Microsoft has finally presented the team, and his alternative house tools such as Slack. A pre-release version is available for organizations with an Office 365 subscription, with a final design scheduled for early next year. As you might expect, the publisher is playing the card of integration.
The rumors circulated for several months already. Microsoft has announced its competitor to solutions such as HipChat or Slack, named Teams, during a conference held yesterday evening. The principle is exactly the same : an e-mail designed to help the teams move forward on their projects or simply to organize.
An interface without particular surprise
The features are many but not really surprising. The core function is to be able to discuss in a team with his work colleagues. We, therefore, find a large box to the right for conversations, and a column to the left to view the groups. The latter, by default, are those to which the user has the right, as defined by the administrator. Only users listed as part of the business can be added, for the moment, the Guest access is not yet available.
The left column is configurable. Users can pin just about anything they want, including the documents on which they must often intervene. There also create all the private discussions, head-to-head or in a group.
conversations in ” threads “, with classical tools
The conversations themselves are displayed by default in threads. This means that it is not a succession without end of messages as in a group discussion classic. The topics thus create automatically “branches” with an indentation for the answers. Each individual can directly see who responds to what. Teams operates a selection on the elements that seem interesting to display for each user.
The latter also has all the standard functions that one can expect from such a messaging solution. The editing interface also includes standard tools of formatting, such as bold, italic or bulleted lists. Read messages can also be marked with flags or “I love” to find them more easily thereafter.
Microsoft plays the card of cohesion with its services
of course, the greatest strength of Teams can easily guess : the integration. It is available to all companies with a subscription Office 365 type of Business or Enterprise, all in 18 languages and in 181 countries. In all cases, the Office suite is supported, Planner, PowerBI, SharePoint, OneNote, and of course Skype.
The integration of this last one is interesting. It already provides to Teams of features of video conferencing from the interface, without any extra effort. A user can also set up a meeting in the calendar, and adding people on the fly. The groups also have an icon to launch a collective call with no special preparation. It is even possible to put in place conference standing in which the users will come and go as they please.
A necessary opening to the outside world
For the rest, the Office integration in general allows a number of interesting points, of which the principal is to be able to work the compatible documents directly into teams. When it is necessary, a part of the controls is thus shifted to the software, for example, to make quick edits or include comments.
developers can also take advantage of the Microsoft Graph API and enabling the creation of extensions. Microsoft does, in fact, a opening of Teams to other services, and will have to see if they will be more to go for the integration with other Office solutions. Because it is without question that everything is going to play, the possibility to use a messaging tool, as a central element, thanks to integrations simple and various as the main force of the Slack at the present time. This explains in large part its success over the past few years.
the Teams wants to be malleable, for example by allowing for the creation of tabs focused on other services in cloud, channels, conversation, custom, up to the “same house” if the business wants to. Microsoft has made several demonstrations in this direction during the conference, including Twitter integration – simple example of an account that automatically display new tweets in the conversation – and the rapid implementation of surveys.
here at the official launch of Teams, scheduled for the beginning of 2017 (without more precision), Microsoft account, in fact, offer 150 integrations, 70 connectors, and 85 bots. A open towards the exterior on which there was no question of skipping, unless you propose a solution that is focused exclusively on the inside.
integration, a strength as a weakness
unfortunately, This is a point at which Microsoft will face, in spite of all these doors. In contrast to Slack, the editor cannot deny that the Teams is primarily designed for subscribers of Office 365. However, even if these formulas appear as a growing success, many businesses do not need it.
This also explains in part the boom in a Slack which is climbed quickly to four million active users without belonging to any giant of the sector, and by cultivating its difference. Even in the big companies, the battle will not be easy, as behemoths such as eBay, EA, IBM, or even TIME already use Slack.
In the meantime, the pre-release Teams is usable by all businesses that subscribe to Office 365. It requires several preparatory steps, which are summarized on the page dedicated to the new e-mail. She suffers for the time of some defects of youth, in particular at the level of translation of emails. But I bet that this will evolve quickly.
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