MS is closing Skype and moving to teams that is...

[sapator]

A blotted piece of crap.

I don't like skype much but I definitely hate teams.
You need to be MS depended on all the office tools and I definitely not using it outside of the company.
So is there and alternative that the skype community is heading to or they are all have to go teams or go home?

[Shaggy Hiker]

I'd say it's the latter, and you can call it another side effect of COVID. I would guess that the overwhelming move to video chat meetings meant that Skype had no purpose any longer. There's Zoom, Teams, and I seem to remember one other, though all I can think of is holding meetings in Red Dead Redemption Online, which is by far the most entertaining.

[yereverluvinuncleber]

Another thing that Microsoft paid a lot for, mucked around with, made it worse then dumped it. It is a theme that re-occurs.

[sapator]

No DOS was a fine product.

[yereverluvinuncleber]

They bought DOS but left it largely alone. I'd say from 2003-2005 it all went a little downhill.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I'd say that Skype passed it's sell by date. Software expires.

[dday9]

Prior to COVID, we used RingCentral as our VoIP provider and they had a real time face-to-face app that worked very well. Slack has something built-in too, I've used it a little bit, but not enough to have a very strong opinion on it.

I will join the bandwagon and say that Teams is a piece of crap. I don't know what it is about the app, but something about it hijacks my audio and I get in a situation where my default output device for the operating system cannot be the same as the default output device for the app, otherwise the output device will simply stop working from within Teams.

There's a ton of other issues too. It kind of plays into what yereverluvinuncleber said in that it's sort of a trend where Microsoft, in an effort to establish first to market (or first at scale to market), they release something with a bunch of bugs with a promise to fix the issues. The issue is that the real bugs are probably architectural issues that arose from trying to get something out there and now probably cost too much to fix.

[TysonLPrice]

We had Skype and I remember when we switched to MS Teams I didn't like it. Now it is just a tool like any other that has changed over the years...embrace change

[Shaggy Hiker]

There's a ton of other issues too. It kind of plays into what yereverluvinuncleber said in that it's sort of a trend where Microsoft, in an effort to establish first to market (or first at scale to market), they release something with a bunch of bugs with a promise to fix the issues. The issue is that the real bugs are probably architectural issues that arose from trying to get something out there and now probably cost too much to fix.

I feel that it is something else. Microsoft seems to have a vision for a future, but an inability to quite figure out the steps from vision to reality. Azure DevOps, Teams, and Office 365 all seem to be parts of a vision for some kind of comprehensive work environment. DevOps does source control, but it also offers up a series of operations management tools, sprint planning, and interactivity with other parts of the vision. Teams seems to do the same, and Office 365 might be the heart of it all, with the integrated office productivity software. All of them are kind of hinting at a good place, but all of them fall short of getting to that good place. It feels to me like they are trying to do all things in an integrated fashion to the extent that nothing is done well, but all of it is integrated.

We use DevOps at work, while I use GitHub and GitLab for personal things. The source control for all three is the same (Git), and GitHub and GitLab are virtually interchangeable as far as the interface goes....and then there's DevOps. You can get the same things done, just more awkwardly. I don't think that any of them have done a really good job with the interface, and I think I understand that, but DevOps is certainly a level of clunkiness beyond the other two, and it feels like that might be because DevOps offers up so much more than source control is just one little piece that they are trying to integrate into a bunch of planning tools.

[dday9]

Not sure if you noticed, but DevOps switched the branching order in the "title".

So now it says "{user} proposes to merge {your branch} into {parent branch}" which is great, only a few months back it said "{user} proposes to merge {parent branch} from {your branch}". So, force of habit of copying the branch on the right bit me when bringing my pull requests up-to-date with their parent branch for a while.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I have not noticed. I don't tend to read what they write, as the wording often is less than ideal.

[sapator]

We currently have one major website at Azure n it's going terribly. It lags, we got hacked and on busy days it only seems to work with more than 6-10 instances that of course cost money.
We are planing to update our core software that handles pretty much everything to Azure. God help us!
As for office 365, If we exclude the continuous freeze to read data and lags and occasional crash that I never experience with the previous versions. Yes it's the core of all this BS.
I forgot mail. We never dare to put Azure graph as our main mail client. We are doing that in peripheral emails like sending a progress board to company - companies members and it will fail once per week. Also we got a nice surprise the other day as we where sending more that 1000 mails in one go. Apparently they have a lock somewhere so it crashed. Ah also there is an inside limit for email, ye how about that so one day it just stopped sending and started whistling, ffhhiee fhiee fhiiee send your email and count to 3. Now exchange, i think there was a minor error in one email batch in exchange 6-7 years ago. That was it.

So that is my personal experience in a big company and not as a home user. It's not theory it's practice and in practice all these MS is doing beat the living hell out of me why people are going with it. It's not like there are no options but the big heads feel "safe" with MS tools. I feel threatened for year and years but with the cloud it went into a nightmare.

On the up side. I don't give a F, they want to get burned , people running left and right with their hair on fire. Fine, I get paid either way to deal with their MS BS.

[dday9]

I do not like how Azure app services will "spin down" if there isn't any activity after a certain amount of time. It always seems like that time limit is arbitrary and then the next time you go to hit the service, it will take a while to "spin up".

The majority of my contract jobs for web development do not rely on Microsoft products. I mainly stick with PHP and MySQL (or Postgres) and very rarely will use NodeJS. Unfortunately, my 9-5 job is a Microsoft shop and so I still deal with it on a daily basis.

It's just so odd because I came from a VB.NET WinForm desktop development background and almost never had any issues. It was only when I touched ASP.NET and Microsoft's cloud-based services that my feelings for the company changed.

[Zvoni]

There's Zoom, Teams, and I seem to remember one other,

Cisco WebEx?

As for TEAMS: That "versioning"-thingy that Teams is doing for uploaded files is driving me up the walls, since i had to distribute Excel-Files with macros to our Teams-Channels.
You find a bug, you correct it, you upload it, and people complain that the bug is still there....... just because the versioning thinks it's smarter than you....

[Shaggy Hiker]

Cisco WebEx?

Yeah, WebEx. That seems to have fallen away, but I've used it a few times for some meetings.

[sapator]

Today as it was a busy day because all the work from yesterday( that was a national day off) transferred to today, I wanted to count on how many "actions" outlook will lag or stop responding, since we had that converstation.
So on average of per 10 messages that I send, reply or process office lagged. The best one was when (we have 5 or 6 different mail folders (with couple of tens of subtrees) ) I tried to go to another subfolder that is busy as it's a call center . I guess it hasn't cached yet and outlook lagged for about 45sec - 1 minute. Not bad, on the initial versions I got lags up to 5 minutes. After all a lag is a lag if you make it to be a lag.

[TysonLPrice]

All this talk reminded me it has been over fours years since I worked in the office. I probably would have retired by now but it is too easy to make my salary at home.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Today as it was a busy day because all the work from yesterday( that was a national day off) transferred to today, I wanted to count on how many "actions" outlook will lag or stop responding, since we had that converstation.
So on average of per 10 messages that I send, reply or process office lagged. The best one was when (we have 5 or 6 different mail folders (with couple of tens of subtrees) ) I tried to go to another subfolder that is busy as it's a call center . I guess it hasn't cached yet and outlook lagged for about 45sec - 1 minute. Not bad, on the initial versions I got lags up to 5 minutes. After all a lag is a lag if you make it to be a lag.

I'd have to say that your system sucks, but I think you have said about as much, so it won't be a surprise. I don't have an issue with Outlook either at work or at home. Speed and reliability both seem fine. I would also say that speed and reliability of Azure DevOps is also good. You can rely on the interface to be bizarre, but it's reliably so.

[sapator]

Yes you are partially correct , out system(s) mainly suck, except of the important ones, as I'm not part of a software organization we are treated as "if it works you don't need a budget for new" , till we start crashing. We don't expect other divisions to understand the need of and "upgrade". On the hack attack they where forced to get extra tools for Azure and pay extra for the services.
But the comparison here is system A with previous components and system A with Azure components, that is what I'm mentioning.

[Shaggy Hiker]

When it comes to Azure, I can easily compare previous systems to Azure, and it's not a happy comparison. When it comes to Outlook, I can't remember what we used before, but it has been perhaps over 20 years...heck, I can't remember how long it has been, let alone what we were using before Outlook. Therefore, I have no comparison to make on that one.

For a long time, the agency I work for had complete control of what it used. That went away...5-8 years ago, I think. The move to Azure seems like it was far more recent, so perhaps only 2-3 years. Prior to that we used GitLab for repos, Slack for messaging and communication, and....something I never used and don't remember for scheduling. On those things, I do have a frame of reference to compare to. Azure is trying to integrate everything, but the interface leaves much to be desired.

[TysonLPrice]

When it comes to Azure, I can easily compare previous systems to Azure, and it's not a happy comparison. When it comes to Outlook, I can't remember what we used before, but it has been perhaps over 20 years...heck, I can't remember how long it has been, let alone what we were using before Outlook. Therefore, I have no comparison to make on that one.

For a long time, the agency I work for had complete control of what it used. That went away...5-8 years ago, I think. The move to Azure seems like it was far more recent, so perhaps only 2-3 years. Prior to that we used GitLab for repos, Slack for messaging and communication, and....something I never used and don't remember for scheduling. On those things, I do have a frame of reference to compare to. Azure is trying to integrate everything, but the interface leaves much to be desired.

I worked at a couple places that had Lotus Notes.

[Shaggy Hiker]

We had something called Banyan Vines. It was an early LAN-based messaging system with few features. It did have one AWESOME feature, though, which was that you could send an anonymous message to another computer on the network. That message would pop up in the center of the screen in an official looking box with no indication of who sent it or that it was even from Banyan Vines.

At the time, we had loads of people who were quite new to computers. They were easily buffaloed by them, too, and here was a way to send official looking messages incognito. Hilarity ensued. One director, who could barely operate a mouse, decided to teach a staff biologist (who couldn't even find the mouse) how to move into the modern age by writing an email. They sat down together and spent a couple hours carefully crafting a response to some technical issue with regional ramifications. Not a casual endeavor at all. At one point, a message popped up in the center of the screen saying that the network would be going down in 20 minutes. About five minutes later, a second message popped up saying that the network would be going down in 10 minutes. A minute after that, a message popped up saying that the network would be going down in 5 minutes. At that point, they panicked and shut off the computer....without saving their work, whereupon the guy in the next office popped in to ask if they'd gotten his 'messages'.

[TysonLPrice]

We had something called Banyan Vines. It was an early LAN-based messaging system with few features. It did have one AWESOME feature, though, which was that you could send an anonymous message to another computer on the network. That message would pop up in the center of the screen in an official looking box with no indication of who sent it or that it was even from Banyan Vines.

At the time, we had loads of people who were quite new to computers. They were easily buffaloed by them, too, and here was a way to send official looking messages incognito. Hilarity ensued. One director, who could barely operate a mouse, decided to teach a staff biologist (who couldn't even find the mouse) how to move into the modern age by writing an email. They sat down together and spent a couple hours carefully crafting a response to some technical issue with regional ramifications. Not a casual endeavor at all. At one point, a message popped up in the center of the screen saying that the network would be going down in 20 minutes. About five minutes later, a second message popped up saying that the network would be going down in 10 minutes. A minute after that, a message popped up saying that the network would be going down in 5 minutes. At that point, they panicked and shut off the computer....without saving their work, whereupon the guy in the next office popped in to ask if they'd gotten his 'messages'.

We had an IBM mainframe email system that was called PROFS, I think. If you knew the file structure you could read email right off the tables. If someone put a read notice on it that would not trigger it.

[gaouser]

This is making me think we should make an IM server/client on the VBForumsCommunity GitHub account. Lets not use pipe as seperator in commands this time

[sapator]

When it comes to Azure, I can easily compare previous systems to Azure, and it's not a happy comparison. When it comes to Outlook, I can't remember what we used before, but it has been perhaps over 20 years...heck, I can't remember how long it has been, let alone what we were using before Outlook. Therefore, I have no comparison to make on that one.

For a long time, the agency I work for had complete control of what it used. That went away...5-8 years ago, I think. The move to Azure seems like it was far more recent, so perhaps only 2-3 years. Prior to that we used GitLab for repos, Slack for messaging and communication, and....something I never used and don't remember for scheduling. On those things, I do have a frame of reference to compare to. Azure is trying to integrate everything, but the interface leaves much to be desired.

Just now:
8/5/2025 16:06:06 - : httperror: ServiceUnavailable

It's the issue when azure - graph is trying to send email . Fortunately after a nightly dream envision I redirect everything to a lonesome "hidden" exchange server we have in a dirty muddy corner of the server room. Yep Azure is veeery veeery good. Yep, yep

[Shaggy Hiker]

That is common as I'm rude sometimes

NO!! Really???? I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you!!!!

[sapator]

Ah the post is back. It's a miracle I tell you! Praise the undelete button!
And now I'm deleting it myself. In your face! (not Shaggy)

[gaouser]

We had Skype and I remember when we switched to MS Teams I didn't like it. Now it is just a tool like any other that has changed over the years...embrace change

crypto chat bots were E V E R Y W H E R E

[gaouser]

We had something called Banyan Vines. It was an early LAN-based messaging system with few features. It did have one AWESOME feature, though, which was that you could send an anonymous message to another computer on the network. That message would pop up in the center of the screen in an official looking box with no indication of who sent it or that it was even from Banyan Vines.

At the time, we had loads of people who were quite new to computers. They were easily buffaloed by them, too, and here was a way to send official looking messages incognito. Hilarity ensued. One director, who could barely operate a mouse, decided to teach a staff biologist (who couldn't even find the mouse) how to move into the modern age by writing an email. They sat down together and spent a couple hours carefully crafting a response to some technical issue with regional ramifications. Not a casual endeavor at all. At one point, a message popped up in the center of the screen saying that the network would be going down in 20 minutes. About five minutes later, a second message popped up saying that the network would be going down in 10 minutes. A minute after that, a message popped up saying that the network would be going down in 5 minutes. At that point, they panicked and shut off the computer....without saving their work, whereupon the guy in the next office popped in to ask if they'd gotten his 'messages'.

I would've loved trolling others with it if I even existed as a sperm cell then.

[TysonLPrice]

Our Microsoft Teams has a Copilot option now. It is very similar to ChatGTP. I've been getting coding samples from it. I'm really impressed. It has practically made Google obsolete for me at work.

Microsoft 365 Copilot in Microsoft Teams is an AI-powered tool that helps users with various tasks, including summarizing chat conversations, generating notes in meetings, and suggesting action items. It can also provide real-time insights during meetings and events. Copilot can be accessed through the Chat tab in Teams, by opening it in a specific chat, or by selecting the Copilot icon during a meeting.