Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users and employees
Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users and employees
Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users and employees
And they are all terrible and constantly getting worse.
I cant stand anything microsoft anymore. Teams, outlook, word, every iteration just makes me more angry.
I got a new job, fully remote, and we use Teams. Not gonna lie, I don’t get the hate. It seems as exactly adequate as WebEx or Zoom. None of them make me cum, none of them make me upset.
What is it about Teams that people hate so much? How does WebEx or Zoom do it any better?
Fully onboard with hating new Outlook though, fuck it sucks. Can’t even browse the global address list, it’s search only.
It uses a fucking inordinate amount of resources to accomplish its task, mostly.
Teams randomly selects the wrong microphone, so either people can't hear me or they can hear everyone around me too (laptop mic).
How hard can it be to store my microphone preference?
Teams meetings aren't really that much worse than Zoom, it's mostly minor gripes, although there are quite a few of those. The Teams chat client on the other hand is an absolute garbage fire that's significantly worse than Slack, Discord, or pretty much anything up to and arguably including IRC.
An organization , "team", channel, and chat are confusing as hell, that breakdown does not in any way align with the way communication works in a large organization. Why is there so little configuration available for notification settings? Why can't I completely silence or ignore a "team", channel, or chat? Why do I not receive notifications half the time for the things I actually want to be notified about? Why aren't there threads or at least a sensible and easy to follow "reply to" option? Why can't anyone seem to agree on the correct way to organize things? Half our groups are creating gigantic "teams" that include half the company, while the other half are creating shared channels nobody knows about. Both options suck.
For me, it has nothing to do with how good or bad the actual application is, it's the terms of service that go along with it. Basically microsoft hoovers up every morsel of data you put into their system, including your voice and face. I liken it to giving all your personal data to someone (including your voice and face), they put in a pretty looking safe on the side of the street and then they sell the keys to it.
Ignoring the fact that the data could be stolen from one of the many third parties it partners with, microsoft could (will) also give the data to the government which will then be used as evidence to deport or jail you or people you know for speaking out against the American regime or acted against Gods will and had an abortion. Or maybe someone in DC makes up some bullshit law targeting some arbitrary demographic which includes you, they request data from microsoft which is promptly provided; you get arrested and sent to jail or deported.
Data privacy is important, especially when the government is corrupt and insane. It's prudent to protect ourselves and the people we know.
Haven't needed to use it myself, but here's an open source alternative I've heard a lot about:
Not sure it'll help with your work though.
So when my old job had it, about 5 (out of 30) people in my area just couldn't open it.
Not the same five, IT would frequently reinstall it to fix it, but it would just break constantly.
Work computers, very locked down, couldn't do any alternative to it at the time, and we worked remote, so while everyone else had chat, some unfortunate people needed constant updates via email.
The question was who would be SOL, not if someone would be, that day.
I had to use teams with multiple accounts with multiple organisations. Sometimes my account is added to their organisation, sometimes I used their provided account. Microsoft was going for a one sign in approach and the whole thing just totally failed to account for my situation. It never successfully let me switch accounts, running multiple concurrently certainly never worked.
With one situation the work around was to follow the original organisation invite again, reset my password then proceed with my meeting. I'd do this maybe ten times a day sometimes if I had to bounce between different companies.
And all controls are basic as fuck. It's a business tool that thinks its target market is my grandma. All controls were apple-ified. I'd get a long error code and I couldn't select it to copy and paste it, and if I clicked off the window the notification displaying the error code would go away, so i'd have to print screen the error code, paste out somewhere, and then type it out manually into Google to try and diagnose. This was a solved problem 30 years ago. Why are we going backwards?
Anyway, rant over. It's a pos. Slack is light years ahead.
Teams is fine for video calling and screensharing. The mess begins when organisations, as MS encourages them to do, try to embed everything there is into teams. Then it can very fast become a black hole where no one finds anything anymore
I'm in the same shoes about new job having to use teams and I wildly disagree. It is awful.
The best part of it is the noise cancellation on the microphone in calls seem pretty good and having a chat created for meetings is a good integration. BUT..
Compared to zoom, I guess it's not a big deal really. I'd prefer zoom but it's oh well. Compared to slack (which has it's own set of problems, but still) however it seems like a pile of shit in my opinion.
Teams is mostly fine these days and I think it's the only MS product that is getting better over time instead of worse. If you have a competent IT team then the various MS integrations can actually work well to make Teams a usable one stop for comms, recordings/transcripts, scheduling, file sharing, etc.
New features are slow to come but they do come. The insane memory footprint became much more reasonable for me when they moved from Electron to their own Edge-based WebView2 thing last year. The preview builds have finally combined the "teams" channel listings and ad-hoc chats into one tab where you can group them together however you want.
Teams still pisses me off on occasion but no more than any other piece of enterprise software. It's fine.
I use it for school. I'm in different groups and I need to use it for chat, file and image sharing on different projects and its an absolute nightmare trying to keep track of channels, I'd rather use literally any other software to accomplish this task. Most of us just jump on discord and use that.
The leave button is right next to the share button. That's my biggest complaint.
I manage teams in a MacOS environment and ive seen teams fail to notify when people get a message or phone call straight up. Ive seen it fail to deliver a message, automatically select audio devices (because it has to use its own selection of audio devices) sharing screens is like watching a slideshow no matter what network you are on, controlling another users computer is even worse. Our headsets are Plantronics “certified for teams” or whatever its called and the mute button sometimes desyncs with the client and the headphones may be muted but the client not or vice verse. Theres much more but im so tired from dealing with teams all day. I also think its just a wildly unintuitive ui, settings are completely strewn across all sections
It closes and opens itself multiple times a day for whatever reason, updating ? Crashing ? I don’t know because it always just reappears in a completely other place than where I had it before.
Well, are you using "new" Teams, or "classic" Teams, both of which can be installed and nag for updates that fail. My "new" Teams (just finally had to uninstall "classic" altogether) just randomly crashes/restarts throughout the day, and also randomly is "unable to authenticate", making me offline but unaware of it, so miss messages. My "old" Outlook also ~15-20% of the time, on a fresh PC start, just can't connect to server, and nothing will fix it except for rebooting PC. Yeah, so fucking done with MS shit, it's all hot garbage, from 11 on down through all their apps. They've fucked up EMAIL ffs.
Teams is annoying because even when you don't use it, it prioritizes itself and opens making it take longer to get to the programs I actually need and use. This is only a few seconds on new computers but can be minutes on older ones. First world problem sure but my computer should run how I want it.
I've also never been able to get the web version to work there's no error code it just doesn't connect. IT doesn't know and the Microsoft guy just said to use the app, which goes back to the above. If it's going to be an app then leave it as an app if you have a web version then maybe it should fucking work.
I only use it incidentally but my biggest gripe is the total inability to perform its one function of teleconferencing.
The bit where it lags the audio badly and then speeds it up to catch back up to real-time is absolutely infuriating to listen to, and such a failure of a tool that had. one. job.
I had to enroll users in teams. Doing so was confusing and 1 user would never get the invite. I ended up ditching it after about a month.
Teams has been successful in detecting my headphones and mics 20% of the time. So, my alternative is to go on my phone and also my laptop (but mute myself) so I can share my screen during meetings. Windows detects my headphones and mics just fine in other applications, like Zoom or Discord. It's a pain in the ass.
My biggest problems with Teams are system slowdown (this was a big issue before I got my new work laptop), and different versions of Teams launching at startup (personal as default and then you have to choose professional or whatever and wait for it to reload everything). Back during the pandemic I had two different Teams (one for my reserve component, and one for my regular job) and it was a nightmare.
Weird, I always cum while using Teams
(Dear employer - this was a joke)
I used self-hosted rocket chat before, now I use teams, I understand perfectly all the hate
For the scope of WebEx and Zoom, it's.. fine... mostly. I mean I hate that I can't really full screen a remote screen share, so it could be better, but broadly speaking, video, audio, and screen sharing is fine. Not coincidentally, this is pretty much the only standalone stuff Teams bothered to uniquely implement, most everything else is built upon sharepoint...
It starts getting annoying for chat platform. You want to scroll back, it's going to be painfully slow. You participate in cross-company conversations, oh boy you get to deal with the worst implementation of instancing to keep your activity segregated I have seen. Broadly speaking it just scales poorly at managing the sorts of conversations you have at a larger company. If your conversations are largely "forget it after a few hours", you may be fine.
Then you get into what these platforms have been doing for ages, Lotus Notes and Sharepoint suggesting companies build workflows on top of their platform. Now the real pain and suffering begins.
I’ve also had no issues with Teams and haven’t had coworkers with issues in probably six years. I prefer it significantly over Slack, and my first job was using IBM/Lotus Notes before they switched to teams, that was a clunky nightmare.
Not gonna lie, I don’t get the hate.
TEAMs was terrible going into the pandemic but it's steadily gotten better, especially over the past 18 months. Reading down the comment chain though I'm in awe at the amount of problems that people are apparently still having with it!
TEAMs via app or browser on my Windows 10 box at work? Fine. TEAMs via app or browser on my Windows 11 Surface? Fine. TEAMs via app or browser on my wheezy HP laptop with Windows 11? Fine. TEAMs via browser (Firefox even!) on all three of my Linux systems? Also completely fine!
Hell I've got Creative T-60 USB-C speakers, a logi webcam, and Turtle Beach headphones hooked to a USB sharing KVM for two of those linux boxes and it still just works.
I must be the luckiest dumb-ass alive when it comes to MS TEAMs because at least for the last two years it just works.
Popup #10000: Have you tried feature X that nobody asked for yet?
RIP Clippy
Bring back Outlook Express!
i was so glad my new job uses google products, but the one thing they are missing is a counterpart to onenote. Keep ain't it.
Obsidian is my answer to it.
I went from a small business that was entirely G Suite to a mega corp that was entirely Microsoft. Company culture wise the mega corp is soooo much better, technology wise....I felt totally limited and like I had gone back in time.
I went from being able to pull up a Google sheet on my phone to live update decision makers both back in the office and people who were remote, to having to jump through hoops to open an Excel sheet, then request editing rights, then having to submit the edited sheet to my supervisor only for her to have a manager review and approve the edit, and then he'd have to attach the edited version to an all hands email and tell everyone to download and use the new one.
It's gotten better since I started, we now upload everything to OneDrive, but they can't seem to get the permissions right and every once in a while someone edits a file and someone has to comb though the edit history to restore it.
This whole comment chain makes me feel abject despair at the prospect of getting a job outside the service industry.
Shitty software still better than customers
New Outlook for Windows sucks. I tried it a few months ago and it is like a mobile app for idiots. It lacks many settings and many things. It is like windows 11, you need to do extra steps for stuff and settings you want. Also if you have only a standalone office and not a Office365 subscription they have ads, like their mobile app. Fucking Microsoft.
...depending upon the week, somewhere between ⅔ and ⅘ of my workflow can be in outlook...
...our IT policy required a shift to new outlook last year and it devastated my productivity: i struggled against its user-hostile interface for a couple of weeks and eventually just stayed home so i could get work done, despite our back-to-office mandate...in short order i was given an administrator account and i'm back on old outlook again...
The new M365 Outlook is just webmail. Every upgrade is actually a reduction in functionality as they align to the web version. The good news is this eliminates the need for Windows.
Yes! I'm so close to being able to switch the office PC to Linux. I only really use Outlook and Teams, everything else is in a terminal.
Now to convince Security that I don't need their intrusive logging and scanning crap..
I asked my magic 8 ball about this and it said "Outlook not so good"
I've been paying for Office365 home for years. Recently I started a business and signed up for 365 Business for the company email address.
Outlook stopped working, because the 365 Business account - which I specifically signed up in order to do email - doesn't include local Outlook, and my existing home-licensed one throws a hissy fit if I try connecting it to my business account.
Microsoft sucks.
I've stepped away from Microsoft. Not my favourite company regarding mailing and chatting.
How... how do they not have a smooth on-ramp for what is basically a straight upgrade to the same service?!
All of Microsoft office products haven't changed for the good in more than a decade. I still use office 2007 on my personal desktop and 90% of the features and buttons are in the same spot as the current office 365 offering.
Only thing that is an improvement is live collaboration, but that's getting constantly screwed up by one drive sucking ass.
Microsoft is just awful at doing basic shit. Office or M365 or copilot or whatever it is called is a mess of new tabs, signing in and duplication of services.
Christ outlook sucks but it isnt even top five of how shit they are.
Yeah no shit. Then the new ones literally have less features than the old one. Like connecting SharePoint calendars
In true modern Microsoft fashion. Remove features, lock forum posts of people asking for them back. Provide no reason. Profit because apparently this shit is crack to companies.
Windows having Settings and Control Panel. It is just an unmanageable bloat of legacy code.
Or having a button to refresh RSS feeds.
Seems like they wanted the web and app version of outlook to work identically. Some things don't work on the web though, so they decided to cut features on the app until they were the same as web. It's just such a corporate move.
I still think there is a group of people working at microsoft, pulling the strings to dismantle the company from the inside. I haven't seen an update that makes things better for any of their projects in years
Same with Google.
I imagine Microsoft has the same problem as Google, which is internally prioritizing flashy new things over maintaining useful old things. That's why Google comes out with so many new things and kills so many old things.
If you want a raise/promotion/etc., you have a better shot at it by bragging about the new feature/service you launched than bragging about maintaining the relatively stable project that's been running for years but could use some improvements.
It's a really bad structure imo and I hate that Google and other companies prioritize like that :/
Same with the US govt.
Do u mean doge?
Microsoft sucks and so does Outlook. My dad uses Outlook personally and I just can't imagine that. It's like taking your torture rack home with you for personal usage.
My dad is also a huge Outlook fan. I think you need to just have been using it for 20+ years
Yeah, maybe it's a case of software Stockholm syndrome or something.
My dad also uses Outlook on hi Android tablet. I don't get it.
Idk I like outlook. Its more feature rich and reliable than any other client Ive used. Especially since basically every company uses Echange for email.
Edit: I should clarify, I dont like outlook overall. But thats more because email in general sucks. Outlook is the best out of all of the email clients though, especially for power users.
Hah, I JUST had a conversation with my boss about whether or not I was using the "new" outlook or the "old" outlook.
He's apparently using the "old" outlook because there's a toggle switch in the upper right of his window that says "try the new outlook!" and I don't have that, meaning...I guess I'm using the "new" outlook?
Who knows at this point. It's all trash.
https://outlook.office365.com/mail/inbox
^ this is the new version lmao. It's just an electron app (more or less)
In my last job I installed Outlook on my personal phone to access my work calendar conveniently. Found out from a colleague that if the admin for an Outlook server you're signed into on any device fucks up badly enough you could end up having that device completely wiped so I promptly uninstalled it.
Yeah, you're talking about MDM (Mobile Device Management) solutions/tech. I'm not an IT employee myself, but I am familiar with these things from work (similar situation as yours), and also because I'm a nerd and like researching these things.
On some phones, like Samsung's ("Secure Folder"), you can have [essentially] a second, containerized instance of Android running. Or you can think of it like a virtual second user that ultimately you have control of. So what I did was install Outlook in that. Because the MDM permissions (e.g. wipe the phone) would only affect that container.
Otherwise, for everyone else -- yeah don't install work apps/accounts on your personal devices.
Just to expand on this. There is an Exchange specific wipe feature. I think it is quite old school and not really used. Have seen it, but never tested it myself. As per documentation it can perform device wipe, but only if native mail client using ActiveSync is used not Outlook. And it probably does not work with all native mail clients, depends if app has device admin permissions.
Current Intune MDM model always uses separate Android storage so any operation including wipe will affect only this storage not your personal space so employer can not see nor delete your personal data.
In Intune there is another option without a need of enrolling device (MDM) where you can manage supported apps. It's called MAM. If wipe is initiated it affects only data in all apps that support MAM.
In short, companies / schools cannot really wipe your device if we are talking about Intune MDM. Other MDM solutions probably can.
My understanding is that it's called work profile. It's like having 2 users in the same phone. One is personal and you manage it. The other is company owned and you can only install apps whitelisted by your it admin.
I'd love to keep outlook off my personal phone but there's no chance I'm getting a company phone considering I'm a shop employee and everything in it is an afterthought for IT. Like our computers still run windows 7.
Unfortunately I need email to do my job, on a ping system for what to test and general communications with coworkers who are often not there or traveling in the field.
here's some advice from me. Outlook is completely usable from a web browser. This includes phone browsers... just use that if you need your emails on your personal phone.
They have managed to fuck up something as simple as right clicking. There are no words.
Yeah I feel this. Outlook pisses me off. So does Microsoft in general.
What pisses me off more is HP.
Yes but I don't use HP for email because it won't let me send one if my cyan ink is low.
Sounds about right. They tried to get me sign up for a subscription for customer service. They told me they could solve my issue (I forgot my bitlocker encryption key and was giving my old HP laptop to a family member so I needed it to whip the device) but only if I sign up for the subscription. It wouldve cost me $54 to get customer service that day. I laughed at the guy over the phone and he tried to defend the company by saying its worth it pay since I did not know how to solve my issue and needed their help. I didn’t pay and found a work around on my own
Sometimes I think about the billions of dollars of wasted productivity caused by Outlook being so bad at rendering email.
I think every day about the productivity lost because people use Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint. Maybe even multiple times a day.
Most applications would be fine with plain text, some could use markdown, some would need org-mode, a bit further something like HTML or word-perfect format.
Word and Powerpoint are not the worst - just think about all the time lost due to whatever Microsoft is doing in Teams or by random decisions like moving the start button to the middle instead of leaving it where it was since 1995, which automatically renders every corporate training video obsolete.
Whichever version it is, I hope that one day I can delete a mail, change my mind, press ctrl-z and it will actually undo the last delete and not some random one from earlier in the day.
I just stopped deleting everything and now use my archive as a trash instead
this entire article is about a single tweet some guy made as a joke
Welcome to journalism in 202x
"one reddit user said..."
It's exactly the quality of journalism you get for free.
As a help desk worker, I am starting to get tired of Microsoft's bullshit.
Try something new and it doesn't work out? Fine. That's reasonable.
But can we stop breaking what was already working?
This is what happens with innovation when only monopolies are left on the board.
Name an industry, it’s the same. But here’s the dog shit. You still have to give shareholders returns. When you ran out of shit to innovate like 25 years ago, ran out of companies to buy 10 years ago, and already captured the regulatory bodies. Congrats it’s game over.
Except it’s never game over. Just squeeze one side til the toothpaste runs out.
Sounds like that's exactly what they're trying to do.
I work in government, and on mobile devices Outlook government accounts are restricted so that all other accounts have to be removed from the app.
It sounds like a great security feature, but since I need access to 3 accounts for reasons, I've got one version installed on my city phone, one on my tablet, and had to install another on my personal phone.
We're budgeting in a second city phone for me next year because Outlook sucks.
If this is Android look into enrollment which will use separate storage called work profile so you will essentially have 2 independent copies of Outlook. Or it might be possible to have second copy of Outlook depending on your Android flavour. Samsung has Secure Folder for example.
And if these 3 mailboxes belong in same organization, you can utilize delegation and add them as shared mailboxes.
My work and my former university uses outlook and Ms apps as their primary line of communication . It's like the most counterintuitive site there is
The good news is that Outlook doesn't confuse anybody who hasn't used it in years (or never). Last time I did was when I worked at MS. Hasn't been a problem since.
Bullshit, new outlook is total garbage. I dragged a folder inside a folder in the left column and it fucking disappeared. Had to revert back to classic, otherwise folder was in a black hole. Plus other issues like plugins.
I install classic on every computer I setup now.
I think the parents suggestion was to not use it.
However, it's a bit like avoiding water on a boat given how pervasive the cancer is.
Most of the MS suite is pretty awful. OG OneNote was a good idea. VSCode is ok, just quite slow. Oh LSP is fantastic, I believe that was developed by MS.
The Office Suite and PowerBI are terrible, by 2025 standards it's glossy trash.
"new" outlooks has less features than the old one. And its even harder to find things in settings (they removed a bunch of stuff). I dont look forward to this being on work devices...
don't forget that it uploads your non-microsoft email accounts' passwords to microsoft so that they can steal your mails to their systems
Yep, it is straight-up malware. Just like most mail clients on Android and especially iOS. At least there they have the (terrible) excuse of doing it to save power by having their server push new mail notifications through the OS' infrastructure instead of having the app wake the device up all the time.
Our work uses outlook for web and it's utter garbage. So much stuff you just can't do.
The fun part is that the new Outlook for Mac is actually better than the new one for Windows (being a nativa app instead of the Electron app for Windows).
Has anyone tried the new Atari Outlook? You want open that in Atari outlook?
Nah! I use shoelace outlook exclusively. I know its deprecated but just pull the chord a little and it's as good as new!
Windows Mail was IMO perfect for simple mail at home. Now they replaced it with Outlook with slightly updated UI but also with ads.
Guess what - I started looking for alternatives. So far Wino Mail seems pretty good - someone else on here recommended it.
The corp I'm working at moved to Outlook Web.
It's so hostile about downloading attachments through anything but OneDrive it's comical.
Every fucking version displays our HTML email signatures differently.
We have too. I absolutely hate it.
So, we can expect more security breaches?
Microsoft: Move along .. Nothing to see here.
Microsoft destroys product names like no other company.
Microsoft anything = confuses people
how shielded are enterprise accounts from the data harvest?
Very much so.
They are paying for the service and expect appropriate treatment.
Companies generally frown upon their data being taken. It’s only consumers who use “free” services that really suffer from this. After all, if you’re not paying you are the product.
Laughs is just open in the browser.
Why are Microsoft employees so fucking stupid?
8 thousand executives making product decisions from the top down and trying to cram every facet of the business into every other product.
I'm pretty happy with Thunderbird on all my devices. It's not quite perfect, but it's hard to make an argument that Outlook is better. It'd have to be a very specific use case I think.
As someone that maintains Outlook users, I can’t wait. Dumping decades of garbage code is a godsend.
Most businesses will be fine. The edge case scenarios will bitch and moan but will get over it by the following fiscal quarter.
New outlook will be easier than ever to upgrade. Code security will be better than ever before. Also no more unique software for non-Windows OS’s. OSX and Linux support will be a good feature that’s missing today.
I don't think anybody is arguing against a more efficient product. The issue I see is the multiple, incompatible versions with confusing naming schemes that exist simultaneously.
It’s a necessity. It’s too different. It won’t ever have feature parity, and you need to give companies time to adapt their edge case uses.
They did the same thing with Teams and did worse with OneNote.
They did themselves a favor and killed off the Mail app ahead of time at least.
I think calling one “new” and the other “classic” is easy enough. The only alternative is to use a different name entirely.
whatever about code security, when user security goes out of the window in its entirety