Microsoft officially announces Microsoft Teams, its own Slack competitor

This model of “your information travels with you” also pulls from several of Microsoft‘s existing tools – like the Graph that maps out relationships between people or pulls in suggested file, or the bots that respond to user actions to suggest more efficient follow-ups.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft considered acquiring Slack, but the discussions never got serious enough to involve Nadella or the company’s board, and it opted instead to build its own similar software, said two people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the process wasn’t public.

CEO Satya Nadella unveiled the product at a Microsoft event in NY on 2 November, although the announcement had been expected for some time. Further, it includes full support for the Microsoft Bot Framework to bring intelligent first- and third-party services into your team environment.

Furthermore, Microsoft Teams through the Microsoft Cloud provides users with a glibal scale, advanced security, and compliance capabities.

“But if you use Office 365, you are nearly certainly going to shift your allegiances just for simplicity’s sake”. It’s doing more than just offering the core chat experience; the company is also shipping mobile clients for Windows, Android, and iOS. It is fully integrated into Office 365, and features threaded chats, deep integration with Skype built into the app, Power BI and Planner integration, and uses Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Microsoft Teams is inspired by “the art of how teams work together”, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said while introducing the product on Wednesday. Microsoft Teams is (are?) Microsoft’s answer to Slack. Office 365 already contains Yammer, Microsoft’s enterprise-focused social networking tool. The key advantage of Teams is that it integrates just about every Office 365 app and service.

Microsoft describes Teams as a chat-based workspace to enhance the collaboration capabilities in Microsoft Office 365. We’ll find out a lot more about Microsoft Teams at 11AM ET today, and The Verge will be covering Microsoft’s news as it happens. It all depends on how Microsoft positions Microsoft Teams, but if it’s part of what a business is already paying for with Microsoft Office, then it might make many technology officers think twice about paying for Slack on top.

“You’re not going to create something people really love by making a big list of Slack’s features and simply checking those boxes”, it says.

While Slack is the de-facto method through which most startups handle team collaboration these days, the big money come from big-name corporations, and Slack has only a few of them, such as Airbnb, Pinterest, EA, Pandora, Harvard, LinkedIn, Samsung, and eBay. During the demo I found little difference between the Activity and Teams views, because the majority of interactions in Microsoft’s demo took place between members of the same fictional team.

Slack declined to comment beyond the New York Times ad. Over 150 partners are supporting Teams, such as Intercom, Zendesk, Hootsuite, and Asana.