Agree, probably not the best tool for classrooms.
At the office, we’re trying to see it not as a meeting tool, but as a routine work framework.
Videoconferencing would be just an addendum, and I don’t see any problem if people prefer to use Zoom, Webex, Jitsi, or any other videoconferencing tool.
To me, the main strength lies when you’re not in a meeting, but doing day-to-day traditional, Microsoft-based work, as it is the case in my office (government agency).
Then Teams shows its main strength, because collaboration is much, much easier: you create a team to represent your department, but you also create a team to represent a group of people from many departments gathered around a project. The number of teams I’m part of is ramping up.
I’m just about to finish a six-month task with people from different departments that would be done, traditionally, with a bunch of boring, ineffective meetings and lots of email exchanges and its typical attachments or links to shared cloud files/folders.
Instead, we decided to use Teams and we had just one kickoff meeting, where all we did was planning how we would avoid doing meetings and focus on the work itself.
After that, it was all about collaborative work around documents, where each of us made our own contribution, added notes, tracked changes, chatted, until we reached consensus.
No more emails, no more uploading files to shared folders, no more traditional meetings, just producing shared documents whenever we were available, discussing through chat and side notes, assigning and tracking tasks (through MS Planner addon), and that’s all.
Videoconferencing played no role here.
The key is convergence, all you need in one screen.
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And one note: Teams is not open source, as I may have suggested in the title. What is in github is the Teams documentation, and the ticket I opened there makes no sense.
function for example.