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,

Comments

Great! Competition FTW!

[Just Some Guy]

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.

Re:Great! Competition FTW!

[cayenne8]

not just resting on "way better than HipChat"

Am I the only one that pretty much HATES all these chat/IM and other intrusive constant on, constant communication apps and devices at work??

I've been fortunate enough to be able to finally disable fucking MS Lync.

With 100M people a day constantly trying to chat, I can't concentrate or get a fucking thing done.

I finally got everyone to understand, that even though it shows me gone/disconnected, that they can email me, or call if it is truly an urgent need.

I do ok with email since the communication is asynchronous, but with IM...someone is constantly wanting to chat about something, usually inane or something that could be solved by them if they gave it 5 extra seconds thought....and often it is multiple people at once.

Maybe I just don't multi-task well....but anyway, I find that for the most part, constant communication with IM, at least for tech work...kills my productivity and ability to concentrate and work.

Am I the only one that hates this?

Re:Great! Competition FTW!

[Just Some Guy]

Maybe I just don't multi-task well....but anyway, I find that for the most part, constant communication with IM, at least for tech work...kills my productivity and ability to concentrate and work.

With Slack, you can set Do Not Disturb and not get any notifications. I like working that way: I set DND and go into a 25 minute sprint. At the end, I look at Slack and see messages, dog videos, and whatever, then minimize it and go back to work for another 25 minutes.

Those that don't study history

[0100010001010011]

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?

Re:Those that don't study history

[Just Some Guy]

You're discounting the value of UI. You can drop Slack on a new employee and they can immediately click around and figure out how to use it. You and I like IRC and it's great. I also like Usenet, but that's a usability nightmare for anyone used to common web comment tools.

Likely MS Idea Meeting Minutes

[PessimysticRaven]

"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!"

Re:Likely MS Idea Meeting Minutes

[LynnwoodRooster]

Nah, if you REALLY want to fuck up interoffice communications, you go big and go Lotus Notes. Slack is for cheap wannabes...

Re:Slack is terrible

[ahabswhale]

According to Slack, data is encrypted in transit and at rest: https://slack.com/security-pra...

But feel free to make shit up.

what is this garbage.

[nimbius]

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.

Re:what is this garbage.

[grumpy-cowboy]

IRC is difficult for programmers to use?! What?! I hope you are joking.

Re:what is this garbage.

[TedTschopp]

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.

Re:what is this garbage.

[Manic Miner]

The reason slack is great is exactly because it is IRC.. but WAY nicer to look at and *much* simpler to integrate with. TBH it's the integration ecosystem that wins the day. Writing bots to connect into Slack is super easy, and it already has "click to enable" integrations with so many other tools.

Once it's all in once place it makes day to day work flow much easier and there are fewer context switches.

Re:Would you like to play a game?

[unixisc]

If you have multiple computers, Office 365 makes more sense. While it is subscription, you can automatically upgrade once a new version is out - in contrast to having to buy the new version w/ the standard edition (Granted, you may just as easily decide to hell w/ any upgrades). You get 5 subscriptions, and every Hotmail/Live/Outlook.com email you associate w/ it will get you 1TB of OneDrive storage to each account.

Of course, if you are the never upgrade type, Office 2013 will work just fine

good luck...

[Lumpy]

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

Microsoft's collaboration problem

[laughingskeptic]

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.

Re:Microsoft's collaboration problem

[Voyager529]

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.

Re:Yammer

[TedTschopp]

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.