Want to read on? Here you go: Always tough to pick the takeaways – but here are my Top 3:
Substantial V1 for Team Work - Obviously this is a version 1 for Microsoft, but it is not a quickly clobbered together effort, but a substantial new member of the Office product Family. Though I got not confirmation from Microsoft, Teams fells like a new incarnation of Skype, albeit much improved. But the native Chat as well as synchronous communication capability (ad hoc calls video conference) all point to that. Then Microsoft has created a well designed feed control – staple for any collaboration application today. It looks and felt (from a little product usage) like a well workable implementation of team collaboration and chat.
Suite level synergies – As all suite vendors do, Microsoft showed deep integration in other products, mostly the Office capabilities. Starting with the Outlook Calendar – though Microsoft decided to call it Meetings. And with OneNote, Graph and other Office members (of course Word, Excel and PowerPoint cannot be missed), Teams gives Office users what Office users know. Integration with PowerBI shows that there is more than ‘just’ Office to work with in Teams, and though not confirmed, one can expect Dynamics products to be exposed in Teams, sooner than later, too. But it is important to see that Microsoft has kept the product open and vendors like Asana and ZenDesk attended and have built integration into Teams. No surprise Microsoft stressed security – something customers do expect as a table stake, more a positive surprise was that Compliance was an emphasis, which is a welcome surprise to hear from Microsoft. And of course, it is the ‘Fall of AI’ – so bots are not missing, we e.g. saw the Polly and WhoIs bots at work in the chats. Lastly good to see – and the benefit of being a large enterprise vendor – Teams is available with a pretty global rollout in all major markets – right from the get go.
One more place to check things… - With Teams Microsoft created another gravity point for enterprise users to check for information and if anything is needed from them… Add that to Outlook and if a full Microsoft shop, Yammer. Over time Microsoft will and can bring this together, my guess will be in Outlook, as email gravity is expected to be the biggest (at least as I see the future). But for now the elephant in the room is Slack and similar vendors, who all get a lot of usage by users being tired of email – so Microsoft had to come to the independent, team collaboration product, to bring the fight to them. More importantly Teams give pro Microsoft minded enterprises decision makers a product that they will ask users to look at first. And then there are the 84M+ Office users who may just ‘bump’ into Teams. Over all these skirmishes and realizations, the downside of checking two places will be swept under the rug for a few years, I guess.
MyPOV
Good to see Microsoft tackling productivity, especially for teams that have been under supported in the past. It makes sense that Microsoft maintains the ‘toolkit’ philosophy as both Nadella and Koenigsbauer mentioned multiple times, 85M+ office users will not work in only one, pre-conceived way. And Microsoft is pulling the card of the large suite level vendors, who are loosing users and mindshare with point solution vendors – build a good version 1, bring the fight to the point solution, use the ‘higher ground’ of well know and liked products (e.g. OneNote, Word), stress security, roll the product out globally (nice utilization of the Office infrastructure on Azure), bundle it into the suite (Office) and make it – free. Microsoft has played all this right, and I predict it will reduce the speed of point solutions in the Microsoft productivity suite install base.On the concern side, Microsoft is.. Microsoft. Users who for whatever reason want to escape the vendor’s products will always be at hand. A lot of the success of the chat collaboration solutions has been the desire to ‘do less email’ – but ultimately everything gets pulled back to email. Thorough, deep innovation in email (Outlook) is what is the long game, if not the war for productivity suites. AI, Robots, voice all play a role to get business users to new productivity levels. By taking the fight to point solutions, Microsoft may lose the eye on the real prize – collaborative productivity across all channels that the 21st century knowledge worker needs. But it is too early to call that, just an area to keep an eye on. The good news is that more competition in a market has never hurt the users, so expect more and better competition for team collaboration / productivity solutions out of the Microsoft Teams launch.
For now good news for Microsoft users and Microsoft using enterprises, an Office / Outlook integrated solutions is there with Teams now. True and hyped productivity from chat collaboration clients do not need to come from a 3rd party necessarily anymore. And Teams is broadly available for beta and soon GA – so time to give it a shot.
Also don't miss my colleague Alan Lepofsky's take on Microsoft Teams - you can find it here.
Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below (if it doesn’t show up – check here).
More on Microsoft:
- News Analysis - Microsoft announces SAP's choice of Azure to help enterprises transform HR - The SaaS land grab is on - read here
- First Take - Microsoft Ignite - AI, Adobe and FPGA [From the Fences] - read here
- News Analysis - GE and Microsoft partner to bring Predix to Azure - Multi-Cloud becomes tangible for IoT - read here
- Market Move - Microsoft acquired Linked - Tons of synergies, start with Cortana, maybe too many - read here
- News Analysis - Microsoft opens Windows Holographic to partners for a new era of mixed reality - read here
- News Analysis - SAP and Microsoft usher in new era of partnership to accelerate digital transformation in the cloud - read here
- Musings - Will Microsoft's Hololens transform the Future of Work? Read here
- Event Report - Microsoft Build 2016 - A platform vision and plenty of tools for next generation applications - read here
- First Take - Microsoft Build 2016 - Day 1 Keynote Takeaways - read here
- Event Preview - Microsoft Build 2016 - Top 3 Things to watch for developers, managers and execs... read here
- News Analysis - Microsoft - New Hybrid Offerings Deliver Bottomless Capacity for Today's Data Explosion - read here
- News Analysis - Welcoming the Xamarin team to Microsoft - read here
- News Analysis - Microsoft announcements at Convergence Barcelona - Office365. Dynamics CRM and Power Apps
- News Analysis - Microsoft expands Azure Data Lake to unleash big data productivity - Good move - time to catch up - read here
- News Analysis - Microsoft and Salesforce Strengthen Strategic Partnership at Dreamforce 2015 - Good for joint customers - read here
- News Analyis - NetSuite announced Cloud Alliance with Microsoft - read here
- Event Report - Microsoft Build - Microsoft really wants to make developers' lives easier - read here
- First Hand with Microsoft Hololens - read here
- Event Report - Microsoft TechEd - Top 3 Enterprise takeaways - read here
- First Take - Microsoft discovers data ambience and delivers an organic approach to in memory database - read here
- Event Report - Microsoft Build - Azure grows and blossoms - enough for enterprises (yet)? Read here.
- Event Report - Microsoft Build Day 1 Keynote - Top Enterprise Takeaways - read here.
- Microsoft gets even more serious about devices - acquire Nokia - read here.
- Microsoft does not need one new CEO - but six - read here.
- Microsoft makes the cloud a platform play - Or: Azure and her 7 friends - read here.
- How the Cloud can make the unlikeliest bedfellows - read here.
- How hard is multi-channel CRM in 2013? - Read here.
- How hard is it to install Office 365? Or: The harsh reality of customer support - read here.
Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.
