Forum Discussion
View Teams and Chat in the same Left List View like Slack does?
adam deltinger No offense meant here Adam, but I think you are missing the point. It is very easy to miss a notification if you are away from your phone or computer and then later realize that someone messaged you because you were either in the Chat windows or the Teams window. There is also a major inefficiency factor at play when you have to keep clicking all day long between two different windows vs just being able to one click the direct conversation, whether it is a one-on-one or teams chat or even just simply see in the native/default Teams view that you missed a conversation. I know you can click on Activity but that is the point...yet another window you have to click into to see what you missed.
The following solutions all come with this direct and simplified view because they know that it is the most expedient route to get things done:
- Slack
- Zoho Cliq
- RingCentral
- Pumble
- Google Chat
- Chanty
- flock
- Rocket Chat
- Heck - even Discord does this!
Why would so many companies make their app have a default view like this if it wasn't needed or important?! Most people are using Teams on a daily basis for exchanging information, questions, files, etc. When you have to keep selecting between the Chat or Teams view and then specifically selecting the conversation/person vs just clicking on the left side ONE time to get directly into the conversation thread, it becomes both a time and productivity stealer that can add up to hours per week or month.
The question to Microsoft is this: Why not give us a simplified view that makes it easy to be productive? I mean if all of the solutions mentioned above provide this simplified view by default, they could be on to something (sarcasm implied). We have recently switched from using Zoho Cliq to Teams because of the tight integration between Outlook, To-Do/Planner and a few other platforms we use. My entire team is mourning the loss of the one click and let's get busy view. It may not seem like a big deal but when Teams is your team's primary means of communication and collaboration all day long, it can be cumbersome at best but more importantly, costly in lost time/revenue that could otherwise be spent building your product and solution offerings to your clients.
First off you can open chats in a new window and also use the command bar to start new chats etc without leaving the teams tab! Also regarding not missing chats there should be notifications! Also users can customize these further to fit their needs.
Adam
- I couldn't agree more in a busy environment not having a single dashboard is annoying. It's preventing wide adoption and integration to our environment. The UI should be customizable like PowerBI, it shouldn't be hard to doc chats into a single window.
adam deltinger
If Microsoft wants to compete with their Teams App then they should make it easier, and more convenient than Slack, not less.
Teams currently is very annoying to use. I mean you LITERALLY cannot copy and paste into a teams chat without copying to notepad first. I mean what app in 2021 cannot handle a "paste as plain text"? Copying out of a Teams chat also copies all the crap of the user etc. It is so annoying. If I want to copy a computer name, I want just the computer name, not the "sent by" and spaces and the date it was posted etc.
We use Group Policy and we copy text from the GPO app and they show up as gobledygook in Teams.- Well, at 2 days in we had to abandon Teams and switch back to Zoho Cliq. Why? Because Teams was not consistently alerting us that we had been sent a message, regardless if it was a one-on-one chat or Teams channel message. And then it would randomly pop up a bunch of notification alerts, even for messages that you have already viewed or replied to, hours or days ago. Nope. That is not going to work. We can't be the only people experiencing this issue.
For reference, this was happening on both the Windows and phone apps. I know Microsoft has been trying to make Teams the default "work hub" for organizations but something is amiss with alerting as well as ease of use. Perhaps we will revisit Teams again someday but for now we will have to stick with an outside solution that consistently works and is easier to use.
adam deltinger No offense meant here Adam, but I think you are missing the point. It is very easy to miss a notification if you are away from your phone or computer and then later realize that someone messaged you because you were either in the Chat windows or the Teams window. There is also a major inefficiency factor at play when you have to keep clicking all day long between two different windows vs just being able to one click the direct conversation, whether it is a one-on-one or teams chat or even just simply see in the native/default Teams view that you missed a conversation. I know you can click on Activity but that is the point...yet another window you have to click into to see what you missed.
The following solutions all come with this direct and simplified view because they know that it is the most expedient route to get things done:
- Slack
- Zoho Cliq
- RingCentral
- Pumble
- Google Chat
- Chanty
- flock
- Rocket Chat
- Heck - even Discord does this!
Why would so many companies make their app have a default view like this if it wasn't needed or important?! Most people are using Teams on a daily basis for exchanging information, questions, files, etc. When you have to keep selecting between the Chat or Teams view and then specifically selecting the conversation/person vs just clicking on the left side ONE time to get directly into the conversation thread, it becomes both a time and productivity stealer that can add up to hours per week or month.
The question to Microsoft is this: Why not give us a simplified view that makes it easy to be productive? I mean if all of the solutions mentioned above provide this simplified view by default, they could be on to something (sarcasm implied). We have recently switched from using Zoho Cliq to Teams because of the tight integration between Outlook, To-Do/Planner and a few other platforms we use. My entire team is mourning the loss of the one click and let's get busy view. It may not seem like a big deal but when Teams is your team's primary means of communication and collaboration all day long, it can be cumbersome at best but more importantly, costly in lost time/revenue that could otherwise be spent building your product and solution offerings to your clients.
This was from 2021... it is now 2025, and Teams is still terrible. I miss notifications all of the time in Teams. When I do notice the little activity bell, it has the number 1... but when I click in I see that in some cases there are dozens of missed activities. When using Slack I never encountered this.
Our company is making us go to Teams. There is a lot of push back, especially from technology engineers that are heads-down working most of the time. We will continue to miss notifications because Teams is so inconsistent with notifications, not to mention the way that teams, chats, etc. are not organized well. On top of this, some folks are choosing to try to use Viva Engage, which now gives us a SECOND application to have running... and hope we don't miss even MORE messages. All of this used to be done within Slack.
- I couldn't agree more in a busy environment not having a single dashboard is annoying. It's preventing wide adoption and integration to our environment.
