On 2nd November 2016, Microsoft have announced the new chat based work space in Office 365 with an aim to make the team collaboration simple and easy yet all in one solution to make the group of peoples work in a more productive way. Currently it is in a preview stage and available to the commercial users who are having Enterprise or Business Plan for Office 365. It will be made available later this year. Currently it is only available for the users in one organization but it might get available for the outside users in later updates. The service basically allows creating teams which will be a kind of hub for group chats which are referred as channels. Teams is available for all the major platforms like Windows, mac OS, Android, iOS and the web.
Integration with existing tools
Microsoft have closely integrated the Microsoft Teams with other Microsoft tools like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Planner, One Note, Power Bi , Delve, OneDrive and SharePoint which can help the users to embed the data easily. One can easily use the embedded data as a reference or sharing with other peers in the team to make the work get completed in minimum time. Most of these tools are familiar to the users and its integration makes a perfect blend with the Teams.
Different modes of communication on one platform
Users have multiple options to communicate to team members. User can communicate to Teams or Individual by different options available like chat, voice calls and video calls. The group chats are displayed in a threaded format which is visible to all the members in the group. Users will get the notification for any updates. While communicating, the users can easily switch between text chat, voice call or video calls. Meetings can be setup instantly with Teams and even scheduled using the planner just in a few clicks.
Easy collaboration
Team members can easily collaborate for their work. The collaborative editing allows multiple users to work on a single task without wasting time. All the team members in same channels can easily collaborate for their work. The tabs creation allows the user to access the stuff which is frequently used by the team members. All the team members can have access to the information and stuff in one place. Bots enable the users to make the work efficient and productive.
Customizable
Microsoft team workspace is very easy when it comes to manage it for multiple teams with different needs. One can easily add team members, create tabs, share the stuffs and initiate the conversations. Team gets to work more productively while having real-time interaction with other team members. One can easily use third party tools and services using Connector model for getting the notifications and updates from third party services like GitHub, Twitter, RSS Feeds etc.
Secure
Microsoft has designed Teams with high level of security and data protection as it is in Office 365. Microsoft has used end to end encryption which restricts even Microsoft to access the customers’ data share through the teams. Additionally Microsoft has used the two factor authentication which will help to protect the identity of the user while keeping the user data secured.
Admin Panel
Administrators can easily manage the accessibilities and features which has to be made available to the users. The admin can control the access over the available functions by just enabling the options.
For now let’s wait for new additional functionality over the release. Hopefully Microsoft will have the features like Single Sign On and support for External Users.
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