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Why does Outlook keep on crashing and disabling the MS Teams plug-in?
My work laptop is about four years old, running W10 Pro v22H2, Intel i5-6300U 2.40Ghz with 16GB RAM.
Do I need to tell the boss to buy me a shiny new workstation? Or does everyone for Teams & O365 problematic??
No issues here - possibly a dodgy update.
Or does everyone for Teams & O365 problematic??
For me the software is fine - the problems start with the way that other employees use it.
It’s really not that bad. Moving to Office 365 finally forced us to move past Windows 7
As @thepurist says the big issue is people not knowing how to use it properly.
We do have odd glitches relating to running on a VM when on site; seems much happier running natively.
The fat teams client is an absolute heap of junk. It leaks memory like a sieve consuming at least 300mb to just sit there and do nowt. 600mb is usual chatting to colleagues level and if you want to share anything it’ll quite happily eat over a gig. And woe betide you should you dare to have more than one account. The mobile (iOS) client is also equally crappy.
We generally give up and use multiple incognito browser sessions to connect to various customers who may or may not be federated with us.
I also love* the way that if you search for teams, it always opens the personal client (the one they’ve excreted into windows like an unwelcome U2 album) rather than the work or school version that everybody actually uses.
*actually no. Put the developers on spikes along The Mall.
Slack*. Zoom. Done.
*apart from the bazillion channels
The fat teams client is an absolute heap of junk.
New one is much better, and you can switch between different tenants really simply.
It's only in preview at the moment though, and not all the features are in it yet.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/new-teams-desktop-admin?tabs=teams-admin-center
dmorts
Full Member
Slack*. Zoom. Done.*apart from the bazillion channels
Yeah, we used that before migrating to Teams...
As @thepurist says the big issue is people not knowing how to use it properly.
Ok, I'm gonna bite... there's a button on the Outlook calendar page where a Teams meeting can be created. Are you implying that pressing that button (which triggers the crash) is,somehow, improper? 😆
We have nigh on 700 staff using M365 and Teams without much hassle.
Why does Outlook keep on crashing and disabling the MS Teams plug-in?
Because there's a problem with the plugin and Outlook disables it to prevent crashing. Is it up to date?
Or does everyone for Teams & O365 problematic??
Whether or not everyone else at your work finds it problematic is a question for your IT department. They're supposed to provide you with appropriate tools to do your job.
It may just be your laptop loadout or a hardware issue. It may be the way M365 has been deployed company-wide. What it certainly isn't is a global problem.
We have nigh on 700 staff using M365 and Teams without much hassle.
Even HMRC can make it work across 40,000 staff.
I think a lot of it is to do with the various policies people apply: it feels like there’s a lot of “oooh we can disable this bit, that’ll peeve them off” going on in IT departments. Not actually security or evidence driven, just turned off randomly for a few days to see how irate it can make people. Then you combine policies in meetings or even chats between three different tennants and you get all sorts of erratic behaviour.
Maybe I'm the antithesis of a power user and I'm too simple I'm my use but I have zero problems... Well apart from the people at the other end of the teams chat.
It ain't you, it sure ain't me , and it ain't Microsoft 365 as the button you describe works perfectly well where I work for hundreds of people every day. I haven't crashed those apps for a long, long time (years..)
Go and have a polite conversation with whoever is managing your install. IT people like to do clever things and they don't always work
Go and have a polite conversation with whoever is managing your install.
I have (or rather I've posted a request in Teams 😔 as I wfh)...and I'm watching the tumble weed float past. Beside which, I know the experts of STW will be far more responsive than our sys admins
to answer the topline Q - yes it is you, or your system settings. how locked down is your corporate IT environment?
Have been using teams for 10 years, and it's been pretty much flawless. Occassional issues with people joining from iOS or Mac environment.
What's the actual problem? teams and outlook work fine together on w10/11 here
What’s the actual problem?
Outlook 365 disables the Teams COM plug-in as it's too slow/unresponsive.
I've checked Teams and it's up-to-date. Windows is nearly update (just doing another update now...)
how locked down is your corporate IT environment?
I can add and uninstall programs if needed so NOT VERY I guess but I am subject to some unknown-to-me policies
EDIT: to clarify, this has been happening intermittently for the last few months. Invariably, I just re-enable the COM and restart (Outlook and/or Windows as needed). It them works for a week or two before happening again.
So far, I'm not aware of anyone else in my org that's having same problem so I suspect it's my PC build...
Even HMRC can make it work across 40,000 staff.
97,000 here. Been using it since pre-COVID and pretty damn impressed actually.
However I do have to meet with a fair few OAPs with challenged IT capacity. Mostly fine, but just recently a couple are have calendars that aren't syncing correctly with meeting times. I think it's probably that they don't have the correct time zones in their Microsoft account, but it's not particularly easy explaining that to an octogenarian who's convinced there are 'gremlins' in our system.
Sounds like you have the perfect teams client setup to me. I have to scrunch up an empty crisps packet near the mic, while faintly stating "your breaking up, I'm losing the connection" before departing meetings. I have been waiting for a feature that does it for me.
Compared to G-Shuite it's like nectar from the Gods!
Well asking as it keeps designatin my very much not work chat as "collaborative working" so I don't get discovered for the lazy shit I am I will give it 5*
Teams/O365 works reasonably well for most people; this is what is key for most companies. That it is included in Windows (the OS that most businesses use) and integrates mostly well with Office most of the time is a bonus.
BUTT...
Some other software is better suited to other tasks. I know people that prefer Slack and, as I use that as well, I can understand their point of view. It has _some_ shared features and if the unique features it has is important to a team, that's a good reason to get it. A bad reason to get it is "Because it is not Teams" or "Because it is cool and everyone that's cool uses it".
The same with Zoom. It's got animated backgrounds. Great. Most people will only use the basic features so it's not _that_ much different to teams, or Google Meet, or Jitsi. If the reason people want it is "because it's not Teams" or "because it's cool", it's a bad reason.
That said, I know of companies that have bought stuff, despite the warnings on GDPR compliance and data harbouring/security purely because the CTO thought it was cool and had a credit card with no limit on it.
I find it less than optimal, but some of that is some underlying assumptions about how our SharePoint and OneDrive connections work with it. But it works.
Mines not great, insists I’m offline with no connection when on the home wi fi, even though I have a connection and can relieve data fine via outlook, internet etc.
The fat teams client is an absolute heap of junk. It leaks memory like a sieve consuming at least 300mb to just sit there and do nowt. 600mb is usual chatting to colleagues level and if you want to share anything it’ll quite happily eat over a gig.
I use the fat Teams client and it seems fine to me, at idle it's using 57MB currently. Then again even if it were 300MB that's not exactly crazy in 2023, most apps are pretty bloated these days
Generally works for us although it can throw a wobbly and require a full laptop reboot meaning you're late foe a meeting. Flaky is probably the best description.
seems to work OK on our work PC's. we do have a 4 year renew policy so we're not firefightig old laptops, so tha may be one reasin why it's OK.
Our oldest PC's are nrmally the ones that struggle, but that's mostly due to teams being resource hungry and crashing everything else. For these, a quick fix tends to be increasing the RAM, if we can, but ultimately replacement is on the horizon, so it's only seen as a temp quick fix for these
Other than that, teams works well for what we need and was a godsend when the covid lockdowns were in place. That said, I'm not sure teams woud have been quite as well recieved if the lockdowns hadn't forced people to use it, and it's like.
I have had the problem on client company machines, not sure about the root cause but likely some combination of security / admin policies and updates.
One working solution is to uninstall Teams (some reboots needed) and removing all Teams files from roaming profile folder. I recommend working with IT with this process.
Usually recommended solutions of enabling the plugin in Outlook settings (2 possible locations) haven’t worked for me.
Occassional issues with people joining from iOS or Mac environment.
Yes, people using Powerpoint to present from Teams = intractable white noise on Mac
The processor looks a little on the slow side for running Teams with anything else and it's only a dual core processor so maybe it's a new laptop time?
On the back of some of the comments here I've just looked at Taskman. My install of Teams, whilst idle, was using ~700MB. I closed it and restarted, on startup it peaked at over 900MB(!) before settling back down to about 500MB.
Mines not great, insists I’m offline with no connection when on the home wi fi,
If Teams wants to lie about me being unavailable, I'm not complaining...
Cougar
Full Member
On the back of some of the comments here I’ve just looked at Taskman. My install of Teams, whilst idle, was using ~700MB. I closed it and restarted, on startup it peaked at over 900MB(!) before settling back down to about 500MB.
Yeah, mine hovers around ~500MB even though, ostensibly, I've not actually started it. And it shows 9 separate entries under Processes tab in Task Manager. Guess this is normal though based on others responses...
disco_stu
Free Member
The processor looks a little on the slow side for running Teams with anything else and it’s only a dual core processor so maybe it’s a new laptop time?
Good to know 👍
Aye, same. (I didn't count the processes but it was probably about that or approaching it.)
Incidentally,
Outlook 365 disables the Teams COM plug-in as it’s too slow/unresponsive.
This isn't crashing. Outlook will, as you say, disable plugins which take too long to start. There's a logic to this, if only to stop people whining "Outlook is shit, it takes ages to open!" 😁
The question really though is, why? If you're launching 15 apps immediately after switching on the laptop then that might do it, given a dual-core CPU as someone else said. A spinnydisk rather than an SSD / M.2 card won't help with startup performance either.
Don't you have an IT department who can investigate? I'm notorious for squeezing life out of old hardware but in the corporate world I'd expect a laptop lifespan to be maybe 3-5 years depending on how crap it was to start with.
No issue for me using MS Team/Outlook 365 on old (more than 10 years old) i3 hp desktop. My PC is a bit slow with only 4GB RAM and old HDD (not SSD) running Window 10 (can't upgrade to 11 because PC too old).
Outlook is shit
You may be onto something there!
The question really though is, why? If you’re launching 15 apps immediately after switching on the laptop then that might do it, given a dual-core CPU as someone else said. A spinnydisk rather than an SSD / M.2 card won’t help with startup performance either.
To clarify, it doesn't usually happen at startup. I can be happily working away then find I need to create a meeting in Teams and I prefer to initiate this thru Outlook as I can check for empty slots in my calendar. It doesn't always "crash" and it doesn't appear to be linked to a big uptick in CPU demand by my direct actions such a starting a lot of other programs, though I am now monitoring CPU thru Task Manager after others pointed out Teams is a resource hog.
Don’t you have an IT department who can investigate?
Yep, but it seems they are busy with more important tasks at the moment
Anyway, thanks for the input. It seems to be ok at the moment so I'll wait a response from my internal IT people
Yeah, mine hovers around ~500MB even though, ostensibly, I’ve not actually started it.
I get 360MB when it's in the background. As soon as i interact with it we're up to 500
Firefox sits at 1000MB