The giant Microsoft is fully determined to increase its presence in the business sector, even more so after seeing the good results that the alliance between Apple and IBM seems to be giving, mainly in the United States. With this idea in mind he has surprised advertising a new product that, however, is not a competition for the aforementioned firms, if not for Slack.
Microsoft's new product has been given the descriptive name of teams (teams) and it is a chat-based digital workspace, integrated with other applications and services and specially designed for Office 365 users.
Teams, Microsoft's "slack"
Microsoft Teams has been created to stand up to other collaborative work and chat platforms such as Slack or HipChat. To do this, Teams offers a chat interface that integrates with Office 365 applications and services, but also with other services developed by third-party companies like Zendesk, Asana, Hootsuite, and Intercom.
As stated by the company, Microsoft Teams is designed with the idea of providing a "modern conversation experience" in the workplace.. It supports "persistent and threaded conversations", as well as both public and private conversations.
In addition, Skype integration allows work teams to quickly start voice and video conferences, and each digital workspace can be highly personalized with emojis, stickers, GIFs, extensions, and much more.
At Microsoft, we are deeply committed to the mission of helping people and organizations achieve more and reinventing productivity for the cloud and the mobile world is central to our ambition. We have built Microsoft Teams because we see both tremendous opportunities and tremendous change in the way people and teams get work.
Teams are now more agile and organizational structures flatter 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 loop.
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, Planner, Power BI, and Delve are integrated into Microsoft Teams and are compatible with Office 365 Groups. In this way, team members can Quickly and easily switch from conversations to collaborating on documents.
Microsoft Teams is designed for Microsoft business customers and includes enterprise-level security with two-factor authentication, single sign-on via Active Directory, and data encryption.
Microsoft Teams is available as a preview for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and the web in 181 countries and 18 languages starting for Office 365 business customers (Business Essentials, Business Premium, El, E3 and E5). The official launch will take place early next year, without the company having specified a more specific date yet.
Slack's wry wink
Before Microsoft announced Teams, competing platform Slack ran a full-page ad in The New York Times welcoming Microsoft to the chat space and offering some "friendly advice" while noting, clearly in an ironic tone, he is very concerned about competition from Microsoft.
Announcement Posted by Slack in The New York Times "Welcoming" Microsoft Teams | Image shared by Twitter user @SuMastodon
In the ad, it ends with a warning saying that "Slack is here to stay", the company says that it is an open platform, and that love, reflection and craftsmanship are essential for a communication product to be successful.
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 are pleased that you are helping us define this new category of products. We admire many of your accomplishments and know that you will be a worthy competitor. We are sure that you will come up with a couple of new ideas on your own as well. And we will be there, ready.