They say that email is an imperfect solution that has never been bettered. Users get bogged down with disconnected message threads, extraneous white noise and of course spam and unsolicited invitations.
Collaboration technology vendors have been trying to circumvent these issues by creating platforms with a dedicated approach to what they hope will be a more unified communications space, based on project and team interests. Along with the widely popular Slack, software products in this space include Asana, Podio with its mobile device focus, Ryver, Trello and Flock -- and then, of course, there is Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Teams
Representing Redmond’s best efforts in the collaboration space, Microsoft Teams offers a ‘persistent’ (i.e. always on) chat experience in both text and video format for workers. It also offers file storage capabilities and the ability to collaborate on those documents that are shared between team members.
Microsoft offers a free version of Microsoft Teams with some function restrictions (only 300 users allowed, no audio conferencing, no technical support and team storage limited to 10 GB), but the bulk of its user base comes through paid subscriptions from Microsoft Office 365 users.
Overtaking Slack
In something of a landmark moment after two years of development, the Microsoft Teams team confirms that it has overtaken Slack’s user base. More than 13 million people now use Microsoft Teams on a daily basis -- and more than 19 million people use it weekly. Slack has confirmed its user base to be 10 million daily users.
According to a US Securities & Exchange Commission registration statement made in April 2019, “Around the world, over 600,000 organizations in over 150 countries have turned to Slack as the place to communicate, collaborate, and get work done. Over 10 million people inside those organizations – accountants, customer support reps, engineers, lawyers, journalists, dentists, chefs, detectives, executives, scientists, farmers, hoteliers, salespeople and many others.”
Microsoft meanwhile notes that Microsoft Teams offers availability in 53 languages across 181 markets -- and is being used by customers including Emirates, FedEx, Lexmark, The Adecco Group, KONE and McCann Worldgroup.
New Features in Microsoft Teams
To celebrate its new leading position in this market, Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365 has detailed some of Microsoft Teams’ newest features. He says that as part of extending Teams to every worker across all industries, Microsoft is announcing new capabilities in areas that make it easier for customers to use Teams to communicate and collaborate.
“Two new features in Teams will ensure that important messages get through. Priority notifications alert recipients of time-sensitive messages, pinging a recipient every two minutes on their mobile and desktop until a response is received. Read receipts in chat displays an icon to indicate when a message you sent has been read by the recipient,” wrote Spataro, in a blog posting.
Other new features include 'announcements', to allow team members to highlight important news in a channel. This is said to be a good way to kick off a new project, welcome a new colleague, or (for example) to share results from a recent marketing campaign.
Spataro also makes note of the new time clock feature in the Teams Shifts module, which allows workers to clock in and out of their work shifts and breaks right from their Teams mobile app. Managers have the option to geo-fence a location to ensure team members are at the designated worksite when clocking in or out.
Bundles vs. standalone software
It is important to note that Microsoft ‘bundles’ Teams with Office 365 subscriptions, while Slack is a standalone product without the weight of Microsoft’s installed base to establish and develop its growth pattern upon. The growth noted in this story is clearly the result of a concerted push by Redmond to champion this product, but it’s still very conceivable that many users would want to use both Microsoft Teams as well as Slack, so the race (and the product development roadmaps for both technologies) may still take a few twists and turns yet.
