other systems, but (honestly) we don't apply those a lot at the moment.

Microsoft Teams Feature Ratings

Project Management
6.6
Task Management
7
Scheduling
6
Workflow Automation
6
Mobile Access
8
Search
6
Communication
6.5
Chat
7
Notifications
7
Discussions
6
Surveys
7
Internal knowledgebase
4
Integrates with Outlook
8
File Sharing & Management
7.9
Versioning
8
Video files
7
Audio files
6
Document collaboration
9
Access control
8
Advanced security features
8
Device sync
9

Using Microsoft Teams

While the overall offer of Microsoft Teams is compelling, the whole organisation and UI has quite some confusing edges. There is a mixture of desktop apps, web apps and web apps displayed inside the desktop apps. Moreover, the CPU usage of some of the Microsoft Teams components are dreadful (e.g., OneDrive for Business is the highest CPU-consumer, even above 3D and video software). Somehow, the mixture of development approaches does not provide a really coherent view. As Microsoft Teams also incorporates the Planner, OneDrive, OneNote and Sharepoint toolsets, it doen't help that they all have different interfaces and that navigation between them is confusing. Files in OneDrive, versus Sharepoint online versus files inside a team files folder seem to be disjunct. Opening a Word file from the locally synced OneDrive does not present the same syncing experience as opening the same file via Microsoft Teams into the Desktop app. And occasional sync problems don't help either. That said, collaboratively editing MS Office files has improved a lot and is (almost) comparable to collaboratively editing Google documents. Almost.
ProsCons
Like to use
Technical support not required
Quick to learn
Convenient
Familiar
Unnecessarily complex
Not well integrated
Inconsistent
  • Joining a meeting
  • Sharing a file
  • Editing notes in OneNote notebook inside Microsoft Teams
  • Adding a Microsoft Teams Meeting on macOS cannot be done reliably from within Teams
  • Syncing folders and files between Teams, OneDrive and desktop OneDrive client
  • You still cannot search in a Wiki tab in Microsoft Teams, making the wiki useless
Yes - It works reasonably well on iPad, especially with the separate apps for Teams, OneNote, OneDrive, Word, Excel.

The web interface from within the desktop app takes getting used to. And the experience is not entirely coherent between platforms (mobile, desktop, browser). But all in all, it is sufficiently usable, albeit not as elegant as competitors.