Recommendations for a Team in Teams

Question

Recommendations for a Team in Teams

41844108 306

Hi all I'm extremely stressed out and was supposed to post an education program for a 9,000 person agency this week. I have absolutely no control of the content because the platform is so poorly designed. Does anyone have any recommendations for how to present information in Teams that isn't severely problematic? What I want to do:

post a channel for a specific tool, no comments section

post a set of videos in a channel, in order the team should look like this:

TEAM:

_____ Tool:

_____ Learning:

From what I can tell this is impossible in multiple ways.

I'm aware I can never have control of the first channel so there will be a rogue and hilariously confusing "General" whom everyone knows to ignore. So the second channel is the most important not the first (MS dictated that insanity) and the third channel is the second most important. We won't be using Sharepoint because nobody will ever go there and I don't blame them. I refuse to use sharepoint too for obvious reasons -- although attempting to organize Teams is only slightly better, but at least it's not going to scare everyone away.

Queue the replies from MS zealots who don't understand UX:

41844108 306 Reputation points

2023-04-07T00:24:05.6566667+00:00

I'm sorry if the formatting of this above comment is unintelligible. It made perfect sense the way it was formatted visually to me but this WYSIWYG editor is a lie and you actually DON"T get what you see. I don't know why it changed the formatting -- It's almost as bad at formatting as MS Word, (which is terrible insult, sheesh, sorry)

I did try to fix it but I can't see what the output will be. This is seriously communication hell, why is MS so bad this stuff. My guess is the people who use it just don't care.

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41844108 306 Reputation points

2023-04-07T00:24:05.6566667+00:00

I'm sorry if the formatting of this above comment is unintelligible. It made perfect sense the way it was formatted visually to me but this WYSIWYG editor is a lie and you actually DON"T get what you see. I don't know why it changed the formatting -- It's almost as bad at formatting as MS Word, (which is terrible insult, sheesh, sorry)

I did try to fix it but I can't see what the output will be. This is seriously communication hell, why is MS so bad this stuff. My guess is the people who use it just don't care.

Answer 1

SokiGuo-MSFT 31,551 Microsoft External Staff

Hi @41844108

Thanks for visiting our forum. Thank you for your feedback. Please kindly note that here on Microsoft Q&A forum we mainly focus on questions about Teams for Business. For General channels, you can set up to block messages as follows:

User's image

Teams currently provides templates for teams that can be used by users with common needs or projects. Teams templates are suitable for all organizations, from small to large enterprise and education organizations. You can sign into Teams admin center > Teams > team templates.

User's image

Also, I checked for similar feedback on your suggestion in Teams User Voices. Please be patient! With requirements like this increase, the problem may well be released in the future. Thanks for your understanding and support.

Feedback: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/8d410340-86ac-ed11-a81b-000d3a0450e3

If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment". Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

41844108 306 Reputation points

2023-04-07T14:05:00.3166667+00:00

Ok so the permissions part, despite confusing semantics, is pretty easy. I don't need help with that except for a glossary of terms since MS is inconsistent and unclear in the UI. But the problem in my question, is that it seems thoroughly impossible to organize my information. Organizing information just is not possible. Honestly I don't think you can help me because the tool is designed so poorly, but I'm open to hacks. This is what I want: (this is how information would be presented clearly) TEAM: _____ Tool: _____ Learning: but I't not possible, the closest I can get is TEAM: _____ General: _____ Learning: _____ Tool: Notice the most important item is third. I might use "Training" instead of learning, but in the context of AI "training" would be a confusing word to choose. And honestly whomever design these to force alphabetical order is a bad designer (and probably actually an engineer). I really think it's silly that I need to rename things in alphabetical order. Next Problem. The highly compressed and uneditable lo-fi video from Teams recording (1080p 16fps, compressed to web) -- when I post the .mp4 in a conversation in a channel, it displays as a grey box with a download, and not an in-line video as expected. I'm sure when this was designed by engineers for accountants not having an efficient workflow for video assets, but it MS is going to accept money from a 60,000 person ad agency, maybe they should fix their tools so it's not impossible to use. It's negligent and the tools are not designed for visual communication, and our product is literally visual communication. I would like to be able to access the original recording so I can edit it, but I guess MS doesn't have any other clients in the media industry so video editing is totally off your radar.
41844108 306 Reputation points

2023-04-07T14:07:39.83+00:00

that's hilarious, let. me repost since this WYSIWG editor doesn't actually render what I saw. I mean look at that block of text, I put line breaks for clarity. It's like communication general is intentionally obfuscated in MS tools. This isn't even a new problem to solve.
41844108 306 Reputation points

2023-04-07T14:09:31.7566667+00:00

Ok so the permissions part, despite confusing semantics, is pretty easy. I don't need help with that except for a glossary of terms since MS is inconsistent and unclear in the UI. But the problem in my question, is that it seems thoroughly impossible to organize my information. Organizing information just is not possible. Honestly I don't think you can help me because the tool is designed so poorly, but I'm open to hacks.

This is what I want: (this is how information would be presented clearly)

TEAM:

_____ Tool:

_____ Learning:

but I't not possible, the closest I can get is

TEAM:

_____ General:

_____ Learning:

_____ Tool:

Notice the most important item is third. I might use "Training" instead of learning, but in the context of AI "training" would be a confusing word to choose. And honestly whomever design these to force alphabetical order is a bad designer (and probably actually an engineer). I really think it's silly that I need to rename things in alphabetical order.

Next Problem. The highly compressed and uneditable lo-fi video from Teams recording (1080p 16fps, compressed to web) -- when I post the .mp4 in a conversation in a channel, it displays as a grey box with a download, and not an in-line video as expected. I'm sure when this was designed by engineers for accountants not having an efficient workflow for video assets, but it MS is going to accept money from a 60,000 person ad agency, maybe they should fix their tools so it's not impossible to use. It's negligent and the tools are not designed for visual communication, and our product is literally visual communication.

I would like to be able to access the original recording so I can edit it, but I guess MS doesn't have any other clients in the media industry so video editing is totally not something you will allow us to do.
41844108 306 Reputation points

2023-04-07T14:41:50.53+00:00

I also had problems fooling it to be in the correct order, by placing meaningless special characters first, but apparently MS can't handle most special characters. Notably _ and * aren't allowed, which makes no sense whatsoever. But honestly it's not the best hack anyway.
41844108 306 Reputation points

2023-04-07T14:44:48.7933333+00:00

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41844108 306 Reputation points

2023-04-07T14:46:28.6166667+00:00

weird, I guess you can't post a photo and leave a comment at the same time, trying to type make it change the image URL. very weird bug.

Any my concern is this WYSIWYG editor is really broken.
41844108 306 Reputation points

2023-04-07T14:53:59.9266667+00:00

I would look at the Templates but I have no idea how to access the "admin center" and I'm assuming you need to be IT to access it because it's literally called "admin center". So a ridiculous place for content template. Although considering semantics is not a priority for MS maybe this is just bad UI and bad semantics causing me not to investigate. Obviously these templates should go in the app and even an engineer can design that. Besides, the problem is not being able to control the content so a template will still have these problems UNLESS the each have custom features like ability to organize content, and I can't understand why that would not be universal.
SokiGuo-MSFT 31,551 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff

2023-04-11T05:03:13.76+00:00

Hi

Is your account a personal account? Check the account type:
Personal Account: https://teams.live.com
Organizational Account: https://teams.microsoft.com
The admin center is for Teams for business, and each user's needs are different. Meet the different needs of large organizations and simplify client setup, so you can set up in Teams admin center to better manage your team.

Based on your description, it seems like you're not an administrator, so you can't set up everything for Teams. To check if you're an organization administrator, sign in: https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/

In addition, there can be multiple administrators in an organization, and for your convenience, we recommend that your administrator assign you the administrator role. This has a blog describing the steps of allocation in detail, you can refer to: How to assign a role in Microsoft Teams.

Note: Microsoft is providing this information as a convenience to you. The sites are not controlled by Microsoft. Microsoft cannot make any representations regarding the quality, safety, or suitability of any software or information found there. Please make sure that you completely understand the risk before retrieving any suggestions from the above link.
41844108 306 Reputation points

2023-04-11T15:19:34.4133333+00:00
No I have no MS personal account, no reason for that. I don't want admin access, I just need to post educational content. Besides, if the templates are like any other MS templates, they're just designed placeholders and have no extra functionality or (in this case) fundamentally fix major problems in the software. The problem is a number of things.

mp3 videos fail to render properly (so I can't just post the video)

Stream pages don't have basic meta tags in the HTML so when shared Teams fails to render a preview leaving us with two options, text link, or host on Youtube (which isn't an option because these are internal)

it's not possible to structure the order of anything because there's not way to organize anything so there's not order or structure.

Very little control of typography so even with just text it's hard to communicate clearly

pinned conversation only stay pinned when an individual's Teams isn't having cache issues and we can't control the outdated and reorganized order of 1/4 of the users.

Also are content templates in MS really IT's responsibility? Very weird, usually IT departments don't deal with content at all. Probably someone overlooked that. I mean I won't use them because I'm not even sure what a template can offer, especially when I know how to organize content. Also I don't need a template because the entire thing is just one link in one channel, and two links to videos in a second channel. It's just extremely confusing because I have no control at all. I'm working very hard to not have anything extra, and keep my team super minimal because Teams UX is so bad and I don't want to confuse anyone.
SokiGuo-MSFT 31,551 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff

2023-04-12T05:32:54.39+00:00

Hi

Do you mean you're using Teams for Education?

Please kindly note that here on Microsoft Q&A forum we mainly focus on questions about Teams for Business.

If only the education account facing this issue, please consider posting in the corresponding Microsoft Community for better help. Thanks for your understanding.
41844108 306 Reputation points

2023-04-12T14:59:39.9233333+00:00

No this is in a corporate context. We are a 60,000 person agency whose product is visual communication, that's why it's so frustrating and inappropriate that we're using a platform that is terrible at visual communication. If we can't function well in this environment and we can't get rid of MS, we can only hope MS is willing to design the product better, and then hopefully QA it too.

The "education" part is me trying to put together a simple set of tutorials and training sessions. It's a very basic setup and mind-boggling that I can't even accomplish that without making it confusing and alienating. It's clearly not built for sharing content except for text.
41844108 306 Reputation points

2023-04-14T00:26:59.44+00:00

I spoke with IT and we strategized building out Teams so it's useful to us, and then I realized the only thing you can do is build chat bots and they don't eve allow GPT bots so it completely worthless
SokiGuo-MSFT 31,551 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff

2023-04-17T08:17:18.09+00:00

Hi

Please kindly note that Microsoft Q&A forum mainly focus on Teams general usage questions. Based on your description, this problem is related to Teams development.

Hope this article is helpful to you: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/bots/what-are-bots
SokiGuo-MSFT 31,551 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff

2023-04-19T05:38:31.67+00:00

Hi @41844108

Haven't received your message for a long time.

Do you have any further issue on this topic?

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Recommendations for a Team in Teams

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