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Deeply integrated with Office 365, Microsoft Teams is designed to out-muscle Slack in the workplace

By Ng Chong Seng - on 3 Nov 2016, 9:45am

Deeply integrated with Office 365, Microsoft Teams is designed to out-muscle Slack in the workplace

Microsoft has today announced Microsoft Teams, a team-collaboration tool within Office 365 that’s designed to compete with Slack.

Available as a beta starting today in 181 countries and in 18 languages, Microsoft Teams will be generally available in Q1 2017. To use it, you do need to be an Office 365 commercial customer, with either an Office 365 Enterprise (E1, E3, E4, or E5) or Business (Essentials or Premium) plan. Admins can enable Teams through the Office 365 admin center.

As detailed by the Windows 10 maker, Microsoft Teams integrates naturally with Office apps and is built to take advantage of Office 365’s global, secure cloud. Microsoft Teams supports both persistent and threaded chats, public (within team members) and private chats, with Skype deeply integrated for easy voice and video conferences. Emojis, stickers, GIFs, custom memes - they’re all there.

Of course, Microsoft Teams integrates with a wide range of Office 365 apps and services, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, Planner, Power BI, and Delve. It also supports Office 365 Groups, a Microsoft service that allows establishing of a single team identity and having a single set of permissions applied across Office 365 apps. In Microsoft's own words, Teams is the latest tool to join the "Office 365 universal toolkit".

But people like to customize their workspaces, so Microsoft has also designed Teams to be extensible, with open APIs to be available when Teams becomes generally available. Exchange Connector model (e.g., Twitter Connector) and Microsoft Bot Framework support aside, integrations with over 150 partners are also on the cards, and early partners include Zendesk, Asana, Hootsuite, and Intercom.

Regarding security, data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Microsoft Teams will support key compliance standards, including EU Model Clauses, ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA, and more. Microsoft Teams is served out of the company’s hyper-scale global network of data centers, automatically provisioned within Office 365 and managed centrally.

Source: Office Blogs.

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