Office 365 is the broadest toolkit and platform for creation, communication and collaboration.
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The new software will be part of Microsoft‘s Office 365 services, a cloud-based software suite that has more than 85 million monthly active commercial users.
At an event in New York City this morning, Nadella called Teams a “digital forum” where colleagues can “have casual conversations, work on content, [and] create work plans”, all within a unified experience.
Perhaps the biggest threat to Slack is Microsoft’s pricing for Teams.
Teams keeps you up to date on the various conversations via various Windows 10 slide-in notifications, or red exclamation-point tabs that sprout from conversation topics.
Microsoft officially announced its new Slack competitor, Microsoft Teams, at an Office event this morning. It’s also integrating the ability to create quick polls and share custom GIFs and memes.
Teams builds on four key promises to support collaborative work, Koenigsbauer said.
We’re really pumped Microsoft is making this available. And, as I mentioned above, all that fun stuff that allows for personalities to shine through are supported, as well. You can easily share and work on various documents, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, Planner, Delve and Power BI right from Meetings. The Microsoft Graph enables intelligence to help with information relevance, discovery and sharing.
If you want to turn on teams, you will need to visit the Office 365 admin centre and click Settings Services & Add Ins Microsoft Teams. While Slack has already released a full-page ad in The New York Times shading/welcoming its new competitor, Teams strictly-business design does have some distinct differences from Slack that are worth noting.
Microsoft’s first foray into corporate social media was its purchase of Yammer, which offers something along the lines of Facebook for organizations-a virtual noticeboard to broadcast to your team. That means users can ask “who knows about ticket sales” and the bot will return a list of people who have discussed ticket sales inside Teams. In addition, Teams will support key European Union, U.S., and other compliance regulations. Are you an individual or family subscriber to Office 365?
Both Slack and Teams use superimposed numbers to indicate whether there are direct messages or other actionable items that you need to respond to.
Teams can add their favorite apps in Tabs.
We have no doubt that Microsoft Teams will see some traction given that businesses already paying for Office 365 can try it out.
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Unfortunately, though, Microsoft Teams seems to suffer from one of the worst hallmarks of Microsoft’s earliest software efforts: Early hands-on experiences from the likes of PC World say that while it’s cool and potentially very useful, Microsoft Teams is also a little complex and sports a learning curve. Over 150 partners are supporting Teams, such as Intercom, Zendesk, Hootsuite, and Asana.
