Microsoft Teams enhances Office 365 collaboration offering

Microsoft has unveiled Microsoft Teams, a new chat-based workspace that further enhances the collaboration capabilities in Microsoft Office 365.

“We aim to empower every person and organisation with the technology to be more productive as individuals and in groups,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft (pictured). “Microsoft Teams adds a new experience to Office 365 as the chat-based workspace designed to empower the art of teams.”

Microsoft Teams provides persistent, threaded chat to keep everyone engaged and informed, said Redmond. Team conversations are visible to the entire team by default, and the experience also offers private chat capabilities.

A library of emojis, GIFs, custom stickers and memes gives people a fun way to express personality within their digital workspace.

Users can start voice and video meetings, as well as work with Microsoft Office documents. The Microsoft Graph enables intelligence to help with information relevance, discovery and sharing.

Microsoft Teams is also built on Office 365 Groups, the 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.

The technology offers the ability for teams to customise the experience to meet their specific needs. Team members can create channels to organise conversations by topic. And they can customise channels with a feature called Tabs, which provides quick access to frequently used documents and applications. Tabs can be created for Office 365 services like OneNote, SharePoint and Planner, or third-party solutions, such as Zendesk and Asana “coming soon”.

As part of Office 365, Microsoft Teams offers the global scale, security and compliance capabilities provided by the Microsoft Cloud, said Microsoft. Data is encrypted at all times and multi-factor authentication provides enhanced identity protection to help ensure data stays safe within the team.

The preview of Microsoft Teams is available to Office 365 commercial customers with Office 365 Enterprise or Business plans. The preview is available in 181 countries and 18 languages. Office 365 IT administrators can enable Microsoft Teams for their organisation from the Office 365 admin centre.

@AntonySavvas