Microsoft Teams rolls out to Office 365 customers worldwide
Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday announced the general availability of Microsoft Teams, the company’s new chat-based workspace in Office 365. The new tool for team collaboration is now available to Office 365 business customers in 181 markets and 19 languages. Customers worldwide are choosing Microsoft Teams to enable collaboration within their organizations. Since announcing the preview in November, more than 50,000 organizations have started using Microsoft Teams, including Alaska Airlines, ConocoPhillips, Deloitte, Expedia, J B Hunt, J Walter Thompson, Hendrick Motorsports, Sage, Trek Bicycle and Three UK.
“In a world where information is abundant and human time and attention remain scarce, we aspire to help people and groups of people be more productive, wherever they are,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “Office 365 is the broadest platform and universal toolkit for creation, collaboration and communication. Today we are adding a new tool to Office 365 with Microsoft Teams, a chat-based workspace designed to empower the art of teams.”
Office 365 is designed to meet the unique work style of every group with purpose-built, integrated applications: Outlook for enterprise-grade email; SharePoint for intelligent content management; Yammer for networking across the organization; Skype for Business as the backbone for enterprise voice and video; and now, Microsoft Teams.
According to Laurie Koch, vice president of global customer service at Trek Bicycle, Microsoft Teams is already streamlining the company’s work by providing assets and tasks in context: “Across Trek’s global teams, the integrated collection of Office 365 apps serves up a common toolset to collaboratively drive the business forward. We see Microsoft Teams as the project hub of Office 365 where everybody knows where to find the latest documents, notes and tasks, all in line with team conversations for complete context. Teams is quickly becoming a key part of Trek’s get-things-done-fast culture.”
Microsoft has introduced more than 100 new features to Teams since November, including: an enhanced meeting experience, with scheduling capabilities; mobile audio calling, with video calling on Android and coming soon to iOS and Windows Phone; email integration; and new security and compliance capabilities. The company has also delivered new features to make Microsoft Teams accessible, such as support for screen readers, high contrast and keyboard-only navigation. Guest access capabilities and deeper integration with Outlook, and a richer developer platform are targeted for June of this year.