Make Team more like Discord Server
Well because I have multiple issues, I want to explain my current experience with Team to explain why I would like the Feature of Team in MS Teams work more closely to Discord Server.
Here is the bullet list of general features I'm asking change and I'll explain in details later:
1. Sub Team and Channel Group should be an option when managing a Team.
2. General Channel is useless and clustered.
3. Managing a Team is something annoying.
4. [Bug] Editing Post send to multiple channel can break and spam of notification
I'll try to give a full context on how we use Teams, what was use before Teams, why I'm here giving feedback to make it better and any other reason to explain my details reason why I want those feature in the list below.
Before Teams, we were using :
- Skype for messaging (with no chat history when close...)
- Yammer with groups for announcement, questions, social topics, memes, etc.
- A Wiki Site to document our internal tools
- A mix of Mercurial, TFS, Git, for our source code.
- And some Build tools like Jenkins.
Now we are still using Yammer, but Teams and Azure DevOps is mostly replacing multiple tools into one tool set. Yammer is still use for announcement and by the non-dev worker (Can't said if it's really the case, but it's my feeling)
There is multiple Teams already made with the purpose to Announce Release, help people using the tools, but there is no Teams to help communication between teams in the company.
I was trying to ask a question on a npm package to my coworker. No one could answer me, and they tell me ask X person if he know, this X person will tell me to contact Y person and so on until I find someone that can answer me.
With more than 4000 workers in the company, it can take days to have a the desire answer. There is some existing Teams that could answer some of my questions but not on every subject. I decide to make a Team with channel like C/C++, C#, Javascript/Typescript, and so on... I name the Team "Dev@<CompanyName>", made 30-ish channel, remove 10 in the first few days, And post a Welcome message explaining why I'm making YetAnotherTeamWithin30OtherTeamDoingTheSameThing.
I want it to include mostly any Topics/Programming Language the company I work for use so I can get internal help instead of asking StackOverFlow. Like you could probably understand, I'm not a native English speaker, I made mistake and sometime correct myself. So I made a post referencing other channel that I sent to every channel in the Team, edit that post multiple times to understand that I spam multiple times members that had just recently joins this Team because reference to channel is not helping to point out where you should go, but to notify everyone from that channel. So, editing one post sent to 30 channel make 30 notification sent to every member... Why?
Anyway, I receive multiple private message after saying that my Team was trying to be too much and I should let it grow naturally, which I agree, but at the same time, I want this Team to because the place you ask questions, There is 20 others Teams having duplicate channel with the same purpose. So, I'm aiming to make one Team that regroup every possible questions topic and being ask to people who knows something to your question.
I'm trying to be too big, because I think the more natural way I can make this work would be closer to this layout :
People@<CompanyName> (Team)
> Dev (Sub Team)
> > General (Channel)
> > Programming Language : (Channel Group)
> > > C/C++ (Channel)
> > > C#, .NET (Channel)
> > > JS/TS (Channel)
> > > ...
> > Topics : (Channel Group)
> > > Software engineering (Channel)
> > > IDE Settings (Channel)
> > > ...
> > Internal Tools : (Channel Group)
> > > Lib #1 (Channel)
> > > Lib #2 (Channel)
> > > ...
> > SomeChannel (Channel)
> > ...
> UX (Sub Team)
> > Web UI (Channel)
> > Desktop UI (Channel)
> > ...
> Some Department like Sales, Legal, HR, etc... (Sub Team)
> > ...
> Social (Sub Team)
> > Pets lovers (Channel)
> > Humorous/Memes (Channel)
> > Social Event (Channel)
> > Gamers (Channel)
> > ...
> ...
And the list goes on.
So that way, you have the possibility to ask any question in any department by cutting the middleman which I think shouldn't be an issue in the first place.
So with all that said, here is the issues I face when trying to use MS Team to the full capacity:
- Sub Team and Channel Group should be an option when managing a Team.
1.1. It allows to have some structure between channel.
1.2. It can make notification less annoying by letting the user choose which Sub-Team, Channel Group or Channel he wants to be notify.
1.3. It allows to have a Company view on how it work.
1.4. It allows easier communication between department. - General Channel is useless and clustered.
2.1. This one come with no surprise that "MemberX joined the team" is irrelevant to almost everybody.
2.1.1. This make the General Channel clustered of messages nobody cares.
2.1.2. You should have an option to disable "MemberX joined the team" message or move them into an other channel.
2.2. Make the General Channel use for general topics. - Managing Settings in a Team is something annoying.
3.1. I know that having accordion settings is a thing, but I think it's better if the settings was more like a scroll page with different section and more info on how they work. Specially @mention
3.1.1. I would go with a Layout more like the Spotify App.
3.1.2. I would explain better how the notification system work in the settings - [Bug] Editing Post send to multiple channel can break and spam of notification
4.1. I think I describe it well in my context story. @Channel will notify every member of this channel multiple time
4.2. Though Editing one "relay" post can sometime half fail and have some post edited and some not edited.
This should have been the #1 priority : https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/33605068-add-channel-groups
