Last week, Microsoft unveiled products catering to the professional creative. Yesterday, Microsoft is looking to capture the business collaboration market with Teams. Teams is an online collaboration service that competes directly with well-known collaboration service Slack by allowing real time chat and collaboration on projects. It supports threaded 1:1 private chats or open chats. Just like Slack, there is a sidebar with notifications, chat, and meetings.
Microsoft’s biggest advantage over Slack is the tight integration with Office 365. Excel, Word, and Powerpoint content can all be shared and members can be invited directly to Skype for Business calls. Per Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, “Office 365 is the broadest toolkit and platform for creation, communication and collaboration. Microsoft Teams adds a new experience to Office 365 as the chat-based workspace designed to empower the art of teams”. Microsoft products like Power BI and Sharepoint are also integrated for those more engrained in the Microsoft business ecosystem. However, Microsoft has released APIs to allow third party tab integration and even bots into Teams. Microsoft showed off Zendesk and Asana tab support as well as Polly bot integration. There’s even Twitter integration with the ability to push messages from tweets. On the security front, Microsoft promises that data is encrypted always, in transit and at rest. Multi-factor authentication is also available for an additional layer of security.
With Office 365 tying directly into Teams, it’s automatically available to any small business or corporation with a 365 account. This means that millions of people will automatically have “free” access to it. Microsoft’s massive presence inside of the business market positions Teams to be a major player in the collaboration space that is largely dominated by Slack. Slack is very well-known (and used) with 750 apps in the Slack App Directory. Still, Slack seems to be aware of the threat Microsoft poses. Shortly after Microsoft’s announcement, Slack penned a letter congratulating Microsoft on the additional competition and providing a few “tips” for success.
For now, Teams is only available for enterprise customers in 181 countries in 18 languages. Rollout to the general public will be in early 2017.
