Do you agree that products always have room for improvement?
"Every day there are little things in software that we find annoying. Some write books about it, like Annoyances.org, but I thought this site would be more constructive.
BetterSoftwareSuggestions.com is proudly maintained by myself and the developers at SSW."
Update: Microsoft have fixed this bug in June 2024
When you are in Teams looking at a webpage often you want to open it in the browser. E.g, Loop pages. Recently it started giving: “The link has been removed.”
Figure: New bug – The link has been removed“The link has been removed”
After very careful inspection in Teams I realized that the URL was being changed when I clicked on the ‘open in browser’ button to all lowercase. This breaks any sharing links to things like SharePoint as they are case-sensitive.
Figure: Line 1 – The original sharing link – Line 2 The Sharing link after Teams saves it
Suggestion:
URL’s by nature are case-sensitive and should not be changed
At SSW we really love using Microsoft Loop to collaborate with each other. We think it would make a great replacement for OneNote in Teams for project Wikis and other important collaboration documents.
⚠️ However, the loop files are stored inconsistently (some are in your workspace and some are in OneDrive and some end up in the Microsoft Team if you create it in the chat), so I worry about data loss.
Figure: A Loop Tab (Like the Notes Tab) would be awesome
Loop pages created in Microsoft Loop can have their link copied to a Team but can’t be shared to a Team. The storage for these loop files then stays with the creator’s workspace. When a creator leaves the company, the link is broken.
Figure: Loop component created in a workspace in Loop
You can add a Loop component to a Teams post and that creates a .loop file in the Teams storage, which is great, but you can only add 1 component per post. You then must pin the post to the top so that other Team members can find it.
Figure: Create a Loop component | Add it to a Post (1 Component Per Post) | Then Pin it✅Figure: Good example – Loop component stored in Team file library
As a workaround, you can add a Teams OneNote, then add the loop components inside OneNote. However that doesn’t work as then strangely the files are stored under the creator’s OneDrive not in the Teams storage.
Figure: Multiple Loop components added to Notes in Teams❌Figure: Bad example – Loop files are saved to the creator’s OneDrive – not in Teams
This storage behaviour is not consistent, and it is not ready for enterprises (as they will lose data in Loops).
At SSW we are rolling out the use of the Approvals App with Teams to get requests approved through the organization. I love how easy it is to create templates and use them to submit requests. Previously we were using emails to manage these approvals, so another benefit is a reduction of noise across our collective inboxes.
Once an approval is submitted there is no way to alter the data. While this makes sense for requests that have been approved, it would be great if we could edit requested approvals prior to being approved. Currently, the only way we can do this is submit another request which means manually entering all information again which takes time.
Send another request with the updated information.
❌ This can be time consuming if multiple edits need to be made
❌ Copying information to another request can be error prone
❌ Approval system gets polluted with duplicate requests
Suggestion:
Add the ability to edit an approval request prior to it being approved.
This would include changing the approver (if the template allowed the user to select approvers)
Figure: Lack of an option to edit an approval requestFigure: Only able to edit approvers during request creationFigure: Viewing details of an approval request after it’s sent
Every company has the need for requests to be approved. We’ve found that the Microsoft Teams Approval App works well, but only in simple cases. It is easy to create templates and use them to submit requests.
When companies switch from emails to a centralized structured approval, processes improve, and emails are reduced.
Senior Management are often responsible for approving most requests and as such can have a large backlog of requests to approve. In order to help approvers action the most important requests I would like to see the following enhancements:
Allow Priority to be set in Custom Approval Templates – ideally the priority level would be set in the Custom Approval Template, and not able to be changed by the user making the request.
The ‘Request title’ field is not enough. We need another column called ‘Approval Template Type’.
We can sort on the column titles, but we need the ability to filter by Priority and Approval Template Name
Figure 1: Approval Hub – Can see Priority and Title, but not Request TypeFigure 2: Not able to filter by Priority and/or Request TypeFigure 3: We are able to configure priority for basic requests, but NOT able to do this for Custom Request Templates. We need access to this field in Custom Request Templates.Figure 4: Why are there only two priorities? We would like to have 3 levels (for example, similar to how Outlook works (see below))Figure 5: In Outlook we have 3 priorities. For consistency, we would like 3 priorities in the Teams Approval App also.
I work in the China office, and we keep reverting to WeChat because it offers this feature which is super useful. It is missing from Teams.
I want to be able to forward a group of messages in my private chat with someone else not in the chat. This often happens when a problem comes up in the discussion and I realized I have already discussed a similar issue. Therefore, I want to share a section of my chat history to them quickly.
❌ My current workarounds: Option 1: Copy + paste the messages one by one to the other chat. Option 2: Take a long screenshot of the chat history and share the image.
✅ Suggestion: Allow people to cherry-pick messages in their chat and forward them in a bundle.
❌ Figure: I want to forward just the section in the red box to someone else (but I don’t want to share irrelevant information about my annual review)✅ Figure: WeChat lets me combine and forward selected messages
I am not sure if this is an edge case…. I’d love to know how others work.
On some calls – for example a managers meeting – you want to temporarily add in someone just for a quick question. You don’t want them to remain after the call. It is kind of a security or privacy issue if you don’t remove them.
So I find it really annoying when I forgot to remove them after the call and they probably find it annoying when they get our messages after the call. So I would prefer not to have to remove the person manually.
Suggestion – next to “Add people”, I think it would be really cool to add a person via an option “Add people (temporarily)”.
We have a new feature “Delete” a chat. I’d love to know if people will use it.
I’m not sure I will use it as I like history in chats, but I regularly use ‘Hide” to remove a chat conversation (I am always aiming for a 0 inbox and a 0 chat list).
On the right click menu, notice the last 2 are about getting rid of a chat…. And so is “Hide” chat. Therefore it is in the wrong place.
Please can you move “Hide” with the bottom 2 menu items. Those 3 are related.
We all love Microsoft Teams and I think this UI looks like it is about to be clever, but it is not.
When starting a new chat… If I pick 1 person… please attempt to guess the 2nd person I will add to the chat. People are often related and I know it would be a nice for all Microsoft Teams users if the people picker showed the like people that I will chat with together.
Today, it doesn’t matter who I pick first in the chat, the search always shows the same people.
Figure: I type ‘Gert’ it pops open people, if I pick ‘Bob’ it pops open the *same* people!
Suggestion
Please pick who I will probably pick next … it should change the people based on who I am adding.
More info: Delve tells me who I talk to a bit, that would be ok. But when you talk to a manager, you probably are going to pick another manager. When I talk to an Azure DevOps engineer, I am probably going to pick another Azure engineer (not a React developer).
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