At their recent event in New York, Microsoft announced 'Microsoft Teams' which is a new chat-based workspace in Office 365. This is a brand new feature that brings together people, conversations and content to make collaboration easier and help organisations achieve more. It integrates with Office applications and comes as part of Office 365. It is currently available as preview to commercial customers, with general availability expected in the first quarter of 2017.
The four core promises that Microsoft Teams delivers are:
This is a way to get everyone engaged in chats. Team conversations are visible to the entire team, but there is, of course, the ability for private discussions. Skype is integrated so teams can partake in voice and video conferences.
As Microsoft Teams is built on Office 365 it includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, Planner, Power BI and Delve, so people have all the information and tools they need.
As all teams are different, you can customise your workspace to suit your needs, with rich extensibility and open APIs available at general availability. For example, Tabs provides quick access to frequently used documents and cloud services.
Microsoft Teams provides the advanced security and compliance capabilities that our Office 365 customers expect. Teams will support key compliance standards including EU Model Clauses, IDO 27001, SOC 2, HIPPA and more. As expected, Microsoft Teams is served out of hyper-scale global network data centres, automatically provisioned within Office 365 and managed centrally, the same way as any other Office 365 service.
For more information, or to help get started with Teams, contact us.