Microsoft Teams, the Chat-Based Collaboration Solution, Launched as Part of Office 365

Microsoft Teams is a new chat-based workspace that further enhances the collaboration capabilities in Microsoft Office 365, the cloud-based productivity offering with more than 85 million monthly active commercial users. Microsoft Teams brings together people, conversations, content and the tools teams need to collaborate.

Microsoft Teams joins the broadest and deepest portfolio of collaboration applications and services to help solve the diverse needs of people and organizations globally. Office 365 is designed for the unique workstyle of every group and includes purpose-built applications, all deeply integrated together. SharePoint provides intranets and content management solutions to more than 200,000 organizations and 190 million people. Yammer is the social network for work, enabling cross-company discussions for 85 percent of the Fortune 500. Skype for Business provides real-time voice, video and conferencing and hosts more than 100 million meetings a month. Office 365 Groups is the cross-application membership service that makes it easy for people to move naturally from one collaboration tool to another.

Microsoft Teams is built on four core promises:

·         Keep track of your conversations. Microsoft Teams provides persistent, threaded chat to keep everyone engaged and informed. 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.

·         Seamless O365 integration. Microsoft Teams brings together the full breadth and depth of Office 365. People can start voice and video meetings, as well as work with Microsoft Office documents, directly within the Microsoft Teams experience. 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.

·         Customize experiences to meet specific team needs. Because every team is unique, Microsoft Teams offers the ability for teams to customize the experience to meet their specific needs. Team members can create channels to organize conversations by topic. They can customize 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. Tabs provides quick access to frequently used documents and cloud services.  Microsoft Teams supports the same Connector model as Exchange to bring notifications and updates from third-party services, such as Twitter or GitHub, directly into the experience. In addition, it supports the Microsoft Bot Framework to bring intelligent first- and third-party services into the team environment.

·         Security that teams trust. As part of Office 365, Microsoft Teams offers the global scale and advanced security and compliance capabilities provided by the Microsoft Cloud. Data is encrypted at all times and covered by a transparent operational model with no standing access to customer data. Multifactor authentication provides enhanced identity protection to help ensure data stays safe within the team.

Microsoft Teams is available to all Office 365 commercial customers. It will run on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and web platforms.