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Ask HN: Making Microsoft Teams Bearable

by jxf on 7/18/24, 5:18 PM with 27 comments

My company was recently acquired. The acquiring company uses Microsoft Teams.

I'm not excited about this. For those of you who have been on a similar transition, what tips or tricks do you have for:

* making Teams more effective as a communications medium * being able to stay on top of recent conversations * managing notifications/interruptions

Browser extensions? Specific settings you'd turn on or off? Open to any ideas at all here.

  • by turtleyacht on 7/18/24, 6:19 PM

    Right-click the Send button to schedule messages.

    Turn off gif auto-loading.

    Use @Everyone to notify everyone in a chat (versus channels).

    Create a new chat to yourself as a pastebin.

    Some bots can be @-mentioned personally, so you can try subcommands (like help docs) without pinging everyone in the channel.

    When creating bullet lists, Shift-Enter can add to the current bullet. Nifty to paste a link, S-Enter, then include an explanation. Press Enter to start the next item.

    Press ```<Space> to start a code snippet.

  • by rk06 on 7/19/24, 2:53 AM

    - Do not rely on teams to store useful messages. Search is hard.

    Better to move such important info to a journal app like obsidian

    - you can pop out chats into separate sub window. Use it for important chats

    - teams channels are the worst thing I have ever seen and am forced to use. No one in right mind prefers it.

  • by homarp on 7/18/24, 5:42 PM

    write to your future self: when you judge a message will need to be found, reply to it with a custom #tag. (#futureme-projectA)

    later search for it.

    Unfortunately, so far, did not find how to read local db to build parallel search index.

  • by null_investor on 7/19/24, 9:12 AM

    Microsoft Teams really sucks. It's one of the reasons I'm leaving my current company. I can't stand it anymore. We sometimes use a page with WebRTC to communicate to avoid it.

    It's so unstable on a Mac, it always breaks, resets my configuration and leave me in bad place during meetings, all while wasting a lot of computing resources.

    Maybe get a Windows computer if you want to be less frustrated, but you'll get frustrated by other reasons then.

  • by Meph504 on 7/19/24, 1:18 PM

    One of the first options that open many doors is power automate, you add a lot of functionality that might make the transition easier.

    we have one client that uses teams and basically uses power automate to repost all the messages to slack. So the MS side and the slack people both get what they want out of it.

    There is a vast array of prefab templates

    You can also do most of this via graph if you would rather, but I find both to be bit painful to deal with, with power automate the infrastructure is provided so there is that, but its largely designed to be a no code drop block style environment which limits its functionality.

    Graph will give you a lot of control, and allow you to create things in a consistent manager, but the management of it, and time to develop often out way the value of the functionality.

  • by gtirloni on 7/19/24, 1:57 AM

    The chat/channel/whatever list is horrible. You can't group anything and there is no way to search. It's just scrolling up and down in the unordered list to find something.

    I thought Slack was bad but Teams is absolutely the worst. I don't have any tips to share, sorry.

  • by solardev on 7/19/24, 12:38 AM

    Set aside focus time on your calendar where you turn off notifications and don't accept meetings.

  • by mirekrusin on 7/19/24, 8:06 AM

    1. uninstall Teams

    2. install Slack or something else that doesn't have "Teams" in the name

    Teams has reputation of being the worst team in the world. Don't rely on the worst team in the world.

  • by callamdelaney on 7/22/24, 4:30 PM

    You can't fix Microsoft Teams, only Microsoft can do that. It's wild to me how Microsoft, Slack and others have taken what has existed for decades, eg irc, and completely ruined it. In both applications the UX is horrid and search either doesn't work or is a terrible experience. Teams on Mac is so buggy you might as well uninstall it, your communication over teams will be just as effective as if it was installed.

  • by Snacklive on 7/19/24, 10:50 PM

    Group chats for everything. Channels are horrible.

    If you are on Linux install chrome and install Teams as a WPA. On Firefox i think its purposely made bad.

  • by zeagle on 7/19/24, 2:22 AM

    My health region is in the process of switching to using teams for paging so I am in a similar boat. Somewhat brutal for notifications and reliability.