Microsoft Teams: a rant
It’s time for a brief rant about Microsoft Teams. Before we start I’ll state that Teams is probably an ok platform for collaboration when you work for just one organization. But when you need to work with multiple organizations, each with their own Teams, you immediately run into a world of hurt. There are two reasons:
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There are no third-party clients or plugins for Teams
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Official Teams web and desktop clients force you to actually switch workspaces (or organizations) if you want to participate in discussions
Allowing external email forwarding in Office 365
We use Zimbra as our main email server. We also have Office 365 subscription to make working with our clients a bit easier. The challenge is that when customers send us, say, Teams meeting invites, they typically use autofill and the email gets sent to our Office 365 mailboxes which nobody really looks at.
It is possible to fix this by configuring email forwarding. That is theoretically possible out of the box on a per-user basis in https://outlook.office.com/mail/options/mail/forwarding. However, when you actually try it out you will get an error message in your Office 365 inbox because forwarding is disabled on the organizational level by default:
Microsoft Teams redirect loop mystery
Some of our customers use Microsoft’s Office 365. Due to that they also use Microsoft Teams for collaboration. Recently, out of the blue, I ran into a “redirect loop mystery” in Teams. Basically I was able to login to our Teams (which we only use when recording video calls). But when I tried to switch to a customer workspace I was able to get in, but got immediately redirected back to our own workspace. This issue affected both the official Teams client for Linux, as well as the Chrome browser. Fortunately this was a well-known issue that could be fixed by relaxing cookie security settings in the browser.