In pre-Covid times, Slack going down would have just meant a slightly louder office since people would fall back on, you know, talking to each other out loud. These days losing access to the group chat is so completely isolating!

Yes, Slack is back for us again, too.

Even before COVID, my team's spread over two offices and everyone would work from home at least one day a week. So Slack's pretty important to us. Someone in our morning Zoom meeting suggested switching to MS Teams and everyone else pretty much recoiled, hissing like vampires who just saw a crucifix.

I cannot even get my co-workers to reliably use jabber IM. Cannot imagine using slack for work.

I still fight with several to use email rather than the phone.

Our University's tech people have moved to MS Teams so my boss has been pushing it for internal communication. So not pretty

One of my customers uses MS Teams for our monthly conference call. It does not seem great, just from that limited exposure.

I was furious when they introduced Teams when we were still in the office, but I've gotten used to it. Basically it feels like mediocre versions of five different things shoved together. I still don't think it makes sense for most document storage, but we still have our regular files (so far) so that's OK.

Someone in our morning Zoom meeting suggested switching to MS Teams and everyone else pretty much recoiled, hissing like vampires who just saw a crucifix.

We have an internal chat/meeting app that was our only option before Slack, and literally NOBODY fell back on it during the Slack outage this morning. Because we hates it, precious.

MS Teams is really nice, but the issue is it only really pays off if you have 100% complete commitment to the entire Microsoft suite of tools. This makes sense for large organizations that have an IT department that is managing all of that, but it's a lot to deal with for a small business. It also means you really need to switch everyone to using Outlook for Calendar, which them means they are also moving to Outlook for e-mail since those are integrated, etc, etc. There's no good way to schedule a meeting in a stand alone fashion in Teams, you need to do it through the calendar in Outlook.

Since we use Google for the backend for our email and scheduling, that made Teams not a very good match. I've had to use it as an external user with some of our clients who are completely in the MS ecosystem, and the tools seemed pretty good.

Timelies all!

One bit of kinda good news here. Found out that the payback of the taxes that weren't taken out since September will be spread out through the whole year. Previously they were going to do it over three months, so I guess that is an improvement. Still wish I had a choice about the whole thing to begin with.

One of the benefits of being one of the "Mornings? What are those?" tech industry people means that things like the Slack outage are resolved by the time I'm around!