Microsoft makes Teams chat service for Office 365 widely available

Microsoft has made its Teams chat service available to Office 365 users after a preview period of several months. With the service, Microsoft hopes to compete with the popular Slack. Since the start of the preview, many new features have been added.

Microsoft Teams can now be used in 181 countries and 19 languages, Microsoft reports. At the preview period, which started in November, 50,000 companies were already using the chat service. In the meantime, the company has added more than a hundred new features, including calling via mobile devices and video calling with the Android app. Video support is coming soon to the Teams apps for iOS and Windows Phone, the company promises.

In addition, Microsoft tries to distinguish itself with the integration of e-mail. For example, Teams makes it possible to email everyone in channels, including with attachment. There is also support for screen readers and users can use keyboard shortcuts for navigation. In June, expansion with guest access, more Outlook functionality and more options for developers will follow.

The Teams service comes at no additional cost to the more than 85 million Office 365 users. Microsoft Teams supports threaded conversations, private chats, and cross-channel signups. Microsoft is making the service an integral part of Office and Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote and PowerBI, among others, are integrated.

In addition, the service supports stickers and bots. Companies can customize Teams with, for example, tabs and bots. In addition, other integrations are possible, SAP and Trello, among others, are already working together with Microsoft for this.

With Teams, Microsoft is trying to stem the rise of Slack as a business communication tool. Slack had 4 million daily users and 1.25 million paid users last October. In addition, Microsoft can expect competition from Google: that giant has split the business services Chat and Meet from Hangouts.