Microsoft yesterday (November 2nd) announced its latest addition to the Office 365 suite- Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams will be the new chat-based workspace in Office 365. Microsoft Teams will bring forth an entirely unique and novel experience to the Office 365 users by allowing seamless and cutting-edge collaboration. It combines people, content, conversation along with the tools the teams need to make the best out of their work. This new feature is built upon the Office 365 global secure cloud and is indeed integrated well with the familiar Office applications. Starting this week, Microsoft Teams preview will be available to the commercial customers (customers using Office 365 enterprise or business editions) in 181 nations and also in 18 languages. We can expect Microsoft Teams to meet the public in the first quarter of 2017.
The Silicon Valley expects that Microsoft Teams will be locking horns with Slack- an office workspace chat app from a Canadian based start-up. Though Slack is widely used by many organizations, Microsoft’s brand image might turn things upside down for Slack. If you are interested to know more about the conversations happening around this, click here.
In his statement, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella strongly asserts Microsoft’s mission to help people and organizations achieve more by supporting them to reinvent the productivity for the cloud and the mobile world. Microsoft Teams will definitely be a major step towards this goal. Microsoft Teams envisions a tremendous change in the way how people and teams are going to work in the future. Today’s organizational structures are more horizontal that supports agility and smooth flow of information across all levels of the organization. Considering this scenario, Microsoft Teams is expected to make the work environment more digital, transparent and accessible across the teams.
Here are the four major ways in which Microsoft Teams will create an optimal digital workspace for today’s organizations:
- An engaging conversation experience– The Chat for today’s teams are quite persistent with threaded chats aimed at engaging everyone in the team. While team chats will be visible to the whole team, there will be scope for private discussions also. Microsoft Teams is deeply integrated with Skype. Read more here.
- Team work to prosper– To facilitate a complete team work, Microsoft Teams brings together everything in the Office 365 suite, in a sense that you have all the relevant information at your fingertips. Having built on Office 365, users can have cross-application membership that easily allows them to move from one collaboration tool to another.
- Highly customizable– There is more scope to customize workspace. You can easily access the frequently used documents and other services. Support for third-party services is also a great advantage that Microsoft Teams brings in.
- Superior security features– Microsoft Teams sticks to the critical compliance standards including EU Model Clauses, ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA and more. All data is encrypted during transit and while at rest. The transparent operational model ensures that there is no standing access to customer data.
To know more about Microsoft Teams, checkout this video.