Microsoft Teams Reviews

Microsoft Teams is used, in our case, to collaborate with all internal employees, to work on offering some proposals, and to work together online on files in Word and Excel. We largely use it to collaborate online and to have video meetings with customers. 

We can integrate SharePoint sites with other people. We have libraries that are available within Teams so that people can sync those libraries to their local drives and therefore will have the most up to date information and documents at their disposal.

The integration of online jobs and documents is one of the most valuable aspects of the solution. The ability to integrate tasks and to assign tasks to certain people is great. 

I'm really waiting for the release of Lists to be included. Lists is a new feature that will probably come into Teams in August. It will be a way of using some sort of database to enter interlinked lists.

I don't like the online version of Word and Excel. It skews the layout. It is no longer representative of the layout that you actually have in a document. You always have to open it in the desktop application to get an accurate representation of how the document will look. 

If you open a document in Teams, it opens online first. If you have, for instance, an entire image on the front page, that image is descaled to the right and to the bottom. So you have a lot of white space on the page, while in reality, it's pretty nicely aligned. You basically have a borderless page. That's one of the main things that they can improve on. If they had a workaround where you can open it in the desktop apps first, it would be better. 

The solution needs to adjust the number of protected channels within a team.

The solution should maybe include breakout rooms within a team meeting. For example, let's say you are with 10 people, within one meeting space. You can have three accounts in separate smaller "meeting rooms" with just two or three people accessing them and still be within the same larger meeting environment. Let's say if you have a team where you have some technical members, some solution architects, a bid manager, a capture manager, an account manager, etc., you should be able to break up a meeting into multiple smaller sessions on certain topics, and yet still stay within the same meeting space. 

They should include a visual application also within Teams, so drawings that are made can attach to that space within the proposal with the ability to add Word or Excel files, as well as tasks, etc.

We've been using the solution for two years now. That's well before everyone started using conferencing systems during COVID-19.

It's a stable solution. We haven't had any hiccups. Its been working flawlessly for the two years that I'm using it now.

The solution is easy to scale, however, you need to take into account best practices so that you don't lose oversight on the number of teams that you have. 

There are other things that can be improved of in terms of scaling. For the moment, you can have approximately 5,000+ different teams within your Office 365 license. In each team, you can have multiple channels. The number of channels with limited access rights is limited to 256 or 250. If you create a channel where you want to find all your different projects and you have more than 250 customers within one team, you run into issues. Then you have to create separate teams for each customer. In those teams, you have various possibilities on channels. We started using a team, for instance, for customer projects. However, in customer projects, you are limited. It's only on about 25 channels that you can give access rights to certain people. If you are working on the project with company X together for a customer, you don't want them to see another project for another customer with a competing solution. That's the tricky part.

That was a limitation that we encountered with scaling. We changed the approach from having a team customer project to creating teams for each customer where we have projects.

Currently, in our organization, we have 250 employees using Teams. We use it quite extensively every day.

We haven't really reached out to technical support. If we need support, we first reach out to our IT department and they will figure it out on our behalf, or contact Microsoft directly. In my experience, until now, with Office 365, I haven't had any issues. I'm satisfied with the product but I can't speak to any specific experience related to customer service.

We use a bunch of solutions at any given time. We have Cisco Webex, for example. We also have the Mitel My Call app and for some of our customers, we also need to use Zoom and BlueJeans. So we have quite a few solutions that are active.

If you look at just the feature of video conferencing and you look at Zoom and BlueJeans and Microsoft Teams, they're all pretty much alike. It's mainly the integration of everything document-wise and the consistency that I really liked within Microsoft Teams.

Out of all of the other solutions, BlueJeans is the one that I found the least reliable. We had quite a few hiccups where we eventually fell back to Cisco WebEx for video conferencing instead of the BlueJeans solution.

Then we have Zoom, which I have less experience with. It's used by a few vendors with whom we collaborate from time to time. They use Zoom predominantly, so when we conference with them, it's largely through that.

In terms of Cisco WebEx, the thing that I don't like is that if someone invites you for a meeting and you connect to the meeting early, you don't get notified when the meeting actually starts, so you constantly have to reload until the meeting organizer starts the meeting and accepts you. For instance, last week, I went into a Cisco WebEx meeting. I connected two minutes before the actual time that the meeting should have started. I opened the WebEx application and the meeting didn't start. 10 minutes later, I reloaded the application and reconnected to the session and they were already actively meeting. The application didn't notify me when the meeting actually started. That's a big drawback.

The solution is installed by our IT department. In the beginning, we had some issues with assigning rights. Not everybody was able to create a team or to invite people into a team or to share files. However, now they have changed a few things around. There are quite a few people now that can create teams, add members, etc., and you can add external members and there are a few new policies internally about best practices.

I was one of the first parties to implement a solution like Teams. Our company bought a few companies and every company was using different tools as their main resource. The one thing that they all had in common was Microsoft Office 365, and yet they didn't use Teams at that time. I was one of the people asking our organization to implement Teams because my position requires me to have to collaborate with people from all of the different companies that our company bought.

The deployment was done in less than a week. That was due largely due to the availability of our IT staff. Once they began doing the implementation, however, it was done within a few hours. It was activated, rights were assigned, and people with rights could begin working and downloading the team's application on smart devices, on their computers almost right away. 

It's as easy as using Skype for a private person. You just download the application and you can start.

I believe we've been using the latest versions of the solution. We use whichever version is pushed out with Office 365.

I would recommend the product. It works with everything. I have an iPad Pro, I have an iPhone, I have my computer. It's installed on all three devices. It works flawlessly. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten, simply because there are a few things the solution still needs to improve upon.

We use it for team meetings. We're still in the process of evaluating the solution, however. 

The solution provides very clear conferencing, even on mobile devices. The voice clarity is excellent.

Organizing a meeting is very simple to do.

The solution provides for comfortable use. New users are able to navigate it pretty easily.

The interface of the solution could use improvement. Right now, the gold standard in terms of team conferencing user interfaces seems to be Zoom. Microsoft Teams should see if they could make their interface and usability as simple as that.

It's not as easy to augment your meetings as it is with competitors. For example, in Zoom, if I want to add attendees, I just grab the meeting link and post it to them. With Teams, how to do this is not as clear.

I'm pretty new to Teams. I've only been using it for the past two months or so.

The stability of the solution is good. The product is reliable in that sense. I haven't experienced crashes. There aren't bugs or glitches that disrupt the user experience. 

It's quite easy to scale the solution if you need to. It's possible to add new people into meetings, for example. We haven't had any issues in that sense.

Our IT department is engaging with Microsoft locally. I haven't made contact with technical support personally. As we were offered one free month of service, we're doing some experiments ont he platform.

We are now on Chatter. The entire team is using and Chatter. We have 5,000 Chatter licenses. The entire organization is using it. We are also evaluating Microsoft 365 which includes Teams.

Internally we are using Chatter across the company as of now. We will continue to use Chatter as it is part of our CRM and all the customer and customer service related communication will be through Chatter only. We are planning to use Microsoft Teams as a collaborative platform in the future.

Currently, now the entire communication of the company is between Teams and the corporate office is appraising each solution.

I've used Zoom in the past, as well as WebEx. With Teams, the clarity of the meeting is good, including when you are using it on a wireless device. Zoom, however, has the easiest interface. It's the most popular option currently on the market. Everyone is using Zoom. 

WebEx I wouldn't recommend. It takes a lot of bandwidth and is more difficult to use.

The initial setup was a bit complex. I couldn't really follow it very well.

Microsoft offers new users one free month of service, so it's easy to try it out if you want to.

Currently, we're just a customer of Microsoft. We aren't consultants or resellers.

To be honest, everyone is using Zoom these days. The familiarity with that system is higher, and the recommendation for that system is higher. 

When I set up Microsoft Teams, people were not very accustomed to how to use it. However, users have found that using it on the laptop is pretty good. Overall the system looks good. That said, when you try to use it on mobile, we've found the bandwidth is higher.

Currently, as a new user, I would rate the solution seven out of ten. If the interface was just a bit better, and it was easier to organize a meeting, I would rate it higher. Generally, it just needs to be tweaked to make it more user friendly.

Although we're not fully subscribed to the solution, I would recommend it to others.

Primarily we are using Microsoft Teams to facilitate collaboration during events and meetings. All of our meetings are voice and video. We are also using it for document sharing.

We use a file folder structure for maintaining all of our documents. There are version controls for projects that are completed and help to maintain the documentation.

Microsoft Teams has helped us improve collaboration through the use of chats, as well as conferencing, voice calls, knowledge management, and maintaining a repository. At this time, we spend four or five hours a day communicating using Teams.

The main features that we use extensively are voice and video calling. They have improved these features and the improvements are happening continuously. 

The other feature that we like is the repository, which is used for knowledge management. It integrates with SharePoint, where we can store and retrieve documents, maintain version control, and collaborate with each other.

I like these aspects of it, but this is a feature-rich product and I am probably not even aware of all the features that it has.

Microsoft Teams is quite demanding on bandwidth, which has been a problem during the COVID situation because we don't get enterprise-class bandwidth at home. Currently, we use broadband, and even the little variations that happen can throw you out of a meeting. It seems that you get disconnected really fast.

It takes a long time to load, which is something that could be improved.

Having a dial-in feature would be helpful because it would allow more people to be included in meetings.

I have been using Microsoft Teams for almost two years.

This is an extremely stable product and we use it on a daily basis. Since we have been on the cloud, I haven't seen any failures that have been the fault of the service. As long as our internet is up, it is working.

I don't see scalability as an issue. Initially, we had fewer licenses than we do now. As we expanded, we acquired more licenses and added more team members to the platform.

From what I recall, we started with about 500 licenses and we now have closer to 2,000. Two weeks ago, we had about 700 regular users. Adding users was seamless from our perspective, although you have to make sure that your network is configured properly, otherwise, there may be issues with performance.

I do not speak with Microsoft support directly. When I have a problem, I simply call my support staff.

I have used similar solutions and I wouldn't say that Teams has the best in terms of voice and video calling, although I have seen continuous improvement over time and I am happy with that. For example, we used to only see four people on a video call, and it has been increased to nine. These kinds of improvements are good.

On the other hand, when compared to other collaboration software, it is more bandwidth-intensive and takes longer to load. In general, it is heavier.

Prior to using Teams, we had been using Microsoft Exchange 2013. We migrated to Office 365 two years ago, which includes Teams as part of the package. While we were still using Exchange, we ordered Skype. From my perspective, Teams is much more stable than Skype. I found that if we used Skype in a very small network, for example with three routers, then it would work fine. Otherwise, we had issues with quality and stability.

The initial setup is easy, as most products from Microsoft are. It follows the same idea and is not difficult. We have the E3 subscription, so we are always using the latest version.

When we migrated from our Microsoft Exchange platform to Office 365, we had consultants come in to assist us with that. We also had some guidance from Microsoft.

The pricing for Teams is very competitive.

We did look at a couple of other products as well, including Zoom. Because of issues regarding security with Zoom, we only use it very rarely.

Network performance does impact teams, but Microsoft does give recommendations as to how the internet and network should be set up. If you follow these instructions then there will be fewer problems to fix. Essentially, if you are implementing this product then you need to very clearly understand the network requirements. Tweaking things on the network side is very important.

Overall, this is a very good collaboration product and the only thing stopping me from giving it a perfect grade is the heavy bandwidth usage.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for video conferencing and meetings.

There are a lot of applications being developed on Microsoft for Teams. They are building out a lot of Office 365 apps and the integration with everything is great.

The call quality has been very good, especially compared to Skype.

We like that you can get a lot of users on one call without the call actually failing or losing quality. Hosts can connect, if I recall correctly, up to 90,000 people. If you need a massive company-wide meeting, you can do it.

The UI can be further improved upon. When I used to use Skype, Skype was a small window that opened on your desktop. With Teams, when you use it, it occupies your full screen just like if you were in Word or Excel. Skype worked more like an app, which I preferred. I liked being able to use it in a minimized screen. If Teams could emulate that a bit, it would be a better user experience.

When we share the screen, we can't actually take control of the user's screen. When I'm trying to do some activity for another person or want to change something for them, it's not possible. In a technical way, I would like to take control of a system where I'm seeing the screen and I want to do some changes, while we are discussing things during meetings.

We've been using the solution for about six months now. It hasn't been that long.

There are occasional patches that are released and updates that need to happen. Occasionally services go down. However, for the most part, the solution is stable.

We haven't had any scalability issues so far. With the COVID-19 situation, our usage really shot up on Teams. We didn't run into any problems scaling up. So many people who were not using Teams are on the platform now. Previously, the solution was used by 30-40% of the company, and now it's closer to 70-80%. 

I've never been in touch with technical support.

We used to rely on Skype and have since moved over to Teams. It was pretty simple for us to decide on Teams because we were already using Microsoft products. 

A lot of the products that we use are Microsoft, including Skype. However, Microsoft is slowly stopping support for Skype and they're moving towards Teams due to the fact that a lot of applications are getting developed now on Teams.

It took our company about two months to put everything in place. We had to do some integration with a few of our colleagues.

I'm not really too sure on the pricing. That is not something that I handle. That is something that our payment team handles. 

We're just a customer. We're not partners with Microsoft.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten. If the UI was better, where the system wouldn't take over the whole screen. I'd rate it higher. I'd also rate it higher if there was the capability not to just share screens, but to take over the screens of other people in a meeting, so discussions and changes could happen in real-time.

I'd definitely recommend Teams over both Skype and Zoom. In my opinion, it's far superior.

The primary use case of this solution is for communications.

In regards to COVID and the Pandemic, we would not be able to do our regular job without this mechanism in place.

We do our regular scrum meetings using Microsoft Teams. 

We have meetings with the entire company every week. There are hundreds of people connected and it works perfectly in terms of linking people together, showing some content, and showing some slides.

I am not familiar with all of the features yet, but some of the features I find to be most valuable are the visual conference call. We all see our videos as well as audios. 

The quality is much better than it is with Skype.

There is more clarity and everything is crisper.

We have not been using the collaboration part as much, as we are focusing on the communications rather than document sharing.

The communication part has been excellent so far.

While we are still familiarizing ourselves with the features, although I would say that there could be some improvements with some additional stability. For some who connect, and do not have a good connection from home or the internet is not as good, it needs a bit more stability. 

On rare occasions, it freezes and some people will lose sound or they could lose video. It needs better handling. 

It needs to be more robust in terms of stability. 

It's still a fairly new product, so they may still improve this a little.

I have been using Microsoft Teams for a few days. 

We are using the Teams business version, which is the one that is offered with the 365 premium package.

There are some issues with stability and it could be improved.

We are using Skype Enterprise but in two or three months, Skype is going to be decommissioned for us. The IT department has been using Microsoft Teams.

We have a local client installed. The software is installed on our desktop and updated to the most recent version whenever it's available.

The initial setup is simple, but if you are a government agency, you have to make it more secure and more robust. 

There are additional purchases necessary to secure it in a government agency where you don't want to share a document or expose documents that may be private.

If you have content that requires more security and you want to use it in a more secure manner, with more protection, then it will come at a higher cost. You have to set your environment up with additional features, such as multifactor authentication and identity protection, which are not available in the basic plan. Instead, they can be purchased additionally from Microsoft.

My advice for anybody interested in Microsoft Teams is that it's a good product and they should hire some consulting services that are specialists if they are serious about implementing it the correct way.

At this time, Microsoft Team fulfills everything we need.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We're a tech services company and have numerous use cases for this solution, whether it be for meetings and chat, for collaborations, sharing files, document libraries, collaborating on Word documents and Excel. We use the solution every day, almost as much as we use email. We're partners with Microsoft and I'm the company delivery practice director. 

It's improved our organization by enabling us to create a channel where we collaborate on all the projects and communicate instantly. You can set up a meeting for that channel which links to your personal calendar, it's very good. 

I believe the chat messaging is a very valuable feature. It's not like Skype or Google Hangouts where you chat and once you're done you'll never find it again. This solution sticks with the chat until it's deleted and it also enables the application of backend retention policies so it can be saved longer. If you need to adhere to any regulation or compliancy regarding data retention you can set policies for that. Within a Teams meeting, you can put in all your meeting notes, whiteboards, all sorts of communication tools that you use. It's a very simple, intuitive platform. The learning curve for clients is minimal.

If you're using this product in a big corporation with a lot of data to manage, finding something specific can become very complex and the solution can become a little bit quirky. If I'm searching for a file in Teams, I might not find the relevant information right away. I think the search feature could be improved in that regard although any platform might have issues when dealing with masses of data. It's a management challenge when you're dealing with that amount of data. 

I'd like to see better ways of managing data, perhaps create a life cycle, possibilities for deletion or archiving. So, at this point we don't have, there is a way to do that, but it's it's really complex to do. There's a way to do it now but it's very complex. 

I've been using the solution for four years. 

It's a very stable solution. Once in a while we may have some issues when users complain that things are moving slowly, but I've never experienced outages. 

It lives in the cloud, so it's scalable. We're a relatively small company and have approximately 300 users but some of our client companies are huge and can have somewhere between 10,000-30,000 users. We don't have dedicated deployment staff but we have an internal IT department that takes care of things. 

The quality of technical support really depends on the tier of support a company has. We don't have any issues because we have a lot of Microsoft and former Microsoft employees, but if we were a client without premier support, then we'd want to see some improvement in the technical support. 

We used Skype before moving over to Teams. Some of our clients also use Slack so we use it too. Teams is unique because the other solutions are more for chat or video but lack the collaboration of Teams.

The initial setup is straightforward. Because the software as a service is part of Office 365, it only requires a user a license, and then you can download the product or push it with whatever tools you have, whether it's configuration manager or Intune, you push it to the endpoints. The other way it can be set up is using an SAAS application, where you don't have to worry about infrastructure in the backend, and you just need a good internet connection. 

From what I know the licensing comes in a bundle. There is an enterprise license that comes with email, Office Suite like Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and a second possible option without the added features. I believe that the fees are charged based on the number of users. 

The transition to this solution is very quick so don't hesitate to give it a go, particularly for anyone already using Microsoft products. If they're using Google or Slack, it depends how they want to consolidate it. The adaptation to this solution is very quick, clients love it and can easily see the power of it. It's a cloud collaboration piece and integrates with products. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We use it for all communication between product development, product management, technical support, field teams, and other stakeholders. It is our primary vehicle for all communications. We have used it extensively to share content, such as spreadsheets, docs, PowerPoints, and other product related materials, for R&D and internal teams (e.g., the technical and field teams) as well as customer-facing documentation. With the recent COVID-19 forcing all our team members to work remotely, this solution has been an invaluable resource where we can easily set up virtual meetings (with or without video conferencing). 

We utilize the chat (with and without video calling) quite a bit as well as the ability to create content and store it. It is easy to share and collaborate, including built-in, edit-in-place, autosave features, without having to download, edit, save, or upload. We take advantage of the Wiki pages to schedule meetings through the calendar, which all but eliminates the need to use Outlook calendar. Teams is fully integrated with our teams, culture, and behaviors. It works as we work and is fairly flexible when configuring things that are team/program specific. 

If I could completely eliminate Outlook and only use Teams, that would help me immensely. Productivity would increase drastically and many of our team members would be more efficient in our day-to-day, as we would be living primarily in a single tool. I'm not a developer, but if Teams could be integrated with VS or Eclipse to easily share information in a chat panel, such as a task you are working on, roadblocks you may have run into, or if you need approval for something. 

This is not critical. It would be a nice feature to be able to have your own background, use a collage (if desired) when doing video calls, or use an animated emoji in place of your video during live chats (as a way to add more personal flavor to your personality).  

More than one year.

It is very stable when compared to Fuze and Skype for Business.

So far, it scales well.

Not applicable at this stage.

Yes, we have previously use Fuze as well as Rocket.Chat and Skype for Business. Fuze was unreliable. Skype for Business and Rocket.Chat lacked too many features.

As a large organization, we have used our fair share of tools, such as Skype for Business (S4B), Rocket.Chat, and most recently Fuze. Rocket.Chat is limited to chat only. Although you can share/attach docs, screenshots, and such, there isn't an easy way to organize the collection of data. If your team likes the ability to use a Wiki tool, there is nothing inherently built into Rocket.Chat for this. S4B is limited to video, chatting, and screen shares, lIke Rocket.Chat, for what it does, though it does it fairly well. However, as a tool for collaboration and communication with a team (large and small), S4B is too limited. Fuze, by far, is the worst tool. It was far too unreliable with calls (with or without video). Teams is a blend of Rocket.Chat, S4B, and a "working" version of Fuze.

Straightforward.

Vendor team.

Someone else handles it. I would estimate it has saved an average of at least one hour per day (for myself) as Fuze crashed too often, then I ended up reverting back to Skype for Business or GoToMeeting. 

Only Teams.

Mostly, how to use it and best practices (real world compared to what we are using today).

I think we're use Microsoft Teams for almost everything when it comes to communications. When I call my colleagues, I no longer using the phone. Because I use Teams so much, I picked up the phone the other day and it was strange — It was like it was the first time I picked up the phone. I use Teams as a phone. Even on my smartphone, I call people using Teams.

We're using Teams to call people to set meetings, record meetings, share documents — all communication now goes through Teams. We create groups to share our documents and update them live. It is really very practical and collaborative.

It is improving our means of communication and I think in the future will encourage users to communicate better because it is fun to use and powerful.

The features that I like the most are the features we have now. I like every aspect of it. It is easy to use. It's on your phone, so it is mobile. You can respond without answering if you have a call or message. You can send emoticons so people know you have gotten their message. This type of response is very quick and doesn't leave the other party waiting. Those features are just like what you might do in WhatsApp or Messenger on Facebook. It is very familiar to anyone using those products.

One thing that we are looking to deploy — and we are testing it now — is to send and track kudos. We want to implement this new feature on a worldwide basis to thank team members for being good participants. 

We work directly with Microsoft to provide feedback on the product and what we would like to see as improvements. I discover a new feature every day, so they're really working to develop it very quickly. 

I would like also to have a feature where we create a worldwide group to act as a social media hub. The difference between that and groups is that it would be separate from all the other groups. I don't want it included in my Teams because I will use it in a different way. I can see the activity of other teams or individuals who are not on my teams. Because I'm using the product extensively and have many teams, I think it is an important addition to be able to organize groups in different ways — and I have put in that request with IS. 

I've heard some people complain and say, "Oh it's not working with me," but I never had any issue with Teams. I use it all the time and it is stable. It opens immediately when I open my computer, it's on my phone and it sends me notifications. 

I have calls with people on it. Sometimes I even record video calls. The only time I have had any issues is when the network is not working well — maybe in high load times — but this happens with every means of communication like WhatsApp or other solutions that depend on the network. It isn't a problem with the package it is a problem with the network.

Our company has about 14,000 employees, but we are not all using the intranet. We are an industrial company and we have people working in manufacturing and they don't have access to computers all the time. 

As far as scalability, we would like to have the ability to use the product off-site. That is, we want to be able to have remote people use Teams with us internally. This is the only thing I've heard that's posing a problem with scaling. 

I have not directly had any experience with the Microsoft technical support team for Teams because we have an IS (Internet Services) group. If we open a ticket, the IS department is the group who will contact support.

Before we tried using Teams, we were using Skype. Now we are only using Teams because it is a more complete and business-oriented tool. 

I was not directly involved in the deployment. 

Our implementation was done by our own IS team.

My advice to people who are considering this solution is that you have to be patient at the beginning. People might think it is too complicated or that it looks too complicated at the beginning. As a first time user, I remember feeling like I didn't understand anything. You have to be patient and play around with it until you become familiar with the different features. For example, there are channels within a group. If you are added to several groups and you start getting alerts, you may not know which channel it is or which group. It is a lot for a first time user to digest. It is not as straightforward as WhatsApp when it comes to groups.

What we have seen is that when we communicate our requests to Microsoft, we are getting back responses with the features we have asked for. There are many features that we request and we discover they are available in just a few days. Either many companies are making the same requests or Microsoft is answering our request, but the product is evolving quickly. 

On a scale from one to ten, when one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Microsoft Teams as an eight. While I like the product a lot and I use it all the time, there is room for improvement.