Microsoft Teams App: How It Works, Features, Photos, Compared to Slack

2017-03-14T15:38:00.000Z

Over the last few years, a red-hot startup named Slack skyrocketed to a $3.8 billion valuation by making it easy and, depending on whom you ask, almost kind of fun to chat with your coworkers.

Slack even created a kind of rising tide in tech, accelerating interest in competitors like Atlassian HipChat and opening the way for big companies like Facebook and Cisco to release their own work-chat products. Google even introduced a new version of its Hangouts for work last week.

Enter Microsoft Teams, Microsoft's take on the market that's now synonymous with Slack. Teams was announced late last year and officially available on Tuesday.

Microsoft Teams, available for Mac, PC, Android, and iPhone, is a bundled part of the Microsoft Office 365 productivity suite for businesses. In other words, if your company subscribes to Office 365, you're getting access to Teams very soon, if you don't have it already. That's an advantage that Slack and most others will have trouble matching, though Slack's not going down without a fight.

Microsoft itself has positioned Teams as a Slack-killer. But we got to try Microsoft Teams a little bit ahead of this official launch — it's a little bit more than that, and simultaneously a little less. Here's the skinny.

This is basically the screen where you're going to spending most of your time in Microsoft Teams. You choose which Team and which chat room you want to spend time in from that box on the left.

It's a little bit like Facebook — someone writes something in the channel, then you type responses under it.

For comparison, here's Slack, the $3.8 billion chat app that Microsoft Teams is going up against. It's a little more freewheeling, working like a group text-message chain, with messages displayed in chronological order as people type them. It's fun and inspires back-and-forth, but a busy chat can get chaotic.

(Slack recently got threaded conversations, but this is still the default way to use it.)

Microsoft swiped one of Slack's best ideas, though. Meet T-Bot, a handy bot that can answer your questions about how to use Microsoft Teams directly via chat.

T-Bot can also lead you to more traditional manuals and help pages, too, covering all the bases for those who'd rather learn the old-fashioned way. And Microsoft promises that more bots from outside services are on their way.

There's also an activity feed to keep you posted on all the conversations in which you've been mentioned, so you can pick up your phone or PC and see what's new in your world.

The little red "@" signs help you quickly scroll to wherever your name is mentioned, which is a nice bonus.

Microsoft Teams supports rich formatting, so you can format your chat messages the same way you would an email.

If you look, you can see that Outlook's famous "redbang" exclamation mark for important images is along for the ride, too.

There are Facebook-style chat stickers, too. But Microsoft takes it a step further and adds a meme generator.

So I made a meme to commemorate the fact that my demo version of Microsoft Teams didn't have any real humans in it, only dummy test accounts.

When you go into a private chat with someone, it's more like a one-on-one text-message conversation. Here, I'm demonstrating the built-in gif search ...

... so I can nail this interaction with Adele Vance, the fictional human I'm chatting with here. And, um, if there <em>is</em> a real Adele Vance who works at Microsoft, I'm very sorry.

Joking aside, Microsoft Teams boasts deep and impressive integrations with the rest of the Microsoft suite. From any conversation, you can book an Outlook meeting with the participants.

From those meetings, you can even directly launch a Skype video or voice call with the participants. It's pretty neat.

Plus, you can see all the files shared within a team ...

... and even access to data pulled from PowerBI, Microsoft's data-dashboard software, straight from within the chat interface, so you can assign tasks based on it. That's assuming your company uses PowerBI, that is.

There are other integrations, too, with popular non-Microsoft tools like Trello, Asana, and Github, so you can keep your chat and your work close together.

It's hard to be fair in a head-to-head Microsoft Teams vs. Slack comparison — I've been using Slack every workday for the last two years or so, while Microsoft Teams is still very new. <em>But</em> ...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

My first instinct is that Slack's simplicity is its greatest asset. You sign up and get chatting pretty quickly. There's very little learning curve, in my experience, and you can just focus on your conversations. To borrow Apple's words, "it just works."

Microsoft Teams is very powerful, with a lot of killer features and integrations with the rest of the Office suite. But I also feel like there's a steeper learning curve if you want to get the most out of Teams. That's excellent news for power users, but the complexity may turn off chat novices.

Still, Microsoft Teams being included with Office 365 business subscriptions is going to win over a lot of converts. And it speaks well of Microsoft that it put together something usable but still powerful.

And anyway, Slack is far from the only game in town — Google just announced Hangouts Chat, its take on the work-chat app. Regardless of what happens next, it's going to be interesting.

Microsoft's effort to reclaim its glory from $3.8 billion startup Slack begins today

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Microsoft's effort to reclaim its glory from $3.8 billion startup Slack begins today

This is basically the screen where you're going to spending most of your time in Microsoft Teams. You choose which Team and which chat room you want to spend time in from that box on the left.

Microsoft swiped one of Slack's best ideas, though. Meet T-Bot, a handy bot that can answer your questions about how to use Microsoft Teams directly via chat.

There's also an activity feed to keep you posted on all the conversations in which you've been mentioned, so you can pick up your phone or PC and see what's new in your world.

Microsoft Teams supports rich formatting, so you can format your chat messages the same way you would an email.

There are Facebook-style chat stickers, too. But Microsoft takes it a step further and adds a meme generator.

So I made a meme to commemorate the fact that my demo version of Microsoft Teams didn't have any real humans in it, only dummy test accounts.

When you go into a private chat with someone, it's more like a one-on-one text-message conversation. Here, I'm demonstrating the built-in gif search ...

... so I can nail this interaction with Adele Vance, the fictional human I'm chatting with here. And, um, if there <em>is</em> a real Adele Vance who works at Microsoft, I'm very sorry.

Joking aside, Microsoft Teams boasts deep and impressive integrations with the rest of the Microsoft suite. From any conversation, you can book an Outlook meeting with the participants.

From those meetings, you can even directly launch a Skype video or voice call with the participants. It's pretty neat.

Plus, you can see all the files shared within a team ...

... and even access to data pulled from PowerBI, Microsoft's data-dashboard software, straight from within the chat interface, so you can assign tasks based on it. That's assuming your company uses PowerBI, that is.

It's hard to be fair in a head-to-head Microsoft Teams vs. Slack comparison — I've been using Slack every workday for the last two years or so, while Microsoft Teams is still very new. <em>But</em> ...

My first instinct is that Slack's simplicity is its greatest asset. You sign up and get chatting pretty quickly. There's very little learning curve, in my experience, and you can just focus on your conversations. To borrow Apple's words, "it just works."

Microsoft Teams is very powerful, with a lot of killer features and integrations with the rest of the Office suite. But I also feel like there's a steeper learning curve if you want to get the most out of Teams. That's excellent news for power users, but the complexity may turn off chat novices.

Still, Microsoft Teams being included with Office 365 business subscriptions is going to win over a lot of converts. And it speaks well of Microsoft that it put together something usable but still powerful.

And anyway, Slack is far from the only game in town — Google just announced Hangouts Chat, its take on the work-chat app. Regardless of what happens next, it's going to be interesting.

Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know

Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know

Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know

Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know

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Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know

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