Office 365 users: say hello to Microsoft Teams

Looking for a seamless way to chat with your Office 365 collaborators? It was recently announced in a global webcast that Microsoft Teams is now live and operational in 181 markets and 19 languages. Microsoft Teams, originally announced in November of 2016, is now used by more than 50,000 organizations, including Sage, Trek Bicycle, Deloitte, Accenture, Alaska Airlines, and many others. Also since November, Teams has been further refined with more than 100 new features in response to customer requests.

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Microsoft Teams is built upon four core promises: chat for today’s teams, a hub for teamwork, customization options, and security trust. Let’s take a look at each of these in detail.

Chat for today’s teams

With Microsoft Teams, you get a modern conversations experience with threaded persistent chat. The chat features also support audio calling from mobile devices, video (now available on Android but coming soon to iOS and Windows phone), the ability to email a channel including attachments, and notifications.

A hub for teamwork

Office 365 apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint and Power BI are built into Microsoft Teams. There’s support for open/public teams within the organization and scheduling capabilities (with free/busy calendar availability), and more.

Totally customizable

When you’re serving 85 million active users across the Office 365 portfolio, no single team is exactly like the other. That’s why Microsoft Teams allows users to customize their workspace with Tabs, Connectors, and Bots. Currently, more than 150 integrations are available. Some of these include bots from hipmunk, Growbot, and ModuleQ. Microsoft will be partnering with SAP under its SuccessFactors to track goals and performance, and Trello for project management.

Trusted by security teams

Of course, no enterprise grade product would be appropriate for Microsoft if not for the trust from security teams. Teams is built on the Office 365 hyper-scale, enterprise-grade cloud, which delivers advanced security and compliance capabilities that are expected always by Microsoft users. Microsoft is considerate of all global standards, including SOC 1, SOC 2, EU Model Clauses, ISO27001, and HIPAA.

Beyond that, Microsoft Teams supports audit log searches, eDiscovery, and even legal holds for channels, chats, and files.

But that’s not all

One last thing Microsoft wanted to make sure they mentioned was that Teams will have support for empowering every organization to be able to do what they’re set out to do. Accessibility features including support for screen readers, high contrast, and keyboard-only navigation are in the works. To be inclusive, Microsoft needs to think of everything.

To get started, just click here.

Photo credit: Shutterstock, Microsoft

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