Microsoft Teams - a new chat-based workspace in Office 365

On Tuesday, Microsoft Corp announced the company's new chat-based workspace in Office 365 Known as 'Microsoft Teams' in order to meet the unique workstyle of every group. Organizations interested in the new chat-based workspace can start using Teams. This new tool is now available to Office 365 business customers in 181 markets and 19 languages.

The preview was announced in November and since then customers are choosing Microsoft Teams to enable collaboration within their organizations. More than 50,000 organizations such as Alaska Airlines, ConocoPhillips, Deloitte, Expedia, J.B. Hunt, J. Walter Thompson, Hendrick Motorsports, Sage, Trek Bicycle and Three UK have started using this tool.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft says, "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. 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."

Microsoft Team is integrated with familiar Office applications and is built from the ground up on Office 365 and Microsoft's global, secure cloud. The company has also added new features to make Microsoft Teams accessible including support for screen readers, high contrast, and keyboard-only navigation.

A user can access multiple teams and can have a private or public conversation with an entire team. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, and PowerBI are all built-in within the team and one can also customize workspaces with tabs, connectors and bots from third-party partners as well as familiar Microsoft tools like Microsoft Planner and Visual Studio Team Services.

This tool is built on the hyper-scale, enterprise-grade Office 365 cloud, delivering the advanced security and compliance capabilities our customers expect. Guest access capabilities, deeper integration with Outlook and a richer developer platform are targeted for June 2017. For more details on this new features go to the Office Blog.