Working From Home

I shaved my beard into a handlebar mustache for two videoconferences’ worth of comedy value today. Tomorrow everyone just won’t recognize me since I’m now barefaced for the first time in over a year.

WFH is working out better than I thought. Getting an extra hour of sleep due to no commute makes a huge difference.

Y’all got some crazy micromanagers. We’re not really “working from home”, we’re “trying to survive and just keep all the shit we oversee from breaking without actually creating anything useful”

Which is better: Skype, Zoom, or Teams? Asking for an IT Department.

OMG, the TP thing. Reminds me of the times I was so poor I stole TP from work. And that office TP is so thin and brittle, I don't think it lasts as long.

Getting an extra hour of sleep due to no commute makes a huge difference.

Absolutely. I had to get up at 5 this morning because on Thursdays I do laundry before work, but other than that, yeah.

Which is better: Skype, Zoom, or Teams? Asking for an IT Department.

Lots of articles around stating that Zoom is basically spyware and that the company gives access to any cop that asks for it. I have been using Teams the last couple of weeks and don't hate it. We also use WebEx once a week for a two-hour team meeting.

Skype > Teams > Zoom > Webex > Gotomeeting

I think.

In five-ish years of using Skype for everything (IM, presence, voice, and meetings) I had very little trouble.

Webex gives me headaches like two or three times a week. I hate it. I cannot understand why my company has Skype for presence and IM but won't use it for conferencing.

Teams, I believe, is functionally a front-end for a combination of the worst features of SharePoint, Skype, a bad version of wiki, and a bad chat room. I haven't warmed to it but I am pretty sure it can't suck less than webex.

I think I meant can't suck MORE than Webex, sorry

Which is better: Skype, Zoom, or Teams? Asking for an IT Department.

Teams by a long shot. Skype is a wasteland of drops and breakups, Zoom is a security nightmare right now.

Teams is better than any in-house frontend for SharePoint I’ve ever experienced. The discussion board and wiki functions are weak compared to purpose-built stuff but they’re serviceable

Teams is great, super fast & easy to use

Ok Tom + Veg.

I worked at Microsoft exactly when Lync was shading into Skype for Business. Teams was just starting to be a thing when I left; they were shaking out the bugs. Hence my affection for Skype as opposed to Teams. Haven't tried it in a while but I guess I should. True UC in one package may be a distant dream.

Still think WebEx blows dead bears, btw.

Oh yeah WebEx is trash

Also I would bet money somebody actually thought about “what UI color profile makes most folks look OK during a videoconference” and that’s why Teams defaults to warm purple

"Warm purple" sounds like a strain of boutique weed

Which is what I will need to get through my next 37 conference calls

hi im the expert on Teams in my organisation, ama

nb

i was appointed today

what the fuck is teams

crash course welcome because management board is in 8 hours ty x

(you don't really need to tbh, ill bluff it pretty comfortably)

Teams is an app

uh huh

great, great, gimmme three more pieces that good and ill spin an hour and probly a promotion tbh keep it comin

It’s the purple one, with a T. Click on it

killer

a t, got it

right or left click?

the training I start next week = for a high profile client who met with our CEO to ensure we would meet their needs and we've been told there's "no room for error".

bitches...right now IT has 2 hour waits for CHAT SUPPORT and hangs up after 30 minutes on the phone, tickets go unresponded to. so when there's a problem, we have little chance of resolving it the same day. we also can't have people sit with other learners if their computer doesn't work because they're all working at home.

and VPN technology for our partner sites is notoriously spotty for WFH employees, to the point where the person I taught the other day got bumped out of it for two hours and screamed "JESUS CHRIST!" during my training the last time it happened.

there will be error. lots of it. you and the stupid client will have to deal with it.

I might finally get to send a passive aggressive email detailing how little I care. it's been a while.

Click on chat and start a new chat with me, your Teams expert. Congratulations you can now chat.
Click on Teams and start a new conversation. Great. Now click on reply. You’ve discovered how to thread.
Go to calendar. See those meetings? Beautiful.
Go back to teams. Click on wiki. It works like a wiki.
Now start a new thread. Click the paperclip. Attach a file (something family friendly). Say something about the file. Hit send. Go to files. There’s your file!

but can i have your sister emale

The above is an illustration of why teams is both good and also bad not good, because we have some folks (ok, one dude) who are relentless about fucking it up

The extent to which Teams a frontend for SharePoint has to do with the "attach a file" thingy Tom mentions - somewhere there is a Sharepoint site with that file in it. I will never not want to got to _that_ site and see it in a nice normal directory where I can sort by date modified and see the versioning history and enable co-authoring.

Haven't used it much for conferencing so if other folks are ok with it I will give it another try.

ok heres one for ye

what the fuck is onenote *for*?

Dude I don’t know but a lot of my classmates used it last year and afaict it did them no favors except maybe saving on pens and proper notebooks

Even the professional services people we employ just fire up Word to capture meeting minutes etc

I fucking HATE OneNote

we abandoned it shortly after we rolled it out

what is it for? damned if I know

ok thats a quorum, congrats we just cancelled onenote in this entire ministry

while ye have me, what else would ye like me to kill

I never understood OneNote when at Microsoft and still don't. Like, you type stuff into it. And it's, like, there. Ok great why can't I just do that in Word or Notepad or, heck, a PIECE OF PAPER

hint: weve a pack of wild animals in athlone still using lotus notes

it was difficult to use, we put agendas in there for meetings and that was about it.

lol we have Lotus Notes but we don't really put new things in it. it's just that it has 20+ years of archived stuff that we haven't all moved other places

Out of office autoreplies

half the people at my company either use specific dates in their OOO message and forget to update them each time, so you'll be in October seeing someone's message assuring you they'll be back on July 5th.

or they leave them on like a week after they return, confusing everyone.

afaict re onenote there's some functionality that lets you tags docs for better cross-reference or some shit but rly it was def not worth the time taken to learn it let alone pay for the product or training or roll out or following up

essentially the same flaw with everything office has rolled out since pivot tables

like i keep arguing that theyd get more out of my salary by letting me sit in with each unit and after a day or two gently show them how excel does that for you than they do any ten salaries in IT or training at present

but i recognise that without that makework the people doing it could quite easily destroy the place. its the equivalent of handing king kong a maiden, yeah you hate to see it but the alternative would be briefly entertaining, long term devastating and not for one second would having done the right thing save you when the mob comes looking

the training I start next week = for a high profile client who met with our CEO to ensure we would meet their needs and we've been told there's "no room for error".

bitches...right now IT has 2 hour waits for CHAT SUPPORT and hangs up after 30 minutes on the phone, tickets go unresponded to. so when there's a problem, we have little chance of resolving it the same day. we also can't have people sit with other learners if their computer doesn't work because they're all working at home.

and VPN technology for our partner sites is notoriously spotty for WFH employees, to the point where the person I taught the other day got bumped out of it for two hours and screamed "JESUS CHRIST!" during my training the last time it happened.

there will be error. lots of it. you and the stupid client will have to deal with it.

― narcissistic sleighride (Neanderthal), Thursday, April 2, 2020 8:34 PM (fifty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's katy perry isn't it

that things she does during ur gonna hear me roa a a aa ar wasnt a stylistic choice it was just her crappy home wifi

Most jobs could be replaced by software but it doesn’t follow that they should be

2xp to d

yeah im with that

So my vision of the future of the bureaucratic sphere is you employ a great many people to be customer service reps who take requests by phone and email and so on and key stuff in to backoffice software of various kinds, but if the whatsit is too complex you escalate to a meeting with a Tier 2 person, who keys in the ultimate solution across as much software as necessary, unless it’s not a supported configuration and you escalate to the business analysts and programmers who figure out the need and implement it and the end beneficiaries don’t have to use a computer at all if they don’t want to

What’s key here is you have to hire dozens of reps, you want no waits at all times, that’s the employment guarantee part of this reform package

oh we do most of *that* we're the civil service, dear