Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a proprietary business communication platform developed by Microsoft, as part of the Microsoft 365 family of products. Teams primarily competes with the similar service Slack, offering workspace chat and videoconferencing, file storage, and application integration.[8] Teams is replacing other Microsoft-operated business messaging and collaboration platforms, including Skype for Business and Microsoft Classroom. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Teams has gained much interest as many meetings have moved to a virtual environment.

Microsoft Teams, Office 365
Microsoft Teams' channel tab, as seen on Microsoft Windows application
Developer(s)Microsoft
Stable release
Android1416/1.0.0.2020121401 / December 14, 2020 (2020-12-14)[1]
iOS2.2.1 / December 18, 2020 (2020-12-18)[2]
Windows, macOS1.3.00.34662 / January 24, 2021 (2021-01-24)[3]
Linux1.3.00.30857 / December 1, 2020 (2020-12-01)[4]
Written inTypeScript, Angular[5]
Operating systemWindows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android
Size225.7 MB (macOS), 61.14 MB (Android), 232 MB (iOS)
Available in45 languages[6][7]
List of languages
English, Albanian, Akan, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Basque, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh.
TypeCollaborative software
LicenseProprietary commercial cloud software
Websiteteams.microsoft.com

History

Microsoft announced Teams at an event in New York, and launched the service worldwide on March 14, 2017.[9][10] It was created during an internal hackathon at the company headquarters, and is currently led by Microsoft corporate vice president Brian MacDonald.[11] Microsoft Teams is a web-based desktop app, developed on top of the Electron framework from GitHub which combines the Chromium rendering engine and the Node.js JavaScript platform.[12]


  • On August 29, 2007, Microsoft purchased Parlano and its persistent group chat product, MindAlign.[13]
  • On March 4, 2016, Microsoft had considered bidding $8 billion for Slack, but that Bill Gates was against the purchase, stating that the firm should instead focus on improving Skype for Business.[14] Qi Lu, EVP of Applications and Services, was leading the push to purchase Slack.[14] After the departure of Lu later that year, Microsoft announced Teams to the public as a direct competitor to Slack on November 2, 2016.[15][16]
  • Slack ran a full-page advertisement in the New York Times acknowledging the competing service. Though Slack is used by 28 companies in the Fortune 100, The Verge wrote executives will question paying for the service if Teams provides a similar function in their company's existing Office 365 subscription at no added cost.[17] ZDNet reported that the companies were not competing for the same audience, as Teams, at the time, did not let members outside the subscription join the platform, and small businesses and freelancers would have been unlikely to switch.[18] Microsoft has since added this functionality.[19] In response to Teams' announcement, Slack deepened in-product integration with Google services.[20]
  • On May 3, 2017 Microsoft announced Microsoft Teams would replace Microsoft Classroom in Office 365 Education (formerly known as Office 365 for Education).[21][22]
  • On July 12, 2018, Microsoft announced a free version of Microsoft Teams, offering most of the platform's communication options for no charge but limiting the number of users and team file storage capacity.[23]
  • In January 2019, Microsoft released an update targeting "Firstline Workers" in order to improve interoperability of Microsoft Teams between different computers for retail workers.[24][25]
  • In September 2019, Microsoft announced that Skype for Business would be phased out in favor of Teams; hosted Skype for Business Online was discontinued for new Office 365 customers that month, and will be discontinued entirely on July 31, 2021.[26][27]
  • On November 19, 2019, Microsoft announced Microsoft Teams reached 20 million active users.[28] This is an increase from 13 million in July.[29] It announced a "Walkie Talkie" feature in early 2020 that uses push-to-talk on smartphones and tablets over Wi-Fi or cellular data. The feature was designed for employees who speak with customers or run day-to-day operations.[30]
  • On March 19, 2020, Microsoft announced Microsoft Teams had hit 44 million daily users,[31] in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[32] Microsoft reported that by April 2020, Microsoft Teams had hit 75 million daily users. On a single day in April, it logged 4.1 billion meeting minutes.[33]
  • On June 22, 2020, Microsoft announced that its acquired video game live streaming service Mixer would shut down in July, and that its staff would be transferred to the Microsoft Teams division.[34]

Features

Chats

Teams allows users to communicate through Chats. Chats in Teams are persistent so users do not have to check a Conversation History unlike Skype for Business. Teams allows users to format text, use emojis, during chats. Users can choose to mark a message as urgent or important. Important messages show up with a red side border and an exclamation mark, urgent messages notify the receiver at regular intervals until it's seen.

Group Chat

It supports one-on-one as well as group chats. Users can have call in groups created.

File Sharing

It allows file sharing through chats.

Teams

Teams allows communities, groups, or teams to join through a specific URL or invitation sent by a team administrator or owner. Teams for Education allows admins and teachers to set up specific teams for classes, professional learning communities (PLCs), staff members, and everyone.[35]

Channels

Within a team, members can set up channels. Channels are topics of conversation that allow team members to communicate without the use of email or group SMS (texting). Users can reply to posts with text as well as images, GIFs and custom made memes.

Direct messages allow users to send private messages to a specific user rather than a group of people.

Connectors are third party services that can submit information to the channel. Connectors include MailChimp, Facebook Pages, Twitter, PowerBI and Bing News.

Calling

Calling is provided by: instant messaging, Voice over IP (VoIP), and video conferencing inside the client software. Teams also supports public switched telephone network (PSTN) conferencing allowing users to call phone numbers from the client.

Meeting

Meetings can be scheduled or created ad hoc and users visiting the channel will be able to see that a meeting is currently in progress. Teams also has a plugin for Microsoft Outlook to invite others into a Teams meeting.[36] This supports thousands of users that can connect via a meeting link.[37]

Teams Live Events

Teams Live Events replaces Skype Meeting Broadcast with the ability for users to broadcast to 10,000 participants on Teams, Yammer or Microsoft Stream.

Education

Microsoft Teams allows teachers to distribute, provide feedback, and grade student assignments turned-in via Teams using the Assignments tab, available to Office 365 for Education subscribers.[38] Quizzes can also be assigned to students through an integration with Office Forms.[39]

Protocols

Microsoft Teams is based on a number of Microsoft-specific protocols.[40] Video conferences are realized over the protocol MNP24, known from the Skype consumer version. The protocol MS-SIP from Skype for Business is not used any more to connect Teams clients. VoIP and video conference clients based on SIP and H.323 need special gateways to connect to Microsoft Teams servers.[41] With the help of Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE), clients behind Network address translation routers and restrictive firewalls are also able to connect, if peer to peer is not possible.

See also

References
  1. "Microsoft Teams APKs". APKMirror. Retrieved December 14, 2020.
  2. "Microsoft Teams". App Store. Retrieved December 18, 2020.
  3. "What's new in Microsoft Teams". support.office.com. Retrieved November 5, 2019.
  4. "Index of /repos/ms-teams/pool/main/t/teams/". packages.microsoft.com. Retrieved June 30, 2020.
  5. "Microsoft Teams AMA". Microsoft Tech Community. November 10, 2016. Retrieved November 21, 2020.
  6. "Microsoft demos vocal translator that uses your own voice". November 30, 2001. Retrieved November 6, 2019.
  7. "Microsoft Teams Review". May 9, 2019. Retrieved November 6, 2019.
  8. Warren, Tom (November 2, 2016). "Microsoft Teams launches to take on Slack in the workplace". The Verge.
  9. "Microsoft Teams: 7 things you need to know".
  10. "Microsoft Teams rolls out to Office 365 customers worldwide - Office Blogs". Office Blogs. March 14, 2017. Retrieved September 30, 2017.
  11. Warren, Tom (March 14, 2017). "How Microsoft Built its Slack Competitor".
  12. msdmaguire. "How Microsoft Teams uses memory - Microsoft Teams". docs.microsoft.com. Retrieved December 17, 2020.
  13. "Source: Microsoft to Acquire Parlano".
  14. Russell, Jon. "Source: Microsoft mulled an $8 billion bid for Slack, will focus on Skype instead". TechCrunch. Retrieved September 30, 2017.
  15. "Microsoft Teams launches to take on Slack in the workplace". The Verge. Retrieved September 30, 2017.
  16. Foley, Mary Jo. "Microsoft launches its Slack competitor, Microsoft Teams | ZDNet". ZDNet. Retrieved September 30, 2017.
  17. Warren, Tom (November 2, 2016). "Slack shows it's worried about Microsoft Teams with a full-page newspaper ad".
  18. Bott, Ed. "Slack versus Microsoft Teams: It's really no contest - ZDNet".
  19. "Microsoft Teams: The smart person's guide - TechRepublic".
  20. "Google and Slack deepen partnership in the face of Microsoft Teams". December 7, 2016.
  21. "Microsoft Classroom to be replaced by Microsoft Teams in Office 365 for Education – SalamanderSoft – Education Integration". blog.salamandersoft.co.uk. Retrieved June 21, 2017.
  22. "Microsoft Classroom Preview has officially been 'dropped'". May 3, 2017. Retrieved June 21, 2017.
  23. "Microsoft launches free version of Teams". VentureBeat. July 12, 2018. Retrieved July 16, 2018.
  24. at 18:27, Richard Speed 9 Jan 2019. "Microsoft wins today's buzzword bingo with empowering set of updates to Teams". www.theregister.co.uk.
  25. "Microsoft demos vocal translator that uses your own voice". OnMSFT.com. March 12, 2012. Retrieved November 6, 2019.
  26. Foley, Mary Jo. "Microsoft will drop Skype for Business Online on July 31, 2021". ZDNet. Retrieved February 9, 2020.
  27. "Microsoft Teams is replacing Skype for Business to put more pressure on Slack". The Verge. Retrieved September 26, 2017.
  28. Foley, Mary Jo. "Microsoft says it has 20 million daily active Teams users". ZDNet. Retrieved April 15, 2020.
  29. "Microsoft Teams surpasses 20 million daily active users; rival Slack shares slip". Reuters. November 20, 2019. Retrieved November 20, 2019.
  30. "Microsoft Teams is getting a Walkie Talkie feature so you can reach colleagues all day long". The Verge. January 9, 2020.
  31. "Microsoft Office 365 Usage Statistics". Retrieved September 19, 2020.
  32. "Microsoft Teams at 3: Everything you need to connect with your teammates and be more productive". Microsoft. Retrieved March 19, 2020.
  33. Tilley, Aaron (June 2, 2020). "Microsoft Takes On Zoom and Slack in a Battle for Your Work Computer". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved June 3, 2020.
  34. Warren, Tom (June 22, 2020). "Microsoft is shutting down Mixer and partnering with Facebook Gaming". The Verge. Retrieved June 22, 2020.
  35. "Microsoft Teams for Education adds assignments and grading features". May 11, 2018.
  36. "Now available: Outlook add-in to schedule meetings in Microsoft Teams". TECHCOMMUNITY.MICROSOFT.COM. July 31, 2017. Retrieved April 25, 2018.
  37. Privacy not included: Teams Mozilla Foundation report
  38. Anderson, Kareem (May 2018). "Microsoft Teams for Education adds assignments and grading features". OnMSFT. Retrieved July 7, 2018.
  39. Thorp-Lancaster, Dan (June 5, 2018). "Microsoft Teams for Education celebrates first year with batch of new features". Windows Central. Mobile Nations. Retrieved July 7, 2018.
  40. djeek in Internet, Microsoft, MNP24, Networks, Opus. "Microsoft Teams and the protocols it uses, OPUS, MNP24, VBSS, ICE and WebRTC | Djeek's Blog".CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  41. "RealConnect Service Network Communications Explained : Jeff Schertz's Blog".

[[Category:Collaborative software]

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