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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?
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 will say this much. There is a reason a lot of corporations are going Cloud. It's because there are a lot of folks in the basement in IT who agree with you, and there are a lot of folks in the rest of the business who disagree and the rest of the business is starting to win out as the Cloud providers are starting to be able to pass audits more often than the on-premise data centers.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Is that they rely on IT Teams to deploy their collaboration tools. [SNIP] the people in control are not the users.
The problem is a constantly moving pendulum.
MBA: "We need to do better document and revision management than a shared folder because everyone overwrites my stuff!"
IT: "Okay, here's Sharepoint."
MBA: "Great! People will just figure this out, right?"
IT: "It's a bit more complicated than that. We can do a one-hour training session in shifts, and have the whole company trained in 2-3 days."
MBA: "We can't afford the downtime! Just roll it out, provide a cheat sheet, and prepare for the service desk tickets to come in!"
IT: *shrug*
A month later...
MBA: "Sharepoint sucks because people keep locking documents and setting the permissions so only they can access them!"
IT: "Users aren't respecting the policy, or don't know how to set them properly...which we'd have taught them all to do in the training class."
MBA: "We don't have time for that! Disable the ability for users to set permissions!"
IT: "...so, everyone has access to everything?"
MBA: "Exactly!"
A month later...
MBA: "Sharepoint didn't protect our data! How did Steve in HR manage to take financial documents with him when he got fired?"
IT: "...because we gave everyone permissions."
MBA: "Why would you do that! Our information needs to be secure secure secure!!"
IT: "...because management was having a tough time with the permissions and told us to revoke them all."
The endless cycle of IT deployments is from convenient/insecure when things are annoying, to inconvenient/secure when hackers rule the news circuit, and back again when everyone is sick of 12 passwords and the budget is too tight for SSO systems to be implemented. Rules and procedures when the rollouts start, to the real-world workflows they impede because the committee who designed them didn't account for corner cases they didn't know existed.
Sharepoint and Team and any number of other collaboration tools *can* be used effectively in an organization. Those who require their implementation, however, are unlikely to account for the fact that the super-smooth tech demo they saw at a conference assumed a use case that perfectly fit with the tool and its demonstration, as well as the fact that all the users spent hours and hours rehearsing that demo. When management thinks in terms of a rollout as a combination of research, acquisition, more research, implementation, even more research, training, and optimization...it is only then that any collaboration tool will work. They cannot work in a situation involving separate fiefdoms and immovable workflows or unwilling users.