Forum Discussion
How can Teams replace skype??
ChrisWebbTech Dam that sucks. It doesn't tell you that anywhere and I wasted hours upon hours today on this. Pretty poor documentation and feature if you ask me.
Why would this take days but everything else in 365 takes just a few min??
Totally turned off by Teams at this point.
- Aug 01, 2019The only valid complaint you have so far is multi window chat which is coming in the not too distant future. You can copy and paste all day long you are Probabaly trying to chat with a Skype user since it seems your the only one set to using Teams. When you do that you don’t get all the same features as chatting with other teams users.
You seriously need to go watch some sessions / YouTube videos from ignite and other materials about teams because it sounds like you did absolutely no research, fired up teams then came here and started complaining about something you don’t understand. - Stuart MooreAug 01, 2019Copper ContributorJust go back to Skype consumer dude, if it works for you
- Stuart MooreAug 01, 2019Copper Contributor
BumSkull is Chat hiding under the ellipsis on the "rail" on the left of the client?
- BumSkullAug 01, 2019Iron Contributor
Stuart Moore No it was not
- BumSkullAug 01, 2019Iron Contributor
So this morning Chat finally showed up.... Did a small test with chat, well there seems to be a ton of missing features and the UX is terrible to navigate. Skype is 10 times more usable for chats. It opens a new window where you have your chats right there shows you everyone your talking to in a nice window to click back and forth on your conversations. Teams however you have to hover over the chat icon and try to figure out who you have talked to. This list it makes doesn't make much sense. Shows recent with things I don't even know what they are and definitely never had chat with. Can't seem to remove Suggested..
We can't send attachments, paste files/screenshots, ect.
After all this work to get the thing to actually work, I can absolutely say unless there is a total UX overall Teams is not going to work out. Shrinking the window to the smallest it goes is still way bigger than it should be and then the usability of Teams drops from minimal to non-existent.
Im sorry Teams dev but I just do not like this thing at all. It may work better and more modern under the hood but the UX is just so bad and the missing ability that skype has are show stoppers for us. I use the paste into chat probably 20+ times a day for sending screenshots of things.
I really hope Teams makes huge improvements before Skype is shut down.
- Aug 01, 2019There are a huge amount of training resources for you to dive into!
Also, if you have ideas, or things you want to change, go to uservoice and make requests/ ideas there! You won’t get much attention on those kind of posts here...
https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/ - BumSkullAug 01, 2019Iron Contributor
ChrisWebbTech Oh yes I have done research. Couldn't find one bit of documentation saying features only work Teams to Teams. You can say all you want that I didn't do enough research but I spent quite a bit of time reading MS documentation on how to plan and implement an upgrade to Teams. Probably more than most will ever do. It states that Teams can communicate with Skype but it doesn't say how limited this ability is. If nothing but text chat works Teams to Skype, how could anyone ever plan a migration? Its all or nothing and that doesn't work well in real world environments. If there is better documentation out there I didn't find it in my searching. Got better links to documentation?
To me multi-window chat is very different. This implies that each chat you have going open in a separate window. This would be lots of wasted space and time going between multiple open windows. Looking for it to be like skype keep all you chats in one nice view where it shows active chats and you click between them in the same window. The multiwindow you refer to I assume is this? https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/16926739-multi-window-for-chats-and-more
It clearly shows in the screenshots provided for this single chat open in its own window. This does not seem productive or as easily user friendly as Skype currently is.
- BumSkullAug 01, 2019Iron Contributor
adam deltinger I have voted and opened multiple items on uservoice.
- RobOKAug 01, 2019Bronze Contributor
We all share your frustration at one time or another with Microsoft. Been there, done that on searching through documentation.
- Multi window is a big issue for many people, over time I have gotten "used to it", but strongly hope they change it. FWIW, Teams was heavily influenced by Slack. Consider Teams to be Skype+Slack+Sharepoint. That doesn't help your usability, but maybe some context. Slack does not have multi window, Skype does.
- Interop between Skype and Teams -- we did this for only a short time pilot and then fully converted to Teams. We eased people into Teams promoting it for "1:1 Chat" and built from there. You may want to chart a plan that gets fully to Teams sooner than you thought. In our fully Teams environment we have no complaints from people (other than above)
- Pasting works fine in Teams to Teams
- Compared to the past, Microsoft has been iterating fast. A lot of feature releases, but not always the features we want or when we want them, but this is much better than the past of 12-18 month release cycles
- Give Teams a chance. Try to move beyond thinking of it as a "Skype replacement" (your immediate need) and think about future opportunities too. It has integration with a lot of apps, a useful command line at the top, persistent chat, Sharepoint integration
Most of the people here are fellow users, trying to help a brother out.
Good luck,
Rob.
EDIT: multi-window is the 7th top request, you are not alone!
- BumSkullAug 01, 2019Iron Contributor
RobOK Thanks
Beyond 1:1 chat, there just isn't anything in Teams that we want or even see using any time soon. SharePoint is a dud. We implemented it back on SP 2010 and everyone hated it. We have attempted to start again with SP 365 but adaption is again minimal at best. Noone likes it at all. The integration with Teams is meaningless if we don't use SP to begin with. It seems like thats a HUGE thing to Teams and we just don't use it. Like O365 groups, they are of no use to us.
Sure people do meetings but 99% of them are just voice call in, for example freeconferencecall.
There were many users that were using Slack for awhile but when we went to 365 they were moved to Skype.
I did try to look at the app integrations but they just seemed like more 365 items that we don't use or even assign licenses for. Im not sure about 3rd party apps but we don't really have any off the shelf apps to integrate with and even if we did integrate I don't see any usefulness of integrating into a chat platform. More reading is needed to understand why app integration would be anything anyone would want.
I really will give teams another shot once a new UX gets created for it. Currently teams seems like it just purely not meant for us. its deeply integrated into Sharepoint, Group chat and video conferencing. All of which we just don't have a use for.