Even though Microsoft just released its Teams enterprise collaboration tool today, there’s a familiar look and feel to a lot of the features, and that’s by design.
GeekWire got a demonstration of the capabilities of the new product at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash. Tuesday. Microsoft Teams’ goal is to become the digital equivalent of the open office space by combining pretty much everything there is to do at work — chatting, having meetings, collaborating on documents, sending cute animal GIFs — all into one place.
But that is no easy task, and it could lead to a steep learning curve for users. So for that reason Microsoft decided to borrow from its own infrastructure, and took cues from other tech giants when building Teams.
“Whenever you try to make something familiar, whenever you try to make something approachable and put users in control, you try to borrow on concepts that people are already familiar with,” said Larry Waldman, Microsoft Teams principal group program manager, during a demonstration of the new product.
At first glance, the general interface looks a little bit like Facebook with the blue header, clean grey background and boxed threads. Jumping between various teams and threads feels like navigating threads in Slack, and the video and audio calling interfaces were heavily-influenced by Skype.
Teams allows for quick, unstructured discussions via threads that can be boiled down to a subsection, or subject area, within a team. For more in-depth messages, users can open a larger message box that looks like an email, or just email the thread directly. And if those solutions don’t work, users can hold an impromptu video or phone call within a thread or schedule one for later.
“We try to cater to various work styles to make people feel comfortable because no one size fits all,” Waldman said.
For a more in-depth demonstration of Teams, check out this video from Microsoft:
Microsoft Teams is included at no extra charge in business editions of Office 365 subscription service and is now available in 181 markets around the world. Since the preview version of Teams was announced in November, Microsoft has added more than 100 new features, including the option for public teams, scheduled meetings, and mobile voice calling. Microsoft added features to appeal to enterprise customers, such as technologies to improve security, legal and regulatory compliance.
Teams enters Microsoft into an already crowded marketplace for enterprise collaboration, which includes some of the world’s most powerful tech giants, such as Amazon, Google and Facebook, as well as upstart Slack.
Microsoft customers WeWork and Trek were on hand for the release event and both liked the threaded conversations and the all-in-one ethos of Teams. WeWork’s relationship with Microsoft goes back some time, and last year the co-working company agreed to rent out space for 300 Microsoft sales employees in its various locations throughout New York City. The company is growing fast, opening 12 new locations this month alone, including a big space in Bellevue, Wash.
Devin Vermeulen, WeWork’s chief of design, told GeekWire that WeWorkers have used a variety of different tools to communicate, and there was no one standard method. Teams is wide-open and highly-customizable, he said, with the ability to do everything in one window rather than jumping from app to app.
“A lot of what they are doing with Teams, it is kind of this digital version of what we are doing with physical workspace at WeWork,” Vermeulen said.
If Vermeulen could add one thing to the Teams, it would be the ability to mark up PDFs, something he said he does all the time. The Trek team had a few features they wanted to see brought to Teams, but most of them were added between the preview of the program and its public launch or are on the way in the next few months.
Trek, which started out of a barn in Waterloo, Wis. now has offices around the world. The company uses numerous Microsoft programs regularly, including Outlook, SharePoint, Skype for Business and Yammer. So Teams was a natural fit for the company, which wants to standardize communications, whether in an office in France or the headquarters back in Wisconsin.
“It’s reduced the number of apps we have to go to which really brings you into one spot and makes it more fluid working between team members,” said Garrett Baltzer, business intelligence manager for Trek. “So if everybody is in the tool we are able to get things a lot done quicker.”
The Trek team surprised its long-time partner Microsoft with a custom, lightweight bike emblazoned with the signature Office orange at the event. Following the Teams announcement it was the center of attention — and plenty of photo ops.
