On November 2, Microsoft made big news by introducing its newest collaboration software for Office 365. It’s called Microsoft Teams, and the press has quickly dubbed it Microsoft’s ‘Slack killer.’ It’s currently available for preview and will be generally available in the beginning of 2017.
Microsoft Teams is a chat-based collaboration tool that brings together all of the other apps in Office 365 with the idea of creating easier teamwork. We think it’s a sharp improvement in the collaboration capabilities for Office 365. And like all of Office 365, it works across all mobile devices.
Users can create Teams, which are based on Office 365 Groups. Each Team has a dedicated SharePoint Team Site. And Teams can have Channels too, which have associated sub-folders on the SharePoint Team Site. This built-in integration with SharePoint provides some real benefits for business-grade use of chat. When a file—be it from OneNote, PowerPoint, Word or other apps—is shared in a conversation, it’s automatically saved to the team SharePoint site. And security compliance standards for this file sharing are the same as they are for all of Office 365.
Teams also allows for easy video meetings. Members of teams can be easily invited and records of meetings are saved in the chat history.
One of the features that has gotten the most attention is ‘threaded conversation’, allowing people to reply to individual messages directly. While this doesn’t seem to be such an earth-shattering capability, it’s significant because Slack has yet to implement this-much requested feature. Teams is also giving users the rich text and emoji capabilities that can make communication more fun.
We think Teams is going to be a significant success for Microsoft, primarily because it’s so tightly and smartly integrated with the rest of the capabilities already in Office 365. And, as Microsoft has been known to do before to enter an existing market, they’re bundling it as a free add-on to Office 365.
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