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Microsoft Teams breaks communication
Monday, January 13 2020
Over the last year or so I've developed a list of staples that I buy to serve as lunch items in my workplace. At first I would just get frozen Amy's burritos. But then I discovered Tres-brand kale & pinto bean pupusas, which almost completely replaced burritos in my in-office lunchtime diet. A couple months ago, I discovered black bean salad (wait, that has mango in it?) and Tostitos black bean & garlic corn tortilla chips. And then, most recently, Hannaford added another vegan flavor of Tres pupusa: black bean & sweet corn. So at this point, I have a variety of things to fix myself for lunch, even if most of them involve black beans. Generally the Red Hook Hannaford shelves these things at a fast enough rate to keep me in supply. Today, though, it was a little unnerving to find myself buying the last available tub of black bean salad. To lose one of my staples from the local Hannaford would probably be about as stressful as when corporate overlords switched our official in-office messaging app from Slack to Microsoft Teams (something they did back in December).
Let that serve as a segway. I'm finding Teams significantly less useful as a messaging app than Slack. Slack would make it clear that someone had a made a post that I needed to pay attention. There would be both a sound and a little red icon decoration. I've been using Teams for a few weeks now, and I've never once heard it make a sound. It uses red icon decorations to signal activity in a manner similar to Slack, but those decorations seem to persist long after I've acted on the activity they signal. This makes them useless. A good indication of how imperfectly Teams is functioning came this morning when I overheard people discussing Friday's accident on the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge. I'd posted a comment about it, complete with a picture of the accident, to the Teams "Random" channel, just like I would've back when we used Slack. Butnit was clear from those conversations I overheard that none of the people talking had seen my post. Had we still been using Slack, they all would've definitely seen my post.
Another problem with Teams is its inability to send messages just to the person doing the posting, which in Slack provides an important cross-device note-taking function as well as a zero-consequence way to explore the system's functionality. There's also an oppressive and seemingly deliberate clamp down on anything anyone might find fun. You only get the six basic emojis, and there is nothing like Giphy (and perhaps other plugins).
Meanwhile, chocolate hummus is evidently a thing, at least at the Red Hook Hannaford. It's nothing I would ever get.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?200113 feedback
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