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Microsoft Media Software

Microsoft Teams Passes 115 Million Daily Active Users (venturebeat.com) 43

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Microsoft Teams is continuing to ride the remote work and learning wave kicked off by the coronavirus pandemic. During Microsoft's Q1 2021 earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella shared that Microsoft Teams has passed 115 million daily active users. That's up 53% from the 75 million daily active users in April. Some 15 months ago, Microsoft Teams had just 13 million daily active users.

"Teams now has more than 115 million daily active users," Nadella said. "We are seeing increased usage and intensity as people communicate, collaborate, and coauthor content across work, life, and learning. Microsoft 365 users generated more than 30 billion collaboration minutes in a single day this quarter." On the call, Nadella highlighted how quickly features are being added to Teams. "We are accelerating our innovation for both first-line as well as knowledge workers, with over 100 new capabilities in the last six months," he said. "Including breakout rooms, meeting recaps, shift scheduling, and large scale digital events, up to 20,000 participants. To help people transcend both time and distance, employee health and wellbeing is a top concern for every CEO. We are innovating with new experiences to help people prioritize wellbeing in the flow of work. New insights in Teams provides personalized recommended actions, making it easier for employees to create healthy work habits and for leaders to build high performing teams."

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Microsoft Teams Passes 115 Million Daily Active Users

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  • by zoid.com ( 311775 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @09:07AM (#60657794) Homepage Journal

    We started using teams about a year ago and it was lucky timing. It has turned into an essential business tool. It works great for small meetings and large presentations. It's also really good at text based messaging and quick file transfers.

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      We were forced into that thing. The interface is just too stupid for words, hate the thing. I refuse to use it unless someone higher up demands I do.

      • We were forced into that thing. The interface is just too stupid for words, hate the thing. I refuse to use it unless someone higher up demands I do.

        Teams was rolled out but Skype is kept around. People use Skype more. Teams has some document storage capability but It's horrible for sharing with people who need to read the files. The group chats are all thrown in a big list with no structure so it's useless.

        I can see how a teams like thing could be better, but right now it's a poor substitute for what we were and still are using.

    • So it works great for everything except what Teams was intended to be: Full on office collaboration tool. :-)

      Now to be fair they have put a lot of effort in and it has gotten better. Hell you couldn't chat to two people at once until about July. But the things beyond messaging, video conferencing and screen sharing are an absolute frigging disaster. A mishmash of Teams patched together with different tabs and functionality that never integrates properly with their parent applications at best, and at worst

  • by boner ( 27505 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @09:15AM (#60657814)

    Microsoft Teams is the only application I have ever had that draws down the battery of my MacBook Pro while connected to the charger, with the fans spinning in overdrive...

    Unconnected to the charger I have about an hour of battery-life on Teams on my 2018 MacBook Pro 13". On Zoom I lose 40% of battery per hour...

    • by coofercat ( 719737 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @09:27AM (#60657852) Homepage Journal

      You got it bad... but yeah, it does seem to get the fans spinning rather regularly for me too.

      One thing I would say is that they've done a good job of getting feature parity with their competitors. Yes, the whole thing sucks, and yes it's horrible, but they do have the features.

      So when Nutella says "We are accelerating our innovation...", what he really means is "we're getting better at copying Slack and Zoom".

      No matter what they say, Zoom is still the best. Webex somewhere next and Teams after that. Way down the corridor, past the drinks machine and the gents toilets you'll find Google Meet.

      • by kalpol ( 714519 )
        Same here, running it on Ubuntu is a huge power draw.
      • by piojo ( 995934 )

        Zoom is still the best. Webex somewhere next and Teams after that. Way down the corridor, past the drinks machine and the gents toilets you'll find Google Meet.

        How would you rate apps as used for text discussions rather than video?

        • IMHO, Slack's the best text messenger (for work stuff). In fairness, Teams isn't miles behind, but it's not there yet. Both offer private, public and ad-hoc rooms and such like, and both can have integrations with other apps and you can have automated alerts from your systems into both too. Slack is slightly ahead here, but Teams is perfectly usable for most people. If you're already an MS shop, then Teams is probably good enough, but if you're starting out from scratch, then go with Slack.

          For less formal s

    • We use it for work as well. It behaves well on my work desktop (Windows 10), but not so much on my iPhone 8 (14.0.1). A one hour Teams meeting took me from 100 to 2% battery life. My battery condition is good, so I'd say the app is a power hog...at least on my phone. Best have a portable charger on hand if you plan on going for a nice walk during your Team meeting.
    • Microsoft Teams is the only application I have ever had that draws down the battery of my MacBook Pro while connected to the charger, [...]

      You're connecting the charger wrong.

    • by t0rkm3 ( 666910 )

      Yeah, it's crap. Use Zoom and Slack instead, you'll be happier and healthier.

      Upsides:
      - Integration with MS Tools
      - Apparently free so people who use it only for single threaded chats like it.

      Downsides:
      - Performance: On a single Windows workstation it's "OK", on Mac or Linux it is monstrous, like 10's of GB monstrous, and it doesn't seem to decrease once it's hit a peak, so killing it is the only way.
      - Features: On MS the feature parity is higher, but the Linux and Mac clients do not allow remote control, and

    • Microsoft Teams is the only application I have ever had that draws down the battery of my MacBook Pro while connected to the charger, with the fans spinning in overdrive...

      Erm you have serious problems. Yes plural. Firstly your teams installation is screwed. It shouldn't take very little resources and I'm able to spend basically the entire day in calls on Teams on battery without flattening it. And secondly you have some serious hardware issues if you're able to drain a Macbook while it's charged. That is the kind of thing only reserved for a couple of very poorly designed gaming laptops.

      • by boner ( 27505 )

        Thanks,

        to clarify, the battery drawdown happens only during Teams-calls.

        As I said, Teams is the only application I have on my MacBook Pro that shows this behavior. None of it with Zoom, WebEx, Skype for Business, Discord, or Slack... or any other app I need for work (Office 365, IDE)....

  • Teams is bad and wrong becuz M$! Anyone who says otherwise is a paid shill!!11
  • For a moment, I was unsure and checked my computer's date/time setting. Did I fall asleep and woke up 6 months later?!

    I thought an earnings call deals with the past quarter(s)? Is this some specific of Microsoft's reporting, or what am I missing?

    • by aitikin ( 909209 )

      Fiscal year 2021 Q1, which, for M$, begins in Q3 of the year, so it runs July 1-September 30.

      And that is about as much of my college accounting courses that I can recall.

  • by thePsychologist ( 1062886 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @09:46AM (#60657894) Journal

    Teams has a pretty horrible interface, if you ask me. I can't understand why every post of more than a couple lines needs a "Read more" link. It just feels very cramped.

    • by djbckr ( 673156 )
      On OSX it's bad in the way that when you bring the application into focus, you then have to click in the text box to start typing. If I switch to another app and back again, I have to click *yet again* to start typing. Infuriating.
    • Read more? That's your complaint? How about the idea that multi-tasking is simply not a consideration. Have you got a file open in the word previewer and you want to click on something else? LOL we'll close that down completely while you do your other thing and completely reload it when you click back on your team.

    • I hate how goddamn slow it is scrolling through the history. Want to go back to a conversation you had last week? That'll take some time. Want to go back a few months? Ha! Forget about it.

      It's also a total resource pig, consuming most of a gig of ram, and often pegging a CPU core. The whole interface is overall sluggish.

      It crashes a lot too. When it does it'll attempt to silently reload itself and resume where it left off. It's actually pretty good at that, so if it's in the background often you won

  • I would bet, most of them, not willingly.
    • by kalpol ( 714519 )
      Nope they got it with O365, and once management found out about that no one wanted to pay for Slack or Zoom.
  • New insights in Teams provides personalized recommended actions, making it easier for employees to create healthy work habits and for leaders to build high performing teams."

    So, healthy as in creating a healthy work life balance for the worker?

    Or making sure to keep the worker at it 24/7/365 - nice and healthy for the employer?

  • It's just OK (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kalpol ( 714519 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @10:26AM (#60657994)
    It's easy to kick off a video call, which is nice, and the integration with Outlook contacts and AD is nice. The chat function is abysmal, the threading is weird and there's no quoting or really any flow that can be made. I do like how it brings active threads to the forefront. The notifications are garbage -delayed, or repeated. Slack is way better in almost every way except the video call integration.
    • by egyas ( 1364223 )

      It's easy to kick off a video call, which is nice, and the integration with Outlook contacts and AD is nice. The chat function is abysmal, the threading is weird and there's no quoting or really any flow that can be made. I do like how it brings active threads to the forefront. The notifications are garbage -delayed, or repeated. Slack is way better in almost every way except the video call integration.

      I agree with everything you said. One of my biggest complaint about Teams is that the active chat/channel does NOT notify! I run a multi-headed (4 heads) Linux system for work, and Teams is at the bottom of the left monitor. Sometimes, hidden behind another app. If someone posts to the channel that is active in Teams, or the chat I have active at the moment, there is ZERO notification. Nor does there seem to be an option to enable this. :(

  • Chromium 68 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by random_nb ( 2453280 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @10:42AM (#60658076)
    The latest version of Teams' fat client for Windows is built on Electron 4.2.12 (1 year old)/Chromium 68 (2 years old). I highly doubt they're backporting all of the Chromium/Blink security patches back that far.

    If you haven't turned off third-party apps from https://admin.teams.microsoft.... [microsoft.com] for your tenant or restricted it down to a business-approved list, please do so. The defaults are to allow any existing and new apps to load right on in. The client is one bad third-party app away from being a major malware vector.
  • Teams is one of the better solutions out there. However, I do wish they would keep the features on all platforms at the same level. I use it on Linux, and seem to be missing a number of features that are available elsewhere.

  • Our company (huge multinational) was using a series of tools that required payment. Someone convinced the higher ups that Teams can do the same as Skype for Business, TeamViewer, Slack, all in one package, all free with Office 365.

    Well, according to Microsoft Marketing is awesome and can replace them all for free.

    In reality, it’s a poor replacement for Skype for Business, a horrible kind-of-replacement for TeamViewer, and a barely passable replacement for Slack. So people now is doing meetings using F

  • People who want to get stuff done and enjoy work use Slack.
  • The numbers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by eneville ( 745111 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @02:17PM (#60659234) Homepage

    That means, then, that Teams, which is pretty much just IRC for the vast majority consumes:

    54.836 petabytes of RAM globally on the client end, 512M is where I see Teams when all I'm doing is messaging, which feels quite slow compared to IRC.

    I wonder the wattage for that, if we use 3 watts for each 8G, then 21562500 watts I suppose. Teams perturbs me as it doesn't return much for the cost of RAM and CPU whilst the user experience is sluggish at best.

  • or, in other markets, keep shufflin' those deck chairs!

  • Instead of promoting how many people are using it, how about getting it to work on Linux first! It's If I were to load Teams it would most likely lock up and then crash. If it doesn't crash it might load but then not allow chat or calls, and a few times it's crashed X. About 1 / 10 times it will load and work, but the other 9 are a write off, so what is Microsoft so proud of?

If all else fails, lower your standards.

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