Today at its Office event in New Your City Microsoft announced the Teams app. The app was first leaked two months ago and now after the launch, it is making quite a buzz on the Internet. Basically, Microsoft Teams is a group chatting app specially build for small to medium business users to collaborate with their teams. With the Teams app, Microsoft intends to take on the popular group communication tool Slack. However, we think it will be a tough job for Microsoft as Slack see’s over 4 million active users per day.
In the first place, like any other app, you will be able to send and receive messages with Teams. You can either chat in private or you can create a ‘channel’, which is nothing other than a group chat. You can create as many channels as you want inside a company. For example, you can create a channel for your marketing team. In a simpler note, Teams also allows you to send GIF’s and stickers to your recipients.
To compete with Slack Microsoft will be offering its own services and features included in the Teams app. It highly integrates with services like OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, Skype and other office related products. Users will be able to start a Skype for business meeting or take a note without even opening these apps. There are options to share a file from OneDrive or to create Word file directly within the app.
Moreover, there are some more things which Slack can’t do. One of my favorites being the ability to reply to messages using the threaded UI. To make it simple, it’s like replying to someone’s facebook comments. You can also mention someone from your team using the ‘@’. Both of the features are highly useful for a team chat.
The Teams is launching today for Office 365 Business users as a Preview and will be available to all Office 365 Business users by January 2017. It will be also accessible from Web, Windows PC, Mac, iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone. You can take a look by clicking here.
