Microsoft is rolling out Teams, a service that was announced on late 2016 as a workplace chat app with Office integration and threaded messaging, to all Office 365 users.
With the release on March 14th, 2017, the chat-based workspace in Office 365 is becoming available to users in 181 markets and in 19 languages. Since its introduction, more than 50,000 organizations have started using it.
Teams is leveraging Office 365 users that account to more than 65 million active users worldwide.
Releasing Teams to more people, Microsoft is also introducing a few new features, such as audio and video calls from mobile devices. Because of its tight integration with Office 365, users can also send email to an entire channel, send messages using markdown formatting and receive notifications about posts in a channel.
Microsoft has added support for open and public teams within an organization. It has also enhanced the meeting experience by adding scheduling capabilities, integrating free/busy calendar availability for team members, adding recurrence, and making it easier for users to transition from chat to voice and video.
With this capabilities, Microsoft wants Teams to be the hub for teamwork.
Each team members that use Team can customize their workspace with the Tabs, Connectors and Bots.
Initially with 150 integrations, some of them include: Bots from hipmunk, Growbot and ModuleQ. Microsoft is also partnering with SAP to help employees and managers track goals and performance as part of the way they work in Microsoft Teams, and Trello to empower teams to easily get projects done with boards, lists and cards right within Microsoft Teams.
Teams is also leveraging Microsoft's enterprise-grade cloud to delivering security and compliance capabilities. Microsoft also added support for log audit searches, eDiscovery and legal hold for channels, chats and files as well as mobile application management with Microsoft Intune.
As the announcement of Teams being released to all Office 365 users, Teams is automatically provisioned within Office 365.
Microsoft Teams, as a workspace chat app, is entering the competition to compete against Google Hangout's Chat and Meet, Amazon Chime and Slack that has dominated the field with its advantage for not being tied with any other services.