Teams, is Microsoft’s contender in the enterprise chat arena which is currently dominated by millennial darling Slack.
At the New York launch event last November , Nadella advocated Teams as “a chat-based workspace where people can come together in a digital forum to have casual conversations, work on content, create work plans — integrated all within one unified experience.”
Microsoft now expects to make Teams generally available in the first quarter of this year to Business and Enterprise subscribers of Office 365. Microsoft is staking the success of Teams because of Teams’ deep integration with the wider Office 365 productivity suite, which Microsoft is steadily improving with investments in machine learning, intelligence, security and governance.
“Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, Planner, Power BI and Delve are all built into Microsoft Teams so people have all the information and tools they need at their fingertips. Backed by the Microsoft Graph, intelligent services are surfaced throughout the workspace to help with information relevancy, discovery and sharing. Microsoft Teams is also built on Office 365 Groups — our cross-application membership service that makes it easy for people to move naturally from one collaboration tool to another, preserve their sense of context and share with others,” said Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for Microsoft Office.
Whether the Office 365 hook is enough to usurp Slack for enterprise users remains to be seen. (Slack took out a full-page ad in The New York Times on the same day as Microsoft’s launch event to both welcome its new competitor and assert that “Slack is here to stay.” )
