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Microsoft Teams Launches To Take on Slack in the Workplace (theverge.com)
Microsoft today launched its team collaboration app called Microsoft Teams. The app, which competes with Slack, is available in beta starting today. Microsoft describes the app as a "chat-based workspace in Office 365." The Verge adds:Microsoft is, of course, integrating Teams deeply into Office and Skype. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote are all built-into Microsoft Teams, alongside meetings with Skype for Business. For businesses truly living in a Microsoft world, there's also integration with SharePoint, Power BI, and Planner. Just like Slack, you can search across people, files, and chats, and Microsoft is using its Exchange integration to provide notifications. You can create tabs that integrate with other cloud services, alongside tailored channels and even custom memes throughout chats. Microsoft is also making Teams extensible with open APIs and its own bot framework. Microsoft demonstrated Twitter integrations at its event, where you can push messages from particular Twitter accounts into chat rooms, alongside the ability to create quick polls, or share custom meme images. One of the more interesting features is Microsoft's Skype integration, and the ability for chat room members to drop in and out of persistent video calls to gather for projects or a quick chat. Microsoft is allowing Office 365 customers preview the Microsoft Teams service today, in 181 countries. Microsoft plans to include Microsoft Teams in all Office 365 Business and Enterprise suites, with general availability slated for early 2017. Microsoft is also opening its developer preview program today, with 150 integrations expected at launch early next year, alongside 70 connectors and 85 bots.Slack, naturally isn't pleased with the existence of Microsoft Teams. In a full-page ad on the New York Times today, the company attempted to mock Microsoft. Update: 11/02 18:10 GMT: Microsoft says it doesn't have any plans for a free or consumer offering of Teams,
I doubt this is something my work would use because we're a Google Docs + Slack shop. Still, I wish Microsoft well in this. I like Slack but I want them to be on their toes and competitive, not just resting on "way better than HipChat" and calling it a day.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
All your sensitive team collaboration on a third party server that sits unencrypted...... Why in the world do people use this? At least MatterMost is self hosted and can be reasonably secured.
that's what I want to know before I decide which one to use.
Are doomed to repeat IRC.
Add some pretty wrappers on top of IRC, make messages JSON if you insist on emjois. We've had bots for decades (for doing all sorts of everything). Live communication.
Can someone please explain why Slack is different?
"Hey, you know what hasn't been super over-complicated yet? Interoffice communications. How can we further fuck this up?"
"Let's make a version of Slack, but integrate it with Skype even more!"
"Brilliant!"
Consistency is only a virtue if you're not a screw-up.
Office as 365 is a subscription model. It's an unwanted shift that will cost you exponentially more to use MS Office the longer a workstation is in service vs the standardized one time purchase fee for the software. Just because you can chat on it doesn't give it much if any additional value. It's a proprietary scheme because it's become the standardized file format. A one time purchase of the software is the logical cost/benefit model and business are starting to revert back to Office 2013 because of it. Office 365 subscription becomes egregiously expensive software in the long term.
disclaimer: I am a greybeard admin in a dark cubicle in the basement.
those who fail to understand *NIX are doomed to reinvent it, terribly. we have had powerhouse collaboration tools like IRC and jabber for decades now. Yet for some reason, in this foul year of our lord 2016, most admins do nothing more than cash a fat paycheck and install the latest vendor bloat. Whatever it was some C level or director saw at an airport billboard, or got stuffed into their carry on luggage during a gold course trade show, thats what we're punished to deploy and I for one am sick of it. Im sick of this cycle of endless corporate garbage that tries to re invent the wheel with more buzzwords.
your collaborative tools should do one thing and do it well. you should spread the risk of outages by avoiding a single tool, not embracing it. And i cant believe im saying this, but in 2016 you should not be paying for voip or chat in the office.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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Yammer is poo, though.
It seems very good-natured. Slack got lots of things right, and what they say in said ad is useful advice. I hope Microsoft listens.
... if you are even slightly concerned about being locked into Microsoft.
All your sensitive team collaboration on a third party server that sits unencrypted...... Why in the world do people use this?
How "sensitive" is most people's collaboration really?
Unless you are a spy operating in hostile territory no-one gives a rats ass about your amazing "collaboration" and the various animated gifs it is composed of.
The fact is its damn hard to get anything done even knowing each other, for a third party to pull much useful out of a slack would be a miracle even for the hardiest deep-learning bot.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The have Skype, Skype for Bussiness/Lync (completely different thing), Yammer and now this.
Can't they come up with something proper instead of continuing to throw an endless stream of shit on the wall and see what sticks?
Nobody wants 20 different ways to communicate, at least if they have a job that involves doing something other than wrangling with communications solutions all day long.
And maybe a bit of code reuse wouldn't hurt, for example their web-based Skype can do proper browser notifications that you can actually see when you are looking at some other web page. Their office365 mail/calender instead uses "notifications" that are just part of the page, i.e. completely useless unless you look at your email tab 24/7. Their PDF reader can't show encrypted emails. Their online word can only show, not edit non-xml documents.
And it just goes on and on. If they stopped reinventing stuff, they might actually find time to develop at least one product to the point where it doesn't suck!
Considering that Lync/Skype Pro is an utter shitshow mess and that is why we switched to Slack for comms..... I have very little hope that microsoft can come up with anything
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
.... I thought that Microsoft was cracking down on employees who slack off
Aren't there plenty of IM options already? And doesn't Lync already do this? I haven't really looked because my company has had an excellent IM solution practically forever and IRC works great for discussions with people outside the company. I've heard about Slack because apparently a lot of people are using it to discuss OpenContrail, but after installing it on my phone I just didn't see the point.
Aren't there plenty of interoperable XMPP clients that don't tie you to a single provider?
Looks like Slack is a bad replacement for email. Am I missing something?
I don't respond to AC's.
This is like all those people using facebook, kik, yim, aim, etc.
I don't have a point here other than getting people to use the sane alternatives isn't happening and will not happen. Many people seem to avoid opensource for dogmatic reasons or the belief that proprietary is superior because people get paid to work on it.
Is that they rely on IT Teams to deploy their collaboration tools. IT Teams perform an analysis and lock down everything that they can before rolling out the product.
The locked down collaboration tool is unable to be used for collaboration and everyone finds some other way to get their jobs done.
The last two companies I have worked for rolled out SharePoint in such a way that people quickly learned to not allow their documents to become captives in the "collaboration tool" and the ballyhooed sites became unused. If Microsoft does not plan on providing a free/consumer offering then this tool will be relegated to the same dust heap that most SharePoint servers have found themselves in and for the same reason: the people in control are not the users.
So the same people who bundled Solitaire with Windows and who gave us an OS that crashes daily costing lost work and long rebooting times are now fighting slack in the workplace. Anyone else not expect this to go well?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
In January, Yammer's data model will be moved over to the Office Graph, the same data model that runs Teams. So you will be able to use Yammer or Teams on the same data set. Yammer and teams will just be different views into the same model.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Yammer is facebook for businesses, not chat. This is different. Not that Yammer is particularly useful.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
to chain yourself to.
Either it doesn't kill Slack and Microsoft gets bored and leaves to to linger barely supported for years before finally killing it, leaving the few users in the lurch, or it does kill Slack and without competition MS doesn't bother putting any effort into improving it, leaving it permanently semi-broken with MS slowly increasing fees over time to milk it for every dollar they can get.
Slack does not have it.
... really?). As another Slashdotter noted - I'd be curious to see how new competition in this area evolves Slack.
Microsoft Teams has it.
I'm not a Microsoft fanboi but this has been a dealbreaker for our organization adopting Slack. We aren't a healthcare shop but we do work with healthcare data. So Stich isn't useful to us and frankly isn't enterprise ready (no LDAP integration
I'm apparently the only person to actually try it here. With my token hipster slack-loving designer coworker. No joke, it's really, really nice. Great interface, nice features, good performance, and some superb and interesting integrations out of the box. nN excellent web client, and very good desktop and phone clients for all major platforms. It actually feels like the end game, connecting up a variety of useful, but disjointed MS products. Unlike slack, it has superb voice, video calling, and screen sharing built in. If you are in an O365 shop, you really, really should try this. It's truly an excellent offering.
Slack will no doubt feel the heat - probably a super nova blast. However, success of Microsoft Teams will complete depend on how well they integrate it with Skype, Office environments and how seamless it becomes. A behemoth like Microsoft might just destabilize Slack. You never know! Moreover, with Microsoft spreading its giant tentacles around the team messaging chat app, it's time Slack innovated even further. Happy times ahead!
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Realisation that you're locked into a vendor and can't move the data to another vendor's vault in 3... 2...
Yeah, at least, when I used Yammer (was forced to use Yammer), that's what it was. I can't imagine how anyone would use it for serious collaboration, but maybe it had features I didn't know about.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What was the last successful Microsoft product? It was Xbox right? Anything since then? Before that it was Office, before that it was that popular keyboard and mouse, and before that it was Windows. I count four successes out of well over a hundred major product attempts. It's amazing they're still a company; those four successes are really extraordinary.