Tag: #teams

I suggest you read Mary Jo Foley’s analysis. She is always on top of things. My own findings:

• The Windows client is a complete rewrite. Users will be able to switch back and forth, for a while.
• The new Teams up looks akin to the consumer version of Teams, that already has been made available in GA.
• Microsoft claims twice the speed and half the memory requirements. Here is your incentive to move soon.
• The rewrite moves the architecture from Custom HTML/JS on top of Angular on top of Electron to a new stack based on Microsoft WebView2. It contains three layers: Fluent, React, and a client data layer.
• There is now a multitude of for-pay options like Teams Premium, or a Teams Copilot. You can make it as expensive as Microsoft desires. I see some contract work coming up.
• Not important for most users, but a must-have for almost all IT guys: multi-tenant login with notifications from all tenants. Hooray.

More >

Announcement from Microsoft:

Meet Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro. Teams Rooms Pro is a new offer that brings together the value of our existing Teams Rooms features, new innovations, and the Teams Rooms managed service platform—all in one license. Teams Rooms Pro simplifies the purchasing process for our customers and delivers the collective benefits of our advancements in both hybrid meeting experiences and device management.

Teams Rooms Pro will deliver the latest hybrid meeting experiences with a focus on inclusivity, ease of use, flexibility, security, and management. Let’s look at some of the features available or coming soon to Teams Rooms Pro. … More >

Teams Rooms Pro is available now at USD40 per user/month

It’s a lot cheaper for small customers:

Microsoft Teams Rooms Basic makes it easier for small businesses to create hybrid meeting experiences. Teams Rooms Basic provides foundational Teams meeting experiences like scheduling, joining meetings, and wireless content sharing. For customers needing core management and hybrid meeting features, we recommend Teams Rooms Pro.

Teams Rooms Basic is included with the purchase of any certified Teams Rooms device at no additional cost purchased on or after September 1, 2022. Customers can apply up to 25 Basic licenses to their tenant.

More >

Microsoft says:

We are rolling out a production grade universal binary version of Teams, which means it will run natively on the entire Mac lineup, including those with Apple silicon. For Mac users, this means a significant boost in performance, ensuring efficient use of device resources and an optimized Teams experience even when using multiple high-resolution monitors during calls or meetings.

More >

A couple of years ago, I created a forum on the ginlo messenger, motivated by two things: give the messenger a push, because my friend Stefan Rubner worked there, and secondly because I wanted to have a place for readers on my site to discuss amongst themselves. I called it vowe’s magic flying circus and it quickly was referred to as the circus.

The circus has been moving a lot, and each time we lost the dead wood. People who had signed up but were not really interested in contributing. If you do not actively contribute, you will lose interest in even reading it. We moved to Microsoft Kaizala, then Telegram, then Signal, and two years ago to Microsoft Teams. I am happy that we moved away from Telegram which has become a dumpster fire.

Teams has proven to be too much overhead for our small operation. You really need to be a Microsoft ship with AAD (Azure Active Directory) to make this work. This is a SNAFU of Microsoft Accounts, AAD Accounts, and everything in-between. I had hopes for the private edition in Windows 11, but that has proven to be utterly useless. It’s closer to Skype than Teams, but not interoperable with Skype. Since I am an active Skype user, something had to give. From my daily use of Skype I know that Skype chat is useless with a few dozen people. I started looking elsewhere.

Two days ago, I started creating two alternative solutions, one built on Keybase.io (yes, it’s more than a directory) and the other one on Discord. And it quickly became obvious that Discord is the better solution.