Microsoft Debuts 'Teams' Chat-Based Workspace and Slack Competitor

[MacRumors]

Microsoft today debuted its latest product, Microsoft Teams, which is a chat-based workspace designed for Office 365 users.

Designed to compete with chat platforms like Slack and HipChat, Microsoft Teams provides a chat interface that integrates with Office 365 apps and services and other third-party services like Zendesk, Asana, Hootsuite, and Intercom.

According to Microsoft, Teams is designed to provide a "modern conversation experience" in the workplace. It supports both persistent and threaded chats, along with public and private conversations. Skype integration allows teams to quickly initiate voice and video conferences, and each digital workspace can be highly customized with emoji, stickers, GIFs, extensions, open APIs, and more.

At Microsoft, we are deeply committed to the mission of helping people and organizations achieve more--and reinventing productivity for the cloud and mobile world is core to our ambition. We built Microsoft Teams because we see both tremendous opportunity and tremendous change in how people and teams get work done.

Teams are now more agile and organizational structures more flat to keep communications and information flowing. With Microsoft Teams, we aspire to create a more open, digital environment that makes work visible, integrated and accessible--across the team--so everyone can stay in the know.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, Planner, Power BI, and Delve are built into Microsoft Teams, and it supports Microsoft's cross-application membership program, Office 365 Groups, so people can easily move from conversations to collaborating on documents.

Microsoft Teams is designed for Microsoft's enterprise customers, and it includes enterprise-level security with two-factor authentication, single sign on through Active Directory, and data encryption. Teams is available for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and the web.

Ahead of Microsoft's announcement, competing chat platform Slack took out a full page ad in the New York Times welcoming Microsoft to the chat space, offering some "friendly advice," and signaling that it's worried about competition from Microsoft.

In the piece that ends with a warning that "Slack is here to stay," Slack says an open platform, love, and thoughtfulness and craftsmanship are essential to a successful communication product.

One final point: Slack is here to stay. We are where work happens for millions of people around the world.

So welcome, Microsoft, to the revolution. We're glad you're going to be helping us define this new product category. We admire many of your achievements and know you'll be a worthy competitor. We're sure you're going to come up with a couple of new ideas on your own too. And we'll be right there, ready.

A preview of Microsoft Teams is available in 181 countries and 18 languages starting today for Office 365 enterprise customers (Business Essentials, Business Premium, El, E3, and E5). It will officially launch early next year.

Article Link: Microsoft Debuts 'Teams' Chat-Based Workspace and Slack Competitor

 

[2457282]

We use cisco's jabber at work and that seems to work very well. Salesforce also has a product that would compete in this space. I guess the differentiating feature is that office is built into the chat. Would need to see that but not sure how that would be different than screen share which is available in all the competitor products.

 

[Avieshek]

While Microsoft is at it.
Meanwhile, Apple and their iWork suite.

 

[MikeAnd]

According to Microsoft, Teams is designed to provide a "modern conversation experience" in the workplace.

Maybe they should first work on providing a modern productivity application experience. Frankly, 15 years after the release of 10.0, Office still doesn't feel like it's made the jump to OS X - they just keep painting more layers of varnish over its crufty core.

Implementing proper auto-save and versions support in Office would be a first baby step (the Office "AutoRecover" function is next to useless). That API has only been available for over 5 years now (since 10.7 Lion). Focus, Microsoft!

 

[soupcan]

Big difference here is that Slack doesn't read your chat with you. Microsoft will.

 

[Kaibelf]

Wow, Slack! That was quite a line:

"We're sure you're going to come up with a couple of new ideas on your own too."

[doublepost=1478106471][/doublepost]

While Microsoft is at it.
Meanwhile, Apple and their iWork suite.

You mean the free software that for some reason you think should have all the features of something you pay for annually?

 

[profets]

Can someone explain these services for me? Slack and now Teams - are these essentially newer, more user friendly 'intranets' for workplaces?

 

[rekhyt]

Big difference here is that Slack doesn't read your chat with you. Microsoft will.

Source?

 

[David_Howard]

Source?

What Soupcan said is a crock (see what I did there?).

It is all encrypted and Microsoft cannot read it.

 

[macduke]

Anything is better than Lync.

ANYTHING.

Please send help. We still use Lync at work!

 

[David_Howard]

Anything is better than Lync.

ANYTHING.

Please send help. We still use Lync at work!

I have been using Skype for Business on MacOS instead of Lync for awhile (in a beta program). They just realeased it to the public about a week ago - look for it, works great.

 

[r03dz]

Slack just lost the enterprise market. gg

 

[rgeneral]

I think I will stick with slack.

 

[Razeus]

Slack just lost the enterprise market. gg

Slack will have to sell itself to Google soon.

 

[AFPoster]

Microsoft has so much money it doesn't make sense to buy out the better product so they just keep making multiple versions of Skype. +1 idiots

 

[pat500000]

Meanwhile, other companies have similar features without requiring subscription.

 

[samden]

Microsoft has so much money it doesn't make sense to buy out the better product so they just keep making multiple versions of Skype. +1 idiots

Was thinking this myself. Awesome, a new chat platform that Micro$oft will forget about and leave to rot just like Skype for Business and Yammer.

What really sucks is nothing integrates with AD as well as M$ products and this prevents a lot of IT departments from using anything else.

 

[Alenore]

Oh, goodbye Slack. At least in companies using Office 365.

 

[PhoenixDown]

I would have liked to have seen this application available for personal O365 subscriptions just so we can try it out.

 

[sudo1996]

What Soupcan said is a crock (see what I did there?).

It is all encrypted and Microsoft cannot read it.

Maybe they won't read it, but there's no guarantee that they can't. Same with Slack.
[doublepost=1478118073][/doublepost]I use Slack for work, and I don't like it. You'd think a simple messaging application inspired by IRC would be 100% problem-free by now, but it still has so many performance issues and user interface quirks. The worst one is that the iOS app (maybe others too) can't receive message notifications from more than one team at once, so I basically can only use Slack with one team. WTF.

Also, I'd really prefer that something with an open protocol be the standard, even if the server is run by one company. I think XMPP was great until everyone made a mess of it.

 

[DavidLeblond]

We just now got Yammer introduced at work. I don't use it. My group uses mainly Skype's instant messaging feature to communicate, although Skype has turned to crap in the past few years. I'll get a message and go click on the window and it'll gray out and do the "Not Responding" thing. Like 5 times a day. Plus it's now covered in ads.

 

[C DM]

Microsoft has so much money it doesn't make sense to buy out the better product so they just keep making multiple versions of Skype. +1 idiots

They did buy Yammer at some point too.

 

[MikeAnd]

Oh, goodbye Slack. At least in companies using Office 365.

Nah. Yammer and Skype chat will totally kill Teams.

 

[0388631]

Does anyone remember the early days of Lotus Sametime? I think what's cool here is that Microsoft took a cue from Apple; 181 countries and 18 languages on Day 1. In prior years, they'd do a slow roll-out spanning months, and would often start in the US and Canada.

 

[r03dz]

Slack will have to sell itself to Google soon.

That would make sense if Google had a strong enterprise presence.