This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Now the squares that have no video and could have been easily put away elsewhere are now big as ever and colorful!
Fuck full screen of presentations! You need to see people's names on big ass squares covering the entire screen! That's where the money is! There is always a banana stand! (Don't know the context)
This actually is an improvement. Not everyone wants to be on camera and for those folks, getting pushed off to the sidebar often means they're overlooked.
This at least means they're given the same importance as anyone else.
No idea what the rant about presentations is about, when anyone presents it becomes the main content and everyone - camera or not - gets pushed to the sidebar. You can also pop out presentation content to give it it's own dedicated window.
I hate teams as a communication platform, but the presentation and meeting views are actually pretty well done compared to the competition.
this! i hate on zoom how it only focuses on people on camera.
in fact the only thing i hate is how horrible it runs in the browser in firefox :/
Just keep it on gallery view at all times, look for the current speaker outline.
Shameless plug for a FOSS alternative:
I can’t even get my InfoSec team to let us use all the features we already pay for in our M365 E5 license because they can’t figure out how to secure and govern it. Unfortunately nowadays bringing up great ideas that are open source to replace mediocre big tech products mostly gets laughed out of the room 😢
This is the way.
This is awesome. But I'm a little suspicious. How is it completely free? Seems like video conferencing would use a lot of resources
Only if you route the video through the server. The modern design is to establish a connection through the server, then send the video directly from peer to peer. You can look up STUN, TURN, and ICE if you want technical details.
You host it yourself.
Honestly, I prefer this Zoom-style view over the way teams segmented put camera-off people in that tray. Those people often got skipped over.
Zoom is so much better. Teams doesn't even identify which screen pre-share. Oh you want to annotate or highlighter point? Install a plugin but only if you're the organizer or allowed by the sharing party, and only if you're using the native app.
Much better UX, not hiding people that have turned off their camera.
Chill out, man. And also don't be a dumbass.
"There is always money in the banana stand" is from the TV series Arrested Development. Personally I prefer to turn incoming video off during meetings, as I find it distracting.
I fucking hate Teams.
Jitsi meet is better. It is OpenSource and more reliable imo.
Jitsi is one part of the solution. You need to integrate it into a messenger like matrix + element, and a dial in system / SIP trunk for rough parity. It's a little resource intensive to self host but well worth doing nonetheless.
True, integrating it into nextcloud is also a solution + it can replace MS Office completely
So teams is Now Safe For Work?
Nope. Not safe for work! Pass the word! We need to form a coalition.
All they did was copy Webex's UI
But the most important thing is that it was done ✅. Right?
any discussion about shit that bill or steve or the alphabet wankers do is a bigger waste of resources than AI art.
I'd like to politely disagree
Finding alternatives to large software packages is great, don't think I'm not saying that - but any time you have competitor X and competitor Y, be they both commercial, both F/OSS, or some combination thereof, the competitors must be cognizant of each other when setting up features.
Burying your head in the sand and ignoring Microsoft, Apple, and Google is a very solidly Microsoft-Apple-Google-style play. It's the play of someone who believes the other side offers no competition. That's how you get unwieldy features these tech giants implement because they know they can make a 70% effort and people won't be annoyed enough to leave.
Every tool they make has a reason someone made it. Many tools are very important - for one example, the Microsoft Office document format is considered to be almost a universal format in presentations, spreadsheets, and plain documents for message passing between businesses.
But as we as a society design alternatives to those various monopolies (as we should), we need users to want to use the new thing. We have to take what people like and keeps them on their old platform, and best preserve the intent of what they want on the new platform. Doing so requires discussing the features those big tech companies
And as users, when we select the platforms we use, we need to weigh the cost of going with an alternative vs going with a giant. No solution is a perfect solution for everyone, and the chooser needs to weigh the maintenance cost (in hours or money) they will incur, how their users will like/dislike it, and maybe even look at a piece of software and decide "nah the vibes are off".
I'd love a world where those three tech giants had proper competition in all fields, and I think their business practices are scummy and need improvement. But the real alternatives to each need some polish before they're ready to be used by [arbitrary tech illiterate grandmother].
I agree, it must continue.
