Microsoft Teams announced

Microsoft Teams announced

Microsoft have just publicly unveiled the up-coming Microsoft Teams Service which naturally will form part of Office 365.

“Microsoft Teams is an entirely ‘new experience’ that brings together people, conversations and content—along with the tools that teams need—so they can easily collaborate to achieve more. “

Slack is naturally integrated with the familiar Office applications and has been built from the ground up around Microsoft’s Secure Office 365 Service.

As of 2nd November 2016, Microsoft Teams is available in preview in 181 countries and in 18 languages to Microsoft commercial customers that have Office 365 Enterprise or Business plans, with general availability (GA) expected in early 2017.

At the New York Press Release Microsoft said “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 organisational 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.”

Microsoft Teams delivers on four core promises to drive and create digital work spaces.

Modern Chat for today’s teams

Microsoft Teams supports not only persistent but also threaded chats to keep everyone engaged. Team conversations are, by default, visible to the entire team, but there is of course the ability for private discussions. Skype is also deeply integrated, so teams can participate in voice and video conferences.

A new hub space to facilitate teamwork

Microsoft Teams brings together the breadth and depth of Office 365 to provide a true hub for teamwork. 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. 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.

Customisable for each and every type of team

Recognising that all teams are unique, Microsoft Teams provides a wealth of ways for people to customise their workspace, with rich extensibility and open APIs available at general availability. Microsoft Teams support notifications and updates from third-party services like Twitter for example and also supports the Microsoft “Bot Framework” to bring intelligent first- and third-party services into team environments.

Security by Default – all the way through

Microsoft Teams provides the advanced security and compliance capabilities natively embedded within Office 365 today. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Like other Office 365 services, Microsoft Teams support key compliance standards including EU Model Clauses, ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA and more.

Rob Quickenden, Chief Strategy Officer at Cisilion