Like many others I unfortunately have to use Microsoft Teams at work.
Like many others I also have a set of grievances with this godforsaken piece of software. As this Blog exists partly as a way for me to vent about topics like this, I thought it would be a fitting first entry.
Can you hear me?
After the times of global lockdowns and a rise of work from home arrangements most of us will have had contact with Microsoft Teams, or one of the competitors.
At the time there were many memes being posted about the typical difficulties faced when partaking in a Teams Meeting.
When sharing your screen, I think we all have heard the classic
Can you see my screen
one too many times.
But that is not something that is Teams fault. Or at least its not alone with those struggles. One thing it is uniquely shit at though, is the controls given to the user about the micrphone input.
During my teens when wanting to talk to friend whilst playing games I started out just using our landline but quckly progressed to using Skype and soon after TeamSpeak 3 (my beloved).
One thing I appreciated from day one was the ability to exactly control when my mic would be recording. I mean look at all these options:
Am I in a setting where i rarely have to talk and there is a bunch of background noise? - Cool I’ll just use Push-To-Talk
Is there some background noise and I can move close enough to the mic to be clearly distiguashable from the background noise? - Perfect, a noise gate will do the trick
Do I not really care about all of that? - Ill just use continuous transmission and let TS3 worry about it
Regardless of what I end up choosing, at least I have a choice. And this glosses over other things like gain control. After a while though we all moved on from TeamSpeak to Discord, as I assume many others will have done as well. It comes with a plethora of benefits that simply outweighed things like the marginally better audio quality of TS3.
So, how does Discord fare?
About the same as TeamSpeak. Which should not surpise anyone, because that, to me at least, is the minimum set of features a voice call tool should offer. Microsoft seems to not agree.
First of all, why the hell can’t I change the voice call settings without being in a call?! I really don’t know how anyone could arrive at that decision. I have no way of knowing if my setup will actually be working in the way I want it to unless I join a call…. The same of course also goes for things like the camera settings, but did we really expect any different? I certainly didn’t.
Some hot keys you got there
So now I am in a Meeting, I begrudingly ensured that the correct audio interfaces are being used and left it at that. Because Teams doens’t let me control my noise gate I’ll just be muted most of the time. The meeting goes on for a while and I start working on some of my other tasks trying to at least be somewhat productive. And then suddely someone asks me a question. The typical struggle starts, where did I place that darned Teams window? After a qick search and roughly gesturing that I am about to give an answer I find the window and can unmute myself to give an answer.
On any other platform this would have played out differently.
Colleague: Hey 8-prime
Presses ALT + Page Down
8-prime: Answers Question
But what sorcery allowed me to do that? The magic of Hotkeys. Something that has apparently not yet been discovered in the realms of Microsoft. I genuely cannot fathon why the fuck Teams doesn’t support hotkeys. Its a basic feature that any sane piece of software (looking at TS3 and Discord again) supports. Luckily we live in a world where an issue that was artificially created can be solved by just buying overpriced solutions. More than one colleague of mine has an Elgato Stream Deck simply to gain the ability to unmute with a single click.
One other solution is to have a headset which is compatabile with Teams like ones from Jabra. Looking at these two options neither really seem like an appropriate solution to the problem. But these devices must be able to tell Teams to Mute/Unmute so why cant I? Well technically you can, somehow. It’s just not clear how. Microsoft has this amazing documentation for the third party api… which is just a guide on how to pair an external device. Not what I want. There is one post on MSXFAQ, but looking at it my main take aways was that Microsoft has no real interest in me being able to control it with a custom program. All in all its just not something that Microsoft wants to be easy. I’m sensing a trend here
Echooooo
The title for this section is not quite correct, but close enough to get the point across.
We are a hybrid team at work. As a result we often have meetings where one or more colleagues are remote only, whilst some others share an office with me. Having to hear them twice with a slight delay for the entirety of the meeting can drive me fucking insane. And its again a problem which needn’t be one.
Other apps allow me to mute participants of a voice chat for my client only. And this extends to setting a per participant volume level as well. As we established Teams audio settings are shit. So, often enough one colleague will be relatively quiet, so I have to turn my volume all the way up to hear what they are saying, only the then get my eardrums ruptured by someone else, whos microphone notoriously overmodulates. Teams, why the fuck don’t you allow me to just set their volume individually?
From what I recall reading about this, it has to do with the architecture of Teams audio processing. The server bundles up all audio streams and sends them down as one. Thats the default at least, because when looking into it again I found that through using the Azure Communication Services (ACS) Calling SDK you could pull all audio feeds separately. So its not really a technical impossibility after all, rather just Teams being lazy once more…
Are we native yet?
Which perfectly leads me to my last point. Yes its about Electron.
I don’t really have the same strong feelings that many others hold against it. I think there is a time and a place for it. VS Code is an amazing piece of software that wouldn’t exist were it not for Electron (and also the other way around). Some personal projects of mine use Electron as well because it is just easier than any other desktop gui framework I have used and for most stuff its more than enough.
Coming back to Teams, a few years back the ‘New’ Teams was released and beforehand there were heavy talks about finally getting a native Windows App. Wouldn’t that have been nice? With how heavy Teams can be to run, it is one of the cases where I would advocate against using Electron and just going for a native app. One would think that Microsoft has the expertise and money for it. Its literally their own OS after all. But maybe thats not fair to them. If they wanted to maintain native clients that would also include MacOS and Linux. Which of course is way too much overhead. So instead, lets just stick to Electron. One code base, all platforms. Its ‘just a browser’ after all. Except apparently thats also too much to ask.
This is a chart showing the Teams Client availability on different platforms
Linux is no longer supported.
Final words
I tried to keep a calm tone and not let this devolve into a test of my swear word vocabulary. Stil, Teams is a hot steaming pile of shit and I hope that it dies its rightful death soon so others can have their chance to dissapoint in new and unforseen ways.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading. My main content on here is going to be programming related, but there will be rants like this from time to time as well.