SOsombragris·Oct 18, 2026
Uni professor here in Paraguay. My university (which is barely starting right now) got Teams as a package deal that included Outlook email and calendaring, One Drive, and Office 365. There might be other stuff, but these are the ones most visible to me in my role as a teacher. We use Teams not as part of a traditional in-office groupware but as a means to deliver online classes.
The good part is that it's a very good tool for that. Meeting quality is usually good to excellent. Screen sharing works, as well as whiteboards. In case there is disruption or vandalism there are readily available controls to quickly secure the meeting room. Audio quality is good, video too.
Moreover, I use Linux, and I intend to implement the whole MS groupware client-side in my desktop applications, such as Kontact/KMail. Teams is covered by a good webapp wrapp
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er done by Ismael Martínez that behaves like a normal desktop app, with system tray capability included (https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux).
But the really bad part is that this is... a Microsoft product requiring authentication mediated by Microsoft. And (speaking from my particular situation, that is, from Asunción, Paraguay) it's a stinking mess. There are ISPs that fail to authenticate due to an unexplained error (they don't even offer those awful hexadecimal error codes). Some ISP can authenticate using their mobile networks, but residential ones fail. And even when authentication supposedly works, switching from consumer (private) Outlook to corporate Outlook is fraught with various failure points.
Teams works well... once you managed to login. I will never forget that I had to give a substitute class for someone and getting access to that specific classroom took me over 90 minutes between retries, delays, silent fails, etc. The stuff of nightmares.
Another really bad part of Teams is that usability and UX are also nightmarish. You open the app and it is not apparent at all how to create an instant meeting. There is the functionality, but it's not easily discoverable at all. How do you manage the access of people to chat, for example? Some people can use the chat, while others can't access to it. And how to fix that, is by no means apparent. So Teams, while being the sensible solution here and even from a Linux user standpoint is reasonably nice, can be quite painful to use.
Now, about what TFA said, about Teams or Slack costing a tiny fraction of what an engineer earns... let me tell you that in our neck of the woods salaries are really low. If you can manage USD 1K/month, you are quite fortunate. So any "fraction of the cost" taken by either Teams or Slack, is not that tiny. Moreover, at least in educational contexts, Slack is not that well-known (to be honest, it's practically unknown here), so Slack does not have the mindshare that Teams has here.
So, about Teams: the product is there and is reasonably good in its foundations. If Microsoft only could set its mind to smooth the rough edges it could have been a real winner.