Microsoft Will Wipe Free Teams Business Users' Data If They Don't Upgrade To a Paid Tier (engadget.com) 62
Microsoft is retiring the existing Teams Free version for small business in favor of the similarly-titled Teams (free) on April 12th, and legacy data won't carry over. Engadget reports: Your office will have to pay for at least the Teams Essentials plan ($4 per user per month) to preserve chats, meetings, channels and other key info. As Windows Central explains, the new Teams (free) tier will require a new account. Data in the old app, now rebadged as Teams Free (classic), will be deleted. Anything you haven't saved by then will be gone, including shared files you haven't downloaded.
Not a news item (Score:3, Insightful)
So a company offered a free service and now wants people to pay for it.
Moving on.
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They still have a free tier, they're just being jerks about a platform "upgrade"...
Re:Not a news item (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: Not a news item (Score:5, Informative)
You act like MS is blocking users from downloading/saving your Teams data.
MS is giving users of free tier 6 weeks to save their data, that seems reasonable. If that's too soon, sign up one user ($4/mo) and figure it out.
This seems pretty reasonable.
If teams isn't worth $4/month per user, transfer your data to a new service...
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How portable is the data? Can you import it directly into rival products or is it basically useless?
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These folks weren't paying MS to begin with, so MS isn't bothering to do free data migration to their new platform...much less a 3rd party platform.
The data is there, freely available for download in standard formats. What you do with it is up to you.
Is it a dick move? Yes. Has this played out with 'free' software/services time and time again? Also yes.
That aside, people really should be paying for the services they use and stop all this 'free but we collect so much valuable information it's more profit
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If I want to keep control of my data I keep it on my computers. My employer is currently learning this lesson.
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You should have a local backup anyway. If you neglect that, it is unfortunate but your own fault.
In this case, it may require a extra backup just before you switch to some other service. But you should already have a backup process established, so it will not be much extra stress.
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I have yet to figure out how to backup team chats. How do you do it?
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I'd consider the shared files, if there are any, most important. If you need everything (for compliance reasons maybe?), here is a sort of HOWTO:
https://www.communicationsquare.com/news/6-ways-to-backup-microsoft-teams/ [communicationsquare.com]
As I'm not using Teams myself, I cannot tell you how well that backup method actually works.
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yeah, files are easy to backup, especially with the sharepoint integration. But chat logs, like for project channels, contain a lot of ad-hoc info that can be usefull when looking up information from previous projects.
And yes. compliance.
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So a company offered a free service and now wants people to pay for it.
Moving on.
I disagree. A company not keeping your data indefinitely? Can we throw a parade?
Man, Google has really made Microsoft into a shelter/soup kitchen/free medical clinic eh?
Just one more reason... (Score:4, Insightful)
...not to use cloud services provided by a third party.
Own your own data. Own your own services. Providing video conferencing and team collaboration is eminently doable [medevel.com] at low cost with open source software and with moderate technical knowledge.
When it's free (and when it's from Microsoft), you are either the product, or it ends up being more expensive later than if you did it yourself.
Now all those users have to try and figure out how to migrate data they don't own. Just don't do it in the first place.
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at low cost with open source software and with moderate technical knowledge
. Probably cheap to pay for it, than to pay some asshole a salary to be on staff to run your "free" open source video conferencing. $48/year per person is not very much money to have something that just works.
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at low cost with open source software and with moderate technical knowledge
.
Probably cheap to pay for it, than to pay some asshole a salary to be on staff to run your "free" open source video conferencing. $48/year per person is not very much money to have something that just works.
You call Teams "Just Works"?!?
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"Better than Zoom" is a pretty low bar to reach.
It's also ironic that Microsoft's announcement that they are pulling shenanigans to nudge users into a paid service comes right after the story of Zoom laying off 15% of their workers.
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In the sense of "barely operates", well yes.
If only I did not have to close it three times, every time I start my Linux "workstation".
Unfortunately I have to have it installed, because customers and suppliers insist on using it. (Similar to how rapists insist on doing things, but to a computer).
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.... $48/year per person is not very much money to have something that just works.
Is there a version of Teams that just works?
My daughter's school used Teams for parent-teacher meetings. I ended up discussing my daughter's progress by phone because we couldn't get Teams to work.
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Teams is flaky as hell.
Markdown code fences are a good example. Teams can't make its mind up from message-to-message if using single tildes around a small amount of text will turn it into an inline code fence or not. Most days it won't turn a triple tilde into code fence for a block of text, but just occasionally it actually works.
Or randomly crashing when you try to drag-drop a file into it.
Surprisingly I've had very few problems with its video conferencing, it only chokes up a bit when there are too many
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Whether one thinks that Teams is a good application or not, there have already been enough interruptions in that service to make the claim "just works" less true than you think it is.
And no, Teams is not that great of an application. Besides, it sure consumes amounts of computational resources that would enable several folding projects on the internet, except it is just a piece of chat with mediocre file-sharing.
Even though it is only 4 USD/month per user, I still feel screwed over what I got for that money
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$48/year per person
1) Per person adds up quite quickly.
2) Everyone raise your hand who thinks this is a one-time thing. Anyone? Seriously, though, what assurance do you have that it will stay at $48/year per person? Once you've demonstrated that you'll cough up money once to pay their extortion (and let's make no mistake "pay or we delete your data" is a type of extortion), then you will be high on their hit list again. You don't own anything, and once you double down by paying the initial fee, and six months later are th
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well I cant read your clickbait link cause it pops up a bunch of side load shit then whines I am running adblock, but no the average teams free edition small business probably doesn't have IT, and the fact you site a top 15 autogenerated web page tells me you don't know your ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to practical experience in the matter
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If you can't argue with the message, then pick apart the delivery and/or the messenger. Well done.
Next time, just google "open source video conferencing" and "open source collaboration tools". Or better yet, actually, for you just keep using Microsoft. You're better off sticking with what you're familiar with.
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next time google "average small business owner", its called the real world
and no I don't use teams despite my wife having her own small business with about 5 remote employees, but I can deal with the light IT work here and there... most can't
Reminder (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft are still complete bastards and relying on proprietary software is still a terrible idea.
This might be a generational wakeup call for any zoomers out there with little to no experience of the pure bastardry Microsoft is capable of.
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teams does a number of things besides video conferencing but thanks for trying
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I meant zoomers as in Gen. Z members rather than users of the app Zoom.
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teams does a number of things besides video conferencing but thanks for trying
Maybe; but I've yet to see it do anything "well".
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Each generation cares less and less about whether something is proprietary. They'll more readily adopt a tech they like and that works for them, and they'll also drop it quicker than ever. Whether it's controlled by an evil overlord isn't a consideration. Asking them to pick up the ideological fight isn't reasonable. That's not the world they live in.
Wiping data? (Score:2)
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Microsoft won't wipe any data. The user won't be able to see it, but MS'll still keep it as part of the user's profile.
Faust (Score:2)
Haven't you idiots seen that play? You sign a deal with the devil what do you think's gonna happen. Anytime you get something free from a corporation, they're playing Indian giver.
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That's some nice chat history you have there... (Score:3)
Pay up, or lose your shit.
That's always a winning strategy for keeping customers happy.
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Re: That's some nice chat history you have there.. (Score:2)
Transition to a new tool, you've got 6 weeks. If you can't transition away from Teams in 6 weeks, then suck it up and pay the $4/mo per user until you figure it out.
MS is allowing users to save their data, how is that bad? Did people really think teams was going to be free for them forever?
slack (Score:2)
Ok, now Teams is a Slack competitor.
Another reason not to rely on MS Teams? Who knew? (Score:5, Informative)
I absolutely hate supporting this product where I work. I can't go 1 week without getting at least one support ticket from someone in a management role who is all upset about some failure or other in it.
It's insane how often the "fix" is to shut down the software, delete the folder and all subfolders containing the "Teams cache" and then re-launching it. At the very least, they could add a quick option for a user to do this with 1 click? I guess it's too much to ask them to look into WHY the cache keeps getting corrupt, or to make it smart enough to just auto-purge it when it hits something unexpected in there?
But the rest of the time, it's been due to outages in the cloud and software updates they pushed without fully testing first. (We went a week with random Lenovo laptops not being able to display video-chats. Just drew a solid black box. Was thanks to a bug MS introduced in an update to Teams that had issues with the video drivers these models of Lenovos used.) We could just roll people back to the earlier version, right? Nope! MS has no mechanism in Teams to put a hold on it auto-updating to the newest version.
They've had a long-standing issue with Outlook too, where the Teams plug-in just randomly gets "disabled" so the toolbar button for it vanishes on people. You can go in Outlook's menu for the add-ins and enable it again and re-launch it. But your average user doesn't think to even check that, especially after a long time getting used to that button being there to schedule a Teams meeting.
Teams has another issue with incompatibility with some Bluetooth headsets. They'll work great in everything else including Zoom or Skype. But nope... not in Teams. MS actually has a "compatibility list" for Teams for supported ones. It's GREAT when you have to tell the CEO or CIO the brand new expensive BT headset or earbuds he/she purchased won't work and they need to buy something different.
Re: Another reason not to rely on MS Teams? Who kn (Score:2)
One ticket per week? The Horror!
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We're not a really big company, as far as employees actually using products like Teams. The lion's share of our tickets have more to do with custom developed software running on Android phones that thousands of delivery drivers carry around and call in about with issues.
So yeah, a consistent ticket every week about a Teams failure is pretty bad, in our situation. It's typically coming from someone in the legal department or real estate purchasing, or upper management or heads of Finance... folks like that w
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MS actually has a "compatibility list" for Teams for supported ones.
Errr every company has a compatibility list for their software like this. It's not an exclusive list. But seriously, grow a backbone. Tell your CEO / CIO that they should follow policy and use tested approved hardware before they become an actual security risk to the organisation.
As for the number of issues you have ... especially the outlook one, I'm really questioning how your IT department has built and deployed their OS images.
Wiping the Teams Cache is something that I remember being a problem 3 years a
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But I'm also thanking you, because if we do get a ticket about it you just saved us some time.
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Unless you recommended Teams, don't be upset.
Treat it as a finicky factory machine and you're the mechanic who can get it going again.
Embrace and amplify the CEO who is upset about his earbuds.
"You are so right, this is unacceptable. I wish we has any ability to get Microsoft to fix this. Surely they have tens of thousands of angry customers. It isn't right."
And maybe have your nightly backup script wipe the cache folder? Do they have to sign in again if you do?
Nothing of value was lost (Score:2)
Except for idiots who think IMs and pinging a file via IMs is some kind of immutable record for posterity. Seriously purge my Teams messages and all the files tomorrow. I don't care, and if anyone does care they need to be schooled on how to manage important data.
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Delete it all, PLEASE. Then that will maybe force people to start actually making notes on their Jira tickets instead of assuming everyone knows because they said it in an obscure Teams chat last week...
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Comment removed (Score:3)
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What did they do before teams? They met in person. In fact, I'd prefer that. But since I actually like (and miss) in person work, I'm considered some sort of corporate dinosaur. And maybe I am - I'm squarely Gen X.
What's that Smell? (Score:2)
Microsoft is going to wipe your data if....
I called BS at the words "Wipe your data". I totally buy into the the part where they won't make it accessible to you, but I can guarantee you they aren't going to wipe it.
More enshittification (Score:2)
Wiping is not exactly a good idea (Score:2)
Lawyers will have a field day with this.
MS: If your company doesn't pay up, say bye to your data!
Lawyer: This sounds like blackmail!
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TIL that "we're ending our business relationship unless you agree to the new terms" is "blackmail" or "extortion." Note that the lawyer in your scenario would absolutely have no problem saying, "your retainer has been exhausted, please pay me another $5000 if you want me to continue to work on this. If you choose not to continue in this matter, I will return or shred your case file in 30 days."
Tried to Upgrade but they dissuaded me! (Score:1)