Microsoft has launched Teams, a chat based collaboration tool as part of the Office 365 suite.
There has been a lot of chatter on the internet that this intends to take on the popular tool Slack. Whilst Teams certainly has crossover with Slack functionality this kind of misses the point. Microsoft have been driving everything they do with with their SaaS tools towards interoperability and working well in teams. A first look at Teams says they have hit the nail on the head.
Combining Office 365 Groups, Skype, Word and the other products in the suite into a subject related chat environment is very powerful and will help project teams and departments get working really well together.
There are some other exciting integrations with 3rd parties such as Twitter and Dropbox with more coming as the developer program is already in preview with some companies already having plug-ins available to try.
We’ll definitely be rolling out Teams in our organisation to work on projects in the most efficient way we can!