I am an active user of Microsoft Teams, and have been for the past six or so years since the organization I work at primarily uses the software for all online communication and collaboration in our hybrid setup. This is also why I have been extensively writing about Teams here at Neowin for the past year, ranging from general news posts, to deep-dives, to editorials, and everything in between. That said, I am not an expert by any means, and my opinion on the software is greatly shaped by personal experiences with it. I also recognize that many people absolutely abhor Teams, but personally, I have a love-hate relationship with it. Here"s why.
I love Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is a critical component of my daily workflow, it"s the first piece of software that I boot up after logging in to my PC. I then use it to respond to messages across my organization, schedule and attend meetings, share documents, react to messages in group chats, and more. Although my Teams mobile use is limited to interacting with messages and taking those odd calls on-the-go, my overall Teams usage covers most of the main use-cases of the software.
I love Teams for a multitude of reasons. Since my organization is well-entrenched in the Microsoft ecosystem and heavily utilizes SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, Azure, Power BI, and other Microsoft 365 office apps, it"s a huge benefit to have most of these services accessible directly within the Teams app. It has essentially become an "everything app" as it features strong integration with other Microsoft software, and it sometimes feels magical to directly open a Power BI report in Teams, or open full-fledged Office documents in a software that"s primarily meant for online calls and messages.
Since all our documents are either stored on SharePoint Online and/or OneDrive, it"s great to have them on my fingertips without constantly opening up the browser or bookmarking online locations for quick access. Now, I can have them all in Teams.
It"s also nice that, for all integrated applications, any changes are synced to the online version automatically; you don"t need to trigger manual refreshes.
Online meetings feature quite a bunch of useful capabilities too, regardless of whether you"re conducting 1:1 calls or conference calls. The ability to send reaction emoji anytime, record content, take notes, enable transcriptions, share screen, collaborate on a shared screen, take control of someone else"s screen are all honestly great features that work seamlessly in most cases. The fact that any collateral related to a meeting, such as recordings and notes, can also be directly accessed from Teams emphasizes the feature-rich capabilities of the software.
Multi-account support is nice too, because it means that I can switch to my other work accounts when required. This is important for me because I work as an offshore contractor / consultant for multiple clients on behalf of my organization.
I also like the various customization options for my profile and the Teams app"s behavior, ranging from chat layouts to themes, ringtones, and more.
All in all, I feel like Microsoft Teams meets most, if not all, of my daily workflow requirements, which is why I love this software. But there are also other aspects of it that make me want to pull my hair out, this is also why I hate it.
I hate Microsoft Teams
Since Microsoft Teams is an important part of my workflow for all the reasons described in the previous section, it is also important for me that it remains reliable. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. Many times, Teams simply won"t show me notifications at all until I launch the app in the foreground. I"ll get notifications on my phone app, but none on desktop, and even vice versa sometimes. This means that I occasionally miss out on important communication happening during the workday.
The unreliable nature of the software also extends to what I can just describe as glitches. There are times when my phone is ringing due to a Teams call, but the desktop won"t show it at all. Similarly, there are instances when I join a call but do not see any call controls like "unmute", "end call" etc., and the only way to fix this is to exit the call interface and rejoin the call. Making excuses for your software"s glitches may seem like a childish thing to do that may annoy my co-workers and superiors, but since everyone experiences them more frequently than they would like, it serves as an understandable excuse.
And even when glitches are not a problem, that"s when performance issues often strike. There will be moments where I"ll just wait for a chat to fully load seconds after I click on it. Now, seconds don"t sound like a lot, but it"s just idle time you"re wasting for your software to respond. This even extends to the mobile app where people will react to a message with an emoji, but when you try to see what emoji it is, you"ll just get a whitespace for several minutes, leaving you wondering what people actually think. Performance can be absolutely horrendous sometimes.
I also feel that it is important to highlight that while Teams works well with other pieces of Microsoft software, it doesn"t really seem to gel well with its counterpart on other platforms. I often use Teams on the web too since, despite having multi-account support in the desktop app, it"s easier to just have one account open on the desktop app and another in the browser. Usually, the former authenticates me within a couple of seconds, while the latter makes me wait for a couple of minutes on end while I just wait and stare blankly at the Teams animations on the screen. And then, I"ll get treated with a random error that is often just resolved by clearing the cookies / cache, and restarting the app.
Of course, I understand that there are other problems with the software too - which would explain even more why many people hate it -, but these are just some of the reasons why I personally detest using it sometimes.
Overall take
Microsoft Teams is a great piece of software on paper that feels absolutely magical when it is working correctly. The feature-rich nature of the tool along with deep integration with the Microsoft ecosystem means that you will be using it as your one-stop shop for many workflows, especially if you are well-entrenched in the ecosystem.
However, Teams" flaws, unreliability, and performance issues just can"t be ignored. Sometimes, it feels like the software is misbehaving on purpose and wants to be as much of a nuisance to you as it can. This can be particularly frustrating when you"re in the middle of something important but are held back by Teams" shenanigans.
Of course, my experience with Teams isn"t expansive, there are many other features that I don"t really use such as the built-in app store and Copilot, so my love-hate relationship is based purely on how I have used the utility in the past. The best way to describe Teams in my eyes would be to make it analogous to a printer: It works great most of the time, but it senses your fear and urgency, and that"s when it decides to malfunction and ruin all the goodwill it has accumulated.
Do you use Microsoft Teams in your daily workflows? How has your experience been with the software? Let us know in the comments section below!