Microsoft Teams

The rise of COVID-19 has put a significant amount of pressure on IT departments around the globe. With the onset of needing to support robust remote work experiences, every type of remote collaboration application has seen strong growth during the past month.

It’s a bit hard to believe but Microsoft’s Teams application is turning 3 this week. To say that the application has been a success for the company is under-selling its performance as the communication tool has been the fastest growing productivity app in the company’s history.

Office 365 Sensitivity Labels can now be applied to “containers” – Teams, Office 365 Groups, and SharePoint sites. Sensitivity labels replace the old text-only classifications that have been available since 2016. The labels don’t affect the contents of the containers, but they can control some container settings, like whether a team allows guest access or if it’s open to any tenant user to join. It’s yet another development in the label and protection story for Office 365.

A growth in demand for Office 365 services caused some issues for users of Teams, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. The growth in Teams demand is understandable in light of the upswing in home working and online education caused by the COVID-19 virus. We’ll all have to be a little patient as Microsoft makes adjustments to keep services running.

Because of the Coronavirus, this edition of Short Takes looks at a lot of virus-related collateral damage, including Microsoft Build 2020, Apple’s retail stores, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft’s ability to manufacture hardware, and even the DOD JEDI contract. OK, that one isn’t related to the Coronavirus.

There is one feature that I have been waiting to be brought to Teams that has been on the roadmap since July – the ability to chat with Skype contacts inside of Teams. Starting this month, Microsoft will being rolling out that functionality to all customers.

In the world of software development, dogfooding is the act of using your own software. For Microsoft, this is done as a sign of trust that if they can use it for the multi-billion-dollar operation, every other company should be able to as well.

Microsoft is working to address this market by adding functionality to its popular Teams application to enhance workflows for all types of workplace scenarios. The company is also building hardware, such as the Surface Go, to help bring low-cost, high quality, interactions to the Firstline worker.

Since its inception, Microsoft Teams has had an odd relationship with email. Some think that Teams will replace email, at least for many internal conversations. The real facts are that Teams and email need to survive and co-operate together as collaborative modalities for Office 365 tenants. Microsoft is introducing three new features to help Teams gets along better with email, and that’s a good thing.

Microsoft Teams is up and coming in the world of business chat and collaboration clients. Much like Slack, Microsoft Teams offers many of the same tools and integration abilities; a key selling point of business-oriented chat clients is the interoperability that the clients offer.