Microsoft Teams has come a long way and really adds value to our work communication
November 30, 2021
Microsoft Teams has come a long way and really adds value to our work communication
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is used in my organization for the following purposes: Instant messenger - multiple groups or direct 1:1. File & text sharing. Video conferencing integration with other systems such as Jira - We don't use them primarily due to company restrictions, but they are there and I've asked for a few that would have benefited us. Additionally, I have used it for video interviews. It provides are very good overall user experience that remains pretty consistent for desktop, web, and mobile applications.
- Audio calls - the quality is VERY good even when there are drops in the video quality and when interacting with multiple locations around the world.
- Rich text editing - although slightly hidden, it's really good.
- Integrations with other systems - there are a lot of them. Can contribute to a seamless work experience.
- Screen sharing with shared control - works really well overall. Remote/shared control does not work with applications that run with "elevated permissions" on Windows.
- Updates come without notice and we find out about features by chance or through experimentation. Feature rollout for the mobile applications seems to be further ahead than the rollout for desktop and web. This could be because of our organization's approach to managing Teams though.
- Mandatory Rich text copy-paste by default. Although it works great in a lot of cases, I'd like to see a "paste as plain text" option as it will make my life much easier when the formatting of the pasted text looks horrible in Teams.
- Fluctuating performance and random crashes. This can be infuriating during a hectic communications-heavy workday. Overall, this is an Electron-based app on desktop and eats a lot of memory.
- There's a CPU usage spike for the person who starts sharing his/her camera - sometimes this spike can cause other apps or even the entire OS to crash.
- There are two major tabs - "Chat" and "Teams". Around 90% of my colleagues want to use only one tab and thus ignore all the established channels in the "Teams" tab/section. Instead, they resolve to named (sometimes long-running) ad-hoc chats.
- Searching for an old message in the history yields somewhat random results so it's better to stick to recent communication.
- Calls - audio and video. They are a part of our daily work. For me, it's sometimes 6 to 8 hours on a very busy day.
- Screen sharing - fast and reliable. This is something we use multiple times per day.
- Sending text messages and some history capability. Although I'm one of the few people that uses rich text formatting, even the plain text and screenshot-sharing features work really fast.
- Positive: works really well and fulfills our communication needs.
- Negative: Since it's not enforced for the entire organization a lot of colleagues (and thus my group also) are forced to use other similar tools such as WebEx, GoToWebinar, Telegram, WhatsApp, and Viber.
- Positive: the mobile and web apps are really useful as well!
- Negative: our organization struggles to balance the rollout of new releases of Teams, integration with other systems, and keeping things secure.
Although competitors such as Slack and Webex can really stand up to MS Teams, our organization chose Teams as the predominant work communicator. Working within this decision, we are overall happy with the feature set that Teams provides. In my opinion, the advantages of its competitors over Teams are as follows: Webex offers a slightly better call experience. Slack offers a better and much more well-known text communication. Mobile IMs like Viber, Telegram, and Whatsapp work with your mobile number, so they are more resilient to Microsoft Cloud issues or anything happening with your company account.
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?
Yes
Did implementation of Microsoft Teams go as expected?
No
Would you buy Microsoft Teams again?
Yes