Microsoft has announced that Microsoft Teams – its collaboration and communication platform, is now available for free to all its 85 million active monthly users of Office 365, Microsoft’s suite of cloud services and apps across 181 countries as a web app and native apps for Windows, iOS and Android.
The company also said it is releasing some 150 integrations with third-party services like Asana, Zendesk and Hootsuite, alongside the ability to chat with other humans or with bots, security services, customization options etc.
Microsoft Teams is a web-based chat service targeted at business and schools – though the access does not extend to schools yet, that have multiple teams working on various projects at once. Some of its features include channels, groups, private messages, Skype video and audio calls, Office 365 integration (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files), OneDrive support, Power BI and Plnner integrations, as well as emoji, Giphy images, memes and many more.
The Microsoft Teams preview service was launched in November, 2016. At that moment the company was targeting general availability by the first quarter of 2017. The latest announcement means Microsoft succeeded with a couple of weeks to spare.
According to Microsoft some 50,000 companies have already signed up and used the service. Some of the companies that have tried it have stayed on to become active users. Companies that stayed on include Accenture, Alaska Mines, Conoco Phillips, Deloitte, Expedia, J.B. Hunt, J. Walter Thompson, Hendrick Motorsports among others.
To use the feature, users only need to open the Office 365 admin centre, click on settings, Services & Add Ins, and then choose Microsoft Teams. While there they can choose how users’ profiles are configured, turn off video and screen sharing in calls and meetings, control whether to allow various kinds of content including animated images, memes, and stickers. They are can also choose to turn off support for tabs from Microsoft partners or side-loaded applications, and choose whether to use bots.
Some of the most significant new features on Teams include calling on mobile, including video calling on Android; ability to email a channel; enhanced the meeting experience with the ability to schedule voice and video meetings with specific participants; support for public teams, which anyone in the organisation can discover and join; information protection channels, chats and files in Microsoft Teams, including: Archive, eDiscovery, Legal Hold, Compliance Content Search, Auditing, Reporting; mobile management with Microsoft Intune and many others.
