Microsoft teams chat app

Microsoft Teams—is a  new chat-based workspace in Office 365.

Microsoft Teams is a new experience that brings together people, conversations and content—along with the tools that teams need—so they can easily collaborate to achieve more. It’s naturally integrated with the familiar Office applications and is built from the ground up on the Office 365 global, secure cloud.

Starting today, Microsoft Teams is available in preview in 181 countries and in 18 languages to commercial customers with Office 365 Enterprise or Business plans, with general availability expected in the first quarter of 2017.

Teams are now more agile and organizational structures more flat to keep communications and information flowing. A more open, digital environment that makes work visible, integrated and accessible—across the team—so everyone can stay in the know.

Create a digital workspace for high performing teams.

Chat for today’s teams

Microsoft Teams supports not only persistent but also threaded chats to keep everyone engaged. Team conversations are, by default, visible to the entire team, but there is of course the ability for private discussions. Skype is deeply integrated, so teams can participate in voice and video conferences.

Everyone can add personality to their digital workspace with emoji’s, stickers, GIFs and custom memes to make it their own.

A hub for teamwork

Microsoft Teams brings together the full breadth and depth of Office 365 to provide a true hub for teamwork.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, Planner, Power BI and Delve are all built into Microsoft Teams so people have all the information and tools they need at their fingertips.

Backed by the Microsoft Graph, intelligent services are surfaced throughout the workspace to help with information relevancy, discovery and sharing.

Microsoft Teams is also built on Office 365 Groups—the  cross-application membership service that makes it easy for people to move naturally from one collaboration tool to another, preserve their sense of context and share with others.

Customizable for each team

All teams are unique, and  people can customize their workspace, 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 shares the same Connector model as Exchange, to provide notifications and updates from third-party services like Twitter or GitHub.

There is  full support for the Microsoft Bot Framework to bring intelligent first- and third-party services into a team environment.

The Microsoft Teams Developer Preview program, is now open and allows developers to extend Microsoft Teams.

Security teams trust

Finally, Microsoft Teams provides the advanced security and compliance capabilities of  Office 365 customers expect.

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. A transparent operational model with no standing access to customer data. Microsoft Teams will support key compliance standards including EU Model Clauses, ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA and more., Microsoft Teams is served out of Microsoft’s  hyper-scale global network of data centers, automatically provisioned within Office 365 and managed centrally, just as any other Office 365 service.

Microsoft Teams joins the Office 365 universal toolkit

Microsoft Teams joins the broadest and deepest portfolio of collaboration applications and services to help solve the diverse needs of people and organizations globally.

Among the 85 million active monthly users, all groups have a diverse set of needs

·         Exchange is the undisputed leader in corporate email and according to Gartner has “80 percent share of companies using cloud email with revenue above $10 billion.”

• SharePoint provides intranets and content management solutions to more than 200,000 organizations and 190 million people.
• Yammer is the social network for work, enabling cross-company discussions for 85 percent of the Fortune 500.
• Skype for Business provides real-time voice, video and conferencing and hosts more than 100 million meetings a month.
• Office 365 Groups is our cross-application membership service that makes it easy for people to move naturally from one collaboration tool to another.

Frequently asked questions

Q. Which Office 365 plans will include Microsoft Teams?

A. Microsoft Teams is available to Office 365 commercial customers with one of the following plans: Business Essentials, Business Premium, and Enterprise E1, E3 and E5. Microsoft Teams will also be available to customers who purchased E4 prior to its retirement.

Q. What action do Office 365 IT admins need to take to access the preview of Microsoft Teams?

A. To turn on Microsoft Teams, IT admins should go to their Office 365 admin center, click Settings > Services & Add Ins > Microsoft Teams.

Q. When will Microsoft Teams roll out broadly to all eligible Office 365 customers?

A. Microsoft Teams is available in preview to eligible Office 365 commercial customers beginning November 2, 2016. We expect the service to become generally available in the first quarter of calendar year 2017.

Q. What platforms does Microsoft Teams support?

A. Microsoft Teams runs on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and web platforms.

Q. What level of security and compliance does Microsoft Teams support?

A. Microsoft Teams is expected to be Office 365 Tier C compliant at launch. This broad set of global compliance and data protection requirements includes ISO 27001, ISO 27018, EUMC, SOC 1 Type I & II, SOC 2 Type I and II, HIPAA and FERPA. Microsoft Teams also enforces two-factor authentication, single sign on through Active Directory and encryption of data in transit and at rest.

Q. What trainings are available to help Office 365 admins learn about Microsoft Teams?

A. We have two different trainings currently available for our IT admins. To view the trainings, visit the Microsoft Virtual Academy website. We have a video on Microsoft Mechanics and more information on the Microsoft Teams