After unveiling a limited preview of Teams in November last year, Microsoft is now rolling out its collaboration and communication platform, positioned as..
After unveiling a limited preview of Teams in November last year, Microsoft is now rolling out its collaboration and communication platform, positioned as a rival to Slack, more widely: Teams is now available, and free, for all 85 million monthly active users of Office 365, Microsoft’s suite of cloud services and apps as a web app and native apps for Windows, iOS and Android.
Along with it, the company is announcing some 150 integrations with third-party services like Asana, Zendesk and Hootsuite, alongside the ability to chat (with other humans or with bots), security services, customization options, and more.
(No word on when and whether Teams would expand outside the Office 365 ecosystem: “We’ve had some discussions but right now remain focused on our huge user base,” noted Mira Lane, Microsoft Teams’ UX lead.)
The wider launch comes in the wake of some reasonable success so far. Microsoft said the Teams preview has had some 50,000 organizations sign up and try out the service.
That figure includes both companies that have tried it out as well as those who have stayed on to become active users, and Microsoft would only tell me that many stay on, with the number of people per company ranging from small groups to organizations with hundreds of users. (Notable customer wins, it said, include Accenture, Alaska Airlines, Conoco Phillips, Deloitte, Expedia, J. B. Hunt, J. Walter Thompson, Hendrick Motorsports, Trek Bicycle and Three UK.)
For a new app that is coming to the market after the meteoric rise of Slack, as well as other competing services like Workplace from Facebook and Hipchat from Atlassian, some might argue that Teams and Microsoft are late to the game.
