Microsoft has launched its Slack competitor – Microsoft Teams following reports last month. Aimed at businesses, Microsoft Teams is a chat-based workspace that allows team members to chat with each other and take advantage of new tools and features.
Similar to Slack, Microsoft Teams features a threaded chat UI and users can initiate one-on-one conversations as well as chat in groups. It also comes with emojis, GIFs, custom stickers and memes as well ability to make voice and video calls. The service features Office 365 integration (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files), OneDrive support, Power BI and Planner integrations. The Microsoft Graph enables intelligence to help with information relevance, discovery and sharing.
Microsoft Teams is also built on Office 365 Groups, the cross-application membership service that makes it easy for people to move naturally from one collaboration tool to another. Team members can create channels to organize conversations by topic. They can customize channels with a feature called Tabs, which provide quick access to frequently used documents and applications. In addition, Microsoft Teams will also support Microsoft Bot Framework.
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Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft said,
At Microsoft we aim to empower every person and organization with the technology to be more productive as individuals and in groups. 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.
Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president of Office said,
We’ve designed Office 365 to meet the unique needs of every group, with purpose-built applications — like Outlook, SharePoint and Yammer — that all naturally work together. And now with Microsoft Teams, Office 365 accommodates all workstyles.
Present on Android, iOS, Mac, Windows, and web apps, Microsoft Teams is currently available as a preview in 181 countries and 18 languages.