Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams on Office 365 launches to take on Slack

Microsoft Teams is the new collaboration and messaging platform from Microsoft to take on Slack.

Microsoft officially launches its Slack competitor “Microsoft Teams”. Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella made the announcements at the company’s November 2nd event in New York City.

Identically to Slack, Microsoft Teams is a new real-time collaboration and messaging platform tailor to businesses. The company is offering Teams as a service as one more feature included for Office 365 customers.

Microsoft describes Teams as chat-based workspace focus on real-time collaboration that brings features, such as chat, meetings, notes with OneNote integration, Office, Planner, PowerBI, and a slew of other extensions.

Microsoft Teams core principles

The new Microsoft chat-base wordspace service is being built in four core principles:

Chat for teams

Teams offers persistent, threaded chat for everyone in the group. You can always chat with a group or privately with one person. In addition, the chat functionality also provides a library of emojis, GIFs, stickers, and memes to say anything with emotions.

Hub for teamwork

People can do voice and video meetings, as well as work with Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote) without having to leave Microsoft Teams. The service is built in the foundation of Office 365 Groups, which makes it super easy to move between collaboration tools, and Microsoft Graphs enables users with information discovery and sharing.

Team customization

Each team can easily be customized to meet each group’s specific needs, and member can also create channels to organize conversations by topics.

Channels are customizable with Tabs, which is a feature that offers quick access to documents and apps frequently used by the team.

Microsoft Teams includes support to connectors to bring notifications and update from third-party services, such as Twitter or GitHub. The collaboration tool also support the Microsoft Bot Framework to bring intelligent first- and third-party services into each team.

Security

Microsoft Teams offers global scan and advanced security through the Microsoft Cloud. All data within Microsoft Teams is always encrypted, there multifactor authentication for more advanced identity protection, and Microsoft Teams will support compliance and data protection standards, such as the data processing terms with European Union Model Clauses, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act business associate agreement (HIPAA BAA), ISO 27001, ISO 27018, and SSAE 16 SOC 1 and 2 report.

Microsoft Teams apps download

Team members can access Microsoft Teams on the web using any modern web browser though the portal.office.com, and Microsoft is also providing desktop apps for Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 7, and Mac users, and mobile apps for Android, iPhone, and Windows 10 Mobile.

Here’s the full “Microsoft Teams” demo at the Microsoft press event in New York City, and an step-by-step introduction to the new product from Microsoft Mechanics:

Availability information

Microsoft Teams is available now for Office 365 Enterprise or Business customers. It’s available as a preview in 181 countries and 18 languages.

Office 365 administrators can easily enable Microsoft Teams for their organization through the Office 365 admin center.

About the author

Mauro Huculak is a Windows How-To Expert who started Pureinfotech in 2010 as an independent online publication. He has also been a Windows Central contributor for nearly a decade. Mauro has over 14 years of experience writing comprehensive guides and creating professional videos about Windows and software, including Android and Linux. Before becoming a technology writer, he was an IT administrator for seven years. In total, Mauro has over 20 years of combined experience in technology. Throughout his career, he achieved different professional certifications from Microsoft (MSCA), Cisco (CCNP), VMware (VCP), and CompTIA (A+ and Network+), and he has been recognized as a Microsoft MVP for many years. You can follow him on X (Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn and About.me.