Last Tuesday, Microsoft Corp. 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 choose Office 365 to enable collaboration within their organizations. Since Microsoft announced the preview in November, more than 50,000 organizations have started using Microsoft Teams, including Alaska Airlines, Cerner Corporation, 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 workstyle 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 now 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 more accessible, such as support for screen readers, and 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. For more details on the new features, go to the Office Blog.

About Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams brings together people, conversations and content, along with the tools that teams need. It’s integrated with familiar Office applications and is built from the ground up on Office 365 and Microsoft’s global, secured cloud. Microsoft Teams is built on four core promises:

• Chat for today’s teams. Microsoft Teams provides a modern conversations experience, with threaded, persistent chat to keep everyone engaged. Team conversations can be either private or visible to the entire team, and users can access multiple teams, making it easy to switch between projects.
• A hub for teamwork. The Office applications and services that teams use every day — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, and OneNote and Power BI— are all built-in, so people have the information and tools they need.
• Customization for every team. Microsoft Teams offers the ability to customize work spaces with tabs, connectors and bots from third-party partners as well as familiar Microsoft tools like Microsoft Planner and Visual Studio Team Services. More than 150 integrations are available or coming soon, with companies like SAP, Trello, Hipmunk, Growbot and ModuleQ building on the platform.
• Security teams trust. Microsoft Teams is built on the hyper-scale, enterprise-grade Office 365 cloud, delivering the advanced security and compliance capabilities that customers expect. Teams supports global standards including SOC 1, SOC 2, EU Model Clauses, ISO27001 and HIPAA.

Start using Teams today

Organizations interested in the new chat-based workspace can start using Teams today. More information on the philosophy behind Microsoft Teams and how it works can be found at the Office Blog, the Microsoft Mechanics video.