On 14th March 2017, Microsoft moved its Microsoft Teams product from Preview to General Availability (GA). In my mind, this product is quite a significant step for Microsoft as it shows an interesting view to the development of the Office 365 platform. There has been a trend in the past for Microsoft to just buy a product in the space that it wants to be in, but this time they’ve built a new product from the ground up.
Teams appears to borrow bits of functionality from other Microsoft products, such as Skype, Skype for Business and Exchange. This, however, is a positive thing as it means that, under the hood, these other technologies are being used to power Teams and further enhance its functionality.
In my experience, the integration Exchange groups with that of SharePoint libraries as the storage mechanism for documents in a team channel is really intuitive for users. The ability to pin certain documents as tabs and have them open in Excel Online, for example, makes the interaction really simple and saves users having to hunt around to find the document that they once would have been looking for.
This feels like the first mainstream addition to Office 365 in the last year that has the ability to impact a lot of people’s daily work flow. Having your documents easily accessible to all enables collaborative working, increasing productivity and communication. This opens the doors to telecommuting for your staff and remote working, with all your shared documents there for the editing.
Staff Hub and Microsoft Bookings are great additions if you have that specific requirement, whereas Teams is pretty applicable to any role an employee may have within a company.
The speed at which updates and enhancements have been added over the Preview period demonstrates another great aspect about Teams. All clients, Windows, Mac and Mobile seem to be getting that same amount of love which is great for companies that have a mixed infrastructure like we do.
If you’d like to discuss how Microsoft Teams could work for your business, get in touch with SpiderGroup. We love it here, enabling collaborative working with ease. Call us on 0117 933 0570 or fill in our contact form and we will get back to you.