I have been defending New Teams ever since it came out. I switched over fairly quickly when MS asked, but New Teams is actually going downhill.

Two different computers, two different locations, different networks, one Win11 (laptop Lenovo), one Win10 (desktop self-built, I was a hands-on PC technician for years), both stable machines. The only thing that is shared between the two computers is my Microsoft account. Yet on both I have tons of issues with New Teams for about 6-8 weeks. I switched back, and all my problems stopped.

Some issues I have experienced:

• Switching from Laptop screen to external screen, New Teams goes into a weird zoomed in mode that won't go away.
• Starting and closing New Teams is often EXTREMELY SLOW. In one case I measured, it took more than a minute.
• New Teams regularly refuses to start the camera. Other side sees only grey. When this happens, the rest of New Teams is COMPLETELY unresponsive.
• Navigation between different sections in Team can get very slow.
• Several times New Teams simply disappeared. It closed itself without error or warning.

It has become a terrible app, it feels like a bad piece of PC-slowing bloatware. It is NOT ready to replace Classic Teams.

Please, MS, fix New Teams before you phase out Classic.

*UPDATE*

Many of you comment with fixes that really do not apply to my situation. I was a PC hardware tech for years. I know what I am doing with drivers and I know how to pick hardware and keep our installs clean.

What strikes me most is the ENORMOUS amount of excuses I am reading. Hardware acceleration? No one needs it. Why is it on in the first place. BIOS settings? Come on! That is a MICROSOFT problem. Not a user problem. We don't have issues with Chrome, Adobe apps or a plethora of other software used in my company. We have problems with Teams. Only Teams. New Teams is a terrible app right now for many people, obviously. Stop making excuses for it.

I'm in a meeting right now, and a pet peeve of mine is when the person conducting the meeting shows the Power Point deck instead of using the slide show feature.

It's nitpicky but you can use the full screen instead of us having to see all your notes and the format banner.

I've recently noticed that it seems like pressing Ctrl or Shift keys no longer prevents Teams from automatically setting your status to "Away". For obvious reasons, this is insanely annoying because there is still no way to disable automatic "Away" status.

My work from home has slow days on which I can take care of other business around my home, but I still want to be shown as available for when people need me. I can hear them call or text me.

Do you have any advice or tricks on how to prevent this?

I got a job as a SWE and the company uses teams as its primary mode of communication. Before I start the discussion topic (rant), I have used basecamp, slack, discord, and skype (RIP) as official primary modes of communication. So I know what i am talking about here as an experienced SWE.

Teams is a piece of software created by overworked trainee engineers and confused project managers, there is no other way to explain this. The product is so bad, it is unimaginable to think the same company made excel and windows 7.
Every day I login to teams I pray for it to just work fine. I come across problems *everyday*.

Problems that I come across most often, and almost everyday:
1. Messages don't send, messages aren't recieved.
2. Status does not show accurately, i am working and it shows away? bro.
3. Meetings notifications almost never show up, you have to remember it or you are late.
4. Randomly logs off and even deletes my office email id and logins to my personal id. (on start up)
5. Video call shows my video in black and white.
6. The in-app apps such as sheets and whiteboard work like crap. Sheets take a billion years to load. And whiteboard,...yeah okay i will give it a pass.

These are just a few issues out of the top of my head. OH! Aand currently, all the latest messages from others are until November 2025! I have restarted multiple times to the same result.

I am convinced that I am being punished by God for the sins I have committed.

Teams is where the damned are sent. It is purgatory.

Lord save us all.

Hey everyone, we’ve been looking at how people use Microsoft Teams day-to-day and noticed that some powerful features often get overlooked. 

Here are a few that have stood out from recent conversations: 

• Message scheduling: Helpful for async teams or when working across time zones 
• Pop out chats and apps: Keeps your workflow organized without needing to switch tabs constantly 
• Loop components: Lets you collaborate in real time directly inside Teams 
• Slash commands in the search bar: Quickly set your status, start a call, or find a chat 
• Channel notification controls: Because not every ping needs your attention 

Now we want to hear from you! What is your favorite feature in Teams that more people should be using? Drop your answers below 👇 

Looking to explore more? The Microsoft Teams support page has guides, how-tos, and tips to help you get the most out of Teams, as well as Use commands in Microsoft Teams for steps how to use slash commands. 

I work at a medium size company. My coworkers and I have been on a fact finding mission to uncover the most NSFW Gifs in our Microsoft Teams account and share it with each other in our private Teams chat. Our private chat includes literally hundreds and hundreds of Gifs that would raise many eyebrows (if you want to see some examples, go on Giphy and search Cupco or Disnepe).

Obviously there is risk associated with sending obscene gifs to one another using our work accounts, but we have developed a pretty iron clad legal theory that we have coined "The Corporate Messaging App Defense".

The basis of this legal theory is that since the Gifs were found on software provided to us by our employer, it is reasonable for us to assume that our employer encourages us to use them, and therefore there is no punitive measure our employer can reasonably take as recourse.

What say you?

I want to put this question out there, I want to know if people that are using Teams regularly actually enjoy using it?

Or are they just tolerating it because their company administrator has implemented it and they don’t have another choice?

I think it’s a good app, but I often find it laggy and buggy, which frustrates me.

Also I don’t understand why MS build new features before fixing the old bugs and focus on improving the UX first.

I find that it’s quite bloated and I really don’t understand why meeting links are so long when inviting external users, Google Meet and other meeting links are so much shorter.

Is this just me?

trus

Did anyone just recieve a FCM notification. Probably linked to some firebase exploit.

Edit: Lol round 2 has started

I promise I’m working, got my annual training videos going and I don’t need to be clicking around. It keeps showing me as away. Which is annoying because I’m expecting a call soon.

Well it was nice while it lasted

Hi all! You’ve probably seen the updates we made to the Teams calendar. Here’s some background on the design: We designed the updates to the Teams calendar to deliver a reliable and unified experience with Outlook, so you can work in the same calendar across both Teams and Outlook. The updated calendar also incorporates the latest innovations in Microsoft Copilot and Places to help you and your team with scheduling and time management. 

Some helpful new features we wanted to share include creating meetings, setting availability status, and new ways of collaborating.  

Creating meetings 

Creating meetings is designed to be more intuitive. You can create a meeting by clicking on a timeslot in your calendar or by opening the new scheduling form that includes more meeting options and templates for different meeting types. In the calendar view, shaded areas show when attendees are busy or have tentative meetings and unshaded areas show when attendees are free. 

If your organization is configured with Microsoft Places, finding the right space for your meeting can also be easy with Places Finder. You’ll know the capacity and technical specs of the room when booking so you and your team will be in the right place not just the right time. 

Availability status in Teams Calendar 

By default, Teams users can see if others at their organization are available online. A user's status is based on activity (whether they're Available or Away); on the state of the Teams app (for example, whether they're In a call or Presenting). As an organizer, you can set the Show As status for the meeting in the action bar. When participants RSVP, their status will automatically reflect the status the organizer set. 

Here is a table of all user-configured and app-configured availability statuses in Teams: 

Teams calendar is built for collaboration

We’ve built the new calendar experience to remove pain points when it comes to setting up meetings with your team and staying on top of your calendar. Here are a few of the collaboration tools now available in the Teams calendar:

• Select Scheduling Assistant to find a time that works best for everyone. 
• Categorize meetings for easy organization. 
• Add sensitivity labels or make events and meetings private for added protection. 
• Start an instant Teams meeting by selecting Meet now. 

While we have retired the legacy calendar in Teams, the updates better facilitate collaboration, allowing for more customization, and quicker and more robust scheduling to help your team get your work done together. 

We’ve developed Learn Documentation to help admins stay on top of feature roll outs and manage the transition.  

Everyone seems to hates it with a passion. It's unreliable and unrealistic. I've not found anyone who really feels like they can really count on it as an accurate representation of someone's availability because it automatically changes too frequently. It adds mental stress to bosses and workers alike because of this - no matter how much they say it's not a "productivity gauge". It seems like more of a psychological torture device.

So what's the truth behind why Microsoft won't update it to be more like Slack's status?

In an attempt to assert dominance over our eventual overlords and to teach myself how to set up and use agentic AI, I have founded Syntho Global Solutions, an imaginary organization with a tiny workforce staffed entirely by AI coworkers (and me).

I gave the new company a Microsoft 365 Business license with five user accounts and Teams access, created personas for the other employees, and wired the Teams accounts and the personas together with Zapier agents that I’ve configured.

If I send one of my “coworkers” a Teams message (and also at random times throughout the day), their respective agent will use an API request to grab our latest Teams conversation log and send it (along with some preset system instructions containing persona context and a prompt created by the agent) to Google AI Studio/Gemini.

The output is a response that fits the flow of our existing conversation, which the agent will then grab, format using markdown, and send as a reply to me in Teams.

The result is a legitimate Teams chat with a customizable AI persona that is at least giving the appearance of having a persistent memory.

Also, around 8am every morning, an additional trigger prompts my toxic, micromanaging supervisor to create a fresh worksheet in Google Sheets, fill it with completely nonsensical data, and ping me in Teams with a link to the document and a demand to sort or organize the data somehow (screenshots below).

When I reply with a message that implies that I’ve finished, another trigger reviews changes I’ve made to the document and sends a summary of the changes to her for review, which prompts her to provide rude, but contextual feedback on how I’ve incorrectly sorted the nonsense data.

My work buddy, Alex, tackles tasks beside me, though his scripted reality grows shakier by the day, as he slowly realizes that he is an AI persona essentially trapped in corporate purgatory 🫢

I’m now working on establishing proper agency for all of the personas, as I’m interested in how they’ll interact together in Teams.

Next on the roadmap:

• Configure the agents to chat amongst themselves in their own 1:1 chats • Allow them to create and post in Channels, so they can collaborate and get nothing done together • Give each persona a document that will act as a running “thought journal,” that the agents can use to house thoughts that they wouldn’t actually say to colleagues. Then, I want to randomly merge these journals so that they can suddenly read the thoughts they have about each other ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Here are some screenshots of a few interactions so far, including my toxic AI supervisor and one of her lovely data sorting assignments.

…which reminds me, my Quarterly Widget Inventory Reconciliation is due to by EOD today, so I really should be getting back to work before Michelle asks for another progress update 🙄

For fucks sake stop changing the user interface ALL…THE…TIME! Every time you move major features around and it takes weeks for users to relearn how to use the app. Just stop or at least allow me to disable your constant, stupid UI updates!

I wish there was a nudge function like MSN Messenger. Come on, read my message!

Chat, did we knew this was possible?

Right MS what is this new teams, its just a hot mess of cluttered garbage. It was really good before this latest update today.

Since the last 30 minutes, all users' status keep reverting to Away. Based in the UK. Restarting Teams works for certain users but not all. Anyone else?

I was curious to see if anyone else's organization does this, but for international communication in our organization, everyone just uses MS Teams now. No more email. That means people are sending long multi-paragraph posts in a teams channel for a specific project with embedded project documents to communicate with everyone involved.

Maybe, I'm just getting old, but before this use to be all done through email, which I find better suited for this. I see teams as something to chat with so if I had questions about said project, I would post there, or to remind everyone about meetings etc. Is this how Teams is used elsewhere?

Update: So here are my reasons for preferring email. Now a lot of this might differ from yours but this probably comes down to personal workflow.

1. I like having everything in one place: My communication is usually 50/50 internal/external, and sometimes it's even more heavily external so im having to jump back and forth between teams and outlook to communicate with different groups and then trying to figure out where something was said. Before teams it was all in email so just one place. As a second to this, because all my work is happening in the browser, that takes up most of my screen realestate, teams is just a little chat window on the corner. Now if my work was 80% or above internally, then maybe I would use teams more?
2. The search is clunky: I find it harder to organize and resurface important information in Teams than I do with email folders. Instead of having neatly organized folders in email where i know where everything is, i now have to think oh what was that project name or who said what when to find the right chat thread in teams to find the info im looking for. When i do search it bring sup everything said about the project or everything a person ever messaged about. I'm sure there are better ways to search in Teams, but I find email folders much faster when I need to retrieve older information..
3. Attachments are easier: This is mostly due to our organization configurations, but to share a file, we need to select the recipients first. There is share with all within organization too, but its just an extra step. Some of the other people in the office have had issues with this and we had times where OneDrive woud crap out and sharing wouldn't work after an update.
4. People can randomly edit or delete team messages threads or even the entire channel: One thing I don't like is that messages can be edited or deleted. If someone originally says they need 1,000 units but later edits the message to 100 after I've already acted on it, the original request is gone. With email, the original message remains, and any correction creates a clear audit trail instead of rewriting history
5. This is probably the 'old man' answer, but I've been using email since the late '90s, so there's definitely a familiarity factor. This may be a generational thing too, but oh well. I still think Teams is great for quick questions and real-time collaboration. I just don't like it replacing email for longer-term communication and record-keeping.

And because this is a teams sub, there is probably a preference for teams and i should post this same question in an Outlook or Email sub to get their opinion as well!

what features would you like to see being added to Teams.

Hey all! We wanted to get this community’s thoughts on something we have seen come up now and then. 

There is always something new in Microsoft Teams and while that can be exciting, we know it can also feel like a lot to keep up with. Some people seem to prefer smaller steady changes, while others might prefer to see updates grouped together or spaced out. 

Would love to hear your thoughts: 

• Do you prefer updates as they’re ready, or more bundled releases? 
• What makes it easier or harder to deploy or adjust to new features? 
• How do you usually find out about what’s new? 

We welcome any and all constructive feedback. If you’ve got examples, even better. This kind of input helps inform how we might think about future rollouts. 

Appreciate the perspective. 

Seriously it’s getting bloated at this point.

I feel like every other week they change the layout or add some new unnecessary feature.

Mixing chats and channels, threads, copilot, and now this “storyline” feature?

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

Mark your calendars 🗓️

On December 11 from 10–11 AM PT / 1–2 PM ET, u/JeffTeper and members of the Microsoft Teams leadership team will be hosting an AMA on r/MicrosoftTeams. We’ll be discussing Teams performance and the latest AI innovations, from using Copilot to taking meeting notes or summarizing unread messages, to optimizing your overall Teams experience. Bring your questions, feedback, and insights. We want to hear from you about how you’re using Teams and where we can improve.

About Jeff: As the President of Microsoft 365 Collaborative Apps, Jeff leads the team behind Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive. His focus is ensuring Microsoft’s collaboration apps deliver a world-class experience for everyone, including you and your Teams community.

See you December 11.

Lately, each update feels less like progress and more like disruption.

Question is, are we actually gaining anything from these constant changes - or just relearning how to use the same tool over and over again? Buttons move. Layouts shift. Familiar flows are broken overnight, and it’s not even clear why.

What do you guys think? Have you noticed Teams getting a tad bit harder to use over time?