Microsoft Teams became generally available to Office 365 customers in March 2017. Let’s take a closer look at Microsoft’s new collaboration platform and what it could mean for organizations already using Office 365.

For organizations already using Office 365, 2017 is proving to be an interesting year. Microsoft continues to expand its cloud productivity platform beyond the familiar Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook applications.

One of the most important additions is Microsoft Teams.

On March 14, 2017, Microsoft announced the general availability of Teams to Office 365 business customers. Microsoft described Teams as a “chat-based workspace” for Office 365, and at launch the service was available across 181 markets and 19 languages.

But what exactly is Teams, and where does it fit into an Office 365 environment?

What is Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams is designed to give groups of employees a central location where they can communicate and collaborate.

Rather than relying exclusively on long email conversations, a team can use a persistent workspace for its discussions while bringing related resources together.

This is significant because Office 365 already consists of several different collaboration services.

Outlook and Exchange Online handle email and calendars. SharePoint provides document and content management. OneDrive provides cloud file storage. Skype for Business supports communication, while Yammer provides enterprise social networking.

Teams adds a workspace that helps connect collaboration and communication.

Microsoft’s launch announcement specifically positioned Outlook, SharePoint, Yammer, Skype for Business and Teams as purpose-built but integrated components of Office 365

More Than Instant Messaging

It would be easy to look at Teams and think of it simply as another corporate instant messaging application.

That would underestimate what Microsoft is attempting to accomplish.

By the time of the March 2017 general availability announcement, Microsoft said it had delivered more than 100 features since the November preview. These included scheduling capabilities, meeting enhancements, mobile audio calling, email integration, accessibility improvements, and additional security and compliance capabilities.

The interesting part is the integration.

If employees can communicate, hold meetings, access files and collaborate from the same environment, Teams could reduce some of the fragmentation that naturally occurs when employees work across separate applications.

What About Skype for Business?

This creates an obvious question for existing Office 365 administrators.

What happens to Skype for Business?

Skype for Business remains an important communication product, but Microsoft’s direction is becoming clearer.

Microsoft’s own historical timeline describes the March 2017 general availability of Teams as the release of the planned successor to Skype for Business within Office 365.

For IT administrators, this is something worth watching very carefully.

Major collaboration platforms affect much more than the client installed on an employee’s computer.

Administrators need to think about adoption, governance, user training, security and how employees choose between different communication tools.

The Challenge for IT Departments

Introducing another collaboration application does not automatically produce better collaboration.

Employees need to understand when they should use email, when they should start a Teams conversation, where documents should live and how projects should be organized.

Without some planning, organizations could simply create another location where information becomes scattered.

IT departments should therefore view Teams adoption as more than a software installation.

The bigger challenge is establishing a working model that employees understand.

Why Teams Could Become Important

The Office 365 platform has gradually been moving Microsoft customers away from isolated desktop applications toward connected cloud services.

Teams takes that strategy another step forward.

Instead of asking employees to think about individual applications, Microsoft is creating a workspace where several types of communication and collaboration can come together.

Whether Teams ultimately replaces some of the other tools employees use every day remains to be seen.

However, the direction is interesting.

Microsoft is no longer simply bringing Microsoft Office to the cloud.

It is trying to change how teams actually work in the cloud.

Final Thoughts

Microsoft Teams is one of the most interesting Office 365 developments of 2017.

For users, the attraction is having conversations, meetings and resources closer together.

For administrators, the arrival of Teams introduces new questions about governance, adoption, security and the future of Skype for Business.

It may still be a relatively new member of the Office 365 family, but Microsoft is clearly placing collaboration at the center of its cloud productivity strategy.