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Microsoft Teams is/was down. What's your fallback?
Teams is down or was down for pretty much everyone I know (work context).
Thinking in terms of business continuity, what is your fallback plan. Is your fallback a managed, enterprise class service?
Might get everyone internally to install Signal since it's end-to-end encrypted, has a desktop client and can handle file transfers. That's just off the cuff.
Thoughts?
Having a nice quiet workday for once?
Being a bit more serious, depends on what you need from teams. If you need access to your files, secretly all SharePoint anyway so unless that's also down you can still access a bunch.
For meetings there is a variety of options, but I honestly wouldn't bother for incidental downtime. Simply not worth the hassle getting everyone up to speed on something unfamiliar to them.
I always thought it was funny when certain co-workers would frantically ask me out of the blue, "Is email down?!" when it wasn't. They just hadn't received emails in the last couple of hours or so.
These were often the same people who were constantly complaining that they're buried beneath a mountain of emails. I'd even joke with them, "Do you want me to turn off inbound email for a bit so you can get stuff done? I have that power!"
Here it is they're getting a slight reprieve, but instead of taking advantage and taking a breather, they freaked out.
This is what I was going to say before I even opened the comments. It is a necessary and useful tool, but it has become .... intrusive in ways both subtle and gross. You should work to live, not live to work.
On a side note, it absolutely flabbergasts my colleagues (friends too) when I just leave my phone at home for a few hours. I might go up to local and have a pint while watching a match and just not worry. Family could get me if really needed. It's not that far away, and pubs have phones too you know.
Honestly, I think it does more for my health and well being to have some alone time, than 5 doctors on call telling me what to give up out of my life so I live longer, but less.
Do you also get a lot of "Are you still alive?" when you don't answer for a few hours? I really can see people getting phones grafted to their body in the future, it already seems to be assumed that you'll always have it with you.
I don't actually. The reason is that I don't use my phone whenever I can, just when I need to. As an example, to the amazement of children under the age of 20, I be in and out of the loo in 5 minutes, and 2 of those are a decent hand washing.
Lobbying my boss to switch to Slack.
Nothing worse than when orgs migrate away from Slack to bs like Teams.
There are Slack alternatives, then there’s being a cheap ass because some C-suite didn’t have the foresight to consider the negative cost impact of switching to a worse tool.
My company got rid of our automatic workstation cloud backup tool because we also had a Dropbox-like tool. That's not at all the same thing! I think someone saw that we had multiple "unlimited" places to store data and wanted to save money by consolidating. I guess it makes sense in their world where all you need to backup is PowerPoints and word documents...
Slack has been getting worse and bloated over time
Yes but Teams started out worse and bloated to begin with.
Right? Let me remove that new extra sidebar plz. In fact get rid of the whole redesign.
You can, for now, with both of these userscripts enabled:
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/475463-slack-layout-ui-restore
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/411959-slack-web-workspace-sidebar
Just have to refresh a couple times every now and again.
Time to switch to Zulip
I asked my wife whose entire department is spread over multiple sites and WFH as well, therefore has a few hundred staff who rely on Teams and she said they they use Whatsapp. Which is the same as Signal. They already have a bunch of groups set up so she can reach her managers and those managers their staff and so on.
If both Teams and Whatsapp are down, voice calls. If voice calls are down too, probably just fuck it off and take the rest of the day off. Also there's likely something very serious happening if everything is offline!
My team has a whatsapp group. Even though we can't use it for official work talk, it's great. When everythings running well, it's a nice way to share friendly banter. When our proper systems break down, it's a relief to have a way of letting others know / reach out for phone calls.
Message my boss on Signal, kick back and not worry. The work will be there tomorrow, unless Teams comes up sooner. Time to walk the building, grab a coffee and find out what other sections are doing.
If there's something that's time critical, it wasn't getting done on teams anyway.
Hello, Peter. What's happening?
Frankly, all of the online meeting clients have fleas, and Teams also has great big squirmy bloodsucking lampreys. I never send Teams invites, only WebEx, but many customers are locked into Microsoft.
Latest Teams update consistently freezes on screen shares, and I've done every conceivable troubleshooting step short of throwing my laptop across the room. I don't usually do education calls, but covered for a trainer today. The call experience in Teams was so bad (the app froze and I had to rejoin four times in 20 minutes) the customer requested a site visit.
I'm regularly switching among Slack, Teams, Zoom, and WebEx. For our company, Teams is primary, WebEx is fallback, and Slack is internal only, rarely used for anything but small huddles. I'd say WebEx is the most reliable at the moment, but this is always subject to change and not saying a great deal about overall quality. Bluetooth audio on Windows is a giant steaming pile as well, particularly when switching among meeting clients throughout the day.
You'd think the pandemic would have created a great leap forward in quality of meeting clients, but generally, I've found reliability is now much worse. [And it's not overall network connectivity - my home connection is rock-solid, I know when there are problems at the office, and most of our customers are hospitals with Tier 1 or 2 backbone connections.]
And we use AT&T VoIP softphones, which I've never had issues with.
I don't have enough of a sample size to discuss Zoom. However, I've never seen significant problems on the sometimes very large conference calls I've been in, and the two customers that use it are among the most technologically sophisticated, well-funded hospitals in the U.S.
And if you have no landline Internet available, mobile Teams works better than either Google Meet or FaceTime.
Zoom is highly performant, and some the bugs I attribute to me running on Linux. The only thing WebEx does better is remote sceen control.
Teams struggles with mass video chats in a way that no others do. I do like how I can have it dial to my phone though.
Zoom in particular has no qualms with 50+ people sharing video the way Teams does. And their whiteboard collaboration tools are well thought out and immensely useful.
Much appreciated. When I schedule a meeting, it's usually for a services implementation call with a tightly focused group of engineers, biomed, and/or clinical staff, and screen-sharing is an absolute requirement. WebEx has been my mostly reliable go-to for this. One of the many, many horrors of Teams is that the slightest misconfiguration or difference in security policies between internal and external domains means that you never know which features will be enabled, particularly screen-sharing, remote control, and recording.
It's been a long time since I've been responsible for operating infrastructure to run any of the meeting clients, mostly Cisco WebEx. I'm familiar with some of the potential backend issues, but way out of date on current state of the art.
Unfortunately, our corporate Microsoft 365 environment is run by a miniscule group of overworked EIT folks who've achieved Olympian indifference to petty complaints about Teams, and I have no visibility into issues with the application packaging and network management. That's why our division uses WebEx as a backup, and I'm terrified we'll lose it in the current round of cost-cutting.
Without spending very scarce time and resources to get some insight into the relative cost structures and technical/security concerns, when it's not in my current job description to do so, I can't go chasing a change to Zoom.
Yea Microsoft did what Microsoft does and provided a shitty product that checks enough of the feature boxes with little regard to quality that overworked and underfunded people won't choose anything else.
Active Directory is a hell of a drug.
Well, if it's any indication, the 100+ person corporate call where they laid off half the staff in my office this week used WebEx. Take my grumpiness with that large grain of salt.
I can't speak to security but Zoom is quite easy to use.
If it helps any, I noticed that recently I suddenly had Teams screenshares that would crash Teams every 3-10 minutes.
Turns out (by sheer trial and error) that it was due to HDR. If I turned off HDR then it was stable.
Might be helpful for you?
Thank you - I'd done my Internet homework and that was one of the things I'd checked. GPU acceleration, cleared cache, uninstalled/reinstalled... It's still garbage.
I had to use Teams for the first time recently for a new job interview and it was not a very user friendly experience. I was looking everywhere for where to input the meeting ID and password I was sent, and I was absolutely floored when I found it under the calendar icon where you schedule meetings! And then it wouldn't connect and recommended I connect through the web browser instead! Why the heck even have a standalone program?
So if I had to regularly use Teams for work and it went down, then good riddance!
Yes. Teams is not one piece of software. You get a different experience if you're the corporate user inside the corporate network than if you're a guest user dialling into the meeting.
And because the IT for those big corporate meetings is handled by corporate IT team who are never part of the call if there are any problems in the meeting the only answer is "disconnect and reconnect" which sometimes works but usually doesn't.
Honestly, if it's to cover a couple of hours outage a year, Outlook probably suffices for a lot of organisations. Has worked fine for my place (mid-sized multinational / manufacturing) over the last few years. A couple of hours even with a full network outage just isn't that much to us - but obviously ymmv depending on your sector.
We have business continuity plans to roll back on when there is a major net outage (hard copies of key processes and forms, chain of command) and fall back to telephone / face to face if needed.
We're a small organization, so Teams being down wouldn't be the end of the world. But if we had to fallback to something, I imagine email (Exchange Online) would be the main mode of communications, provided that O365 overall wasn't down. We do maintain subscriptions to Zoom as well, even if not all employees have paid licenses for it. I think Zoom has chat/IM features? Chats are like 95% of our Teams usage.
However, we do use Teams Phone VOIP. So if we lost phones too, well, not much we could do to replace it. Maybe our phone vendor could switch us to some other VOIP system. But I imagine that would only happen if Teams Phone were down for a significant amount of time; like several days or even weeks. They're not going to do anything if the phones are down for a few hours.
Before WFH and before Teams, our company used to utilize WhatsApp when many of us were travelling, such as when running our conferences/conventions. Some of us still use it today, but mainly for private, not necessarily work-related chitchatting. Though it'd be an option since most/all of us have experience using it.
I'm surprised more people don't know about Matrix.org which has encryption, can do meetings and videoconferences and can be run on your own server...
I'm not saying it can be used instead of Teams though - ie. there is no calendar as far as I know.
Tricky, it really depends on the meeting. For some of them: a nice cup of coffee and get some actual work done. I rarely attend meetings like this because I mostly have control about what meetings I attend.
But for some meetings? There's going to be comprehensive email chains with a command and control structure, with a focus on known or developing risks and rescheduling the meeting for when infrastructure is back up.
There's a point blank refusal to use anything like Zoom and no-one would suggest WhatsApp.
We have redundancy with Teams, Slack and Zoom, all configured properly and in active use (hugely augmented by cross-plattform tooling and bots).
Granted, working in networking and clients with their platforms, we're uniquely positioned to be on top of these things.
I don't know many companies that would be perfectly fine if the large DNS-systems, AWS, all subsea network cables etc. were to go offline. I doubt many but the very largest companies in other sectors could say the same. We could get ransomwared out of all of our systems, and we'd be fully up from multiple locations in minutes.
The costs for all this are manageable for companies above a certain size. Knowing our clients, few bother investing in this, despite heightened risks of cyber warfare leaving bystanders heavily impacted.
It was glitching today, re-sending messages, but calls seemed fine.
My fallback would be email, as my company just axed Jabber for everything but as a soft phone (I assume we plan to cut over fully eventually).
RocketChat is okay as a discount Slack. Though I haven't used Slack for a few years and I hear not great things.
Google Meet is beyond sufficient for meetings. Teams won't even let me sign in without weird tricks. It shocks me this is considered a complete product.
My fallback is sitting back, going "eeheeheehee" and being able to delay my replies for a bit, because it takes longer for emails to reach me.
Now, if email went down as well, then we'd really be up chocolate creek without a popsicle stick.
When I was director of engineering, one of the teams that reported to me was network engineering. Obviously, no technology is a sure thing when things get bad with the network. We had Teams and Zoom accounts, an AWS Chime instance on standby, plus cell phones. When we were doing major work like on our WAN circuits, I would be joined to both Zoom, where a private engineer meeting was going, and Teams, where all of our distributed IT leads were following progress, and I would narrate and call out our scripted punch list of tasks.
Outside of those mission-critical domains or customer-facing channels, we didn't really bother with redundancy in our web-conference tools. I suppose if you use Teams for your DID routing, then that is a more significant outage as it impacts life safety.
We don't use Teams but Slack. We don't really have an equivalent fallback. If it went down for any extended period, I think we'd just use email.