Microsoft Teams doesn’t want you to attend meetings

The purpose of this post is to document two of the more blatant bugs I’ve encountered in my forced exposure to Microsoft Teams during the Coronavirus crisis. To add insult to injury, the only way to work around them is to use Microsoft Outlook, another piece of software riddled with deficiencies.

Let’s get started. Here is a screenshot of me scheduling a meeting at 15:22 for 16:00 today.

Notice anything odd. Probably not: what sane person checks the timezone? But, look closely: Microsoft Teams firmly believes that London is on UTC+00:00 (same as GMT), not BST. This belief is not shared by my system, or any other software on it that I can find.

Now let’s try to join the meeting. Okay it’s early, but we are keen. Here is a screenshot of me hovering with my mouse over the meeting.

There is no way to join. Double clicking on the meeting just gives a chance to reschedule it (maybe to a later date, when Microsoft has fixed this glaring deficiency). The ‘Meet now’ button starts an unrelated meeting.

Okay, maybe our mistake was to join an MS Teams meeting using MS Teams. Let’s try using the Outlook web calendar. Here is a screenshot.

Here is a close-up of the right hand of the right-hand side

On the one hand, the times say that the meeting started 46 minutes ago; on the other, it is ‘in 14 min’. Perhaps because of this temporal confusion, there is no way to join the meeting.

Finally, here is MS Teams at 16:00.

Nothing has changed, there is still no way to join the meeting.

The prosection rests its case. How can Microsoft justify releasing such as inept piece of software?