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Last month, Microsoft rolled out its new collaborative chat application Microsoft Teams to all of its Office 365 customers. The reaction was swift: Headlines declared that Teams was an "almost excellent Slack-killer ," and analysts noted that more than 85 million Office 365 business users would now have access to the chat app.

Now comes the big question: How many of them will use it?

Even now as Teams approaches the one-month release mark, Microsoft continues to roll it out to new customers — just this week, it released Teams to Office 365 Enterprise K1 customers . That now puts it in the hands of Office 365 business and education users as well as customers who pay for Office Business Essentials, Business Premium, and the Enterprise E1, E3, and E5 service tiers.

First announced in November 2016, Microsoft Teams was seen as a strong competitor to Slack, a popular chat app widely by businesses. The announcement came months after news broke that Microsoft had mulled an $8 billion acquisition of Slack , which has added on voice and video services to its chat app platform.

“We built Microsoft Teams because we see both tremendous opportunity and tremendous change in how people and teams get work done,” Microsoft said at the time . “We will have integrations with over 150 partners at general availability — including our early partners Zendesk, Asana, Hootsuite and Intercom.”

Beyond those integrations with third-party partners, Teams also features deep integration with other Office 365 services such as Outlook and Word. And this is where Teams differs from other chat apps such as Slack and HipChat: Instead of trying to replace or kill email, Teams is built to complement it. Users can quickly move from a group chat in Teams to an email in Outlook or a shared Word document.

In a crowded field of chat apps, Teams could turn the needle; the fact that it is currently available to Office 365 users offering an irrefutable advantage. Still, a Spiceworks survey earlier this year found the majority of IT departments currently use Skype for Business, Google Hangout, and Slack in that order.

Now that we’re almost a month out from the general release of Teams, we want to know — have you tried Teams? Are you considering using it in your organization? How do you think it compares to the hype?

Has your organization tried Microsoft Teams?
  • Yes
  • No
  • I don’t know
  • No, but we plan to in the future
0 voters
49 Spice ups
2

They gonna include unsolicited advertisements in this application too?

31 Spice ups
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I am the only one in my organization using Office 365, needed it for Power BI, so it would be useless for us.

4

From my use of Teams so far, it’s a good idea and when it’s done I think it’ll serve to increase productivity, but for the time being it’s buggy and feature-lacking. May have changed but last I tried, there was no support to import OneNote notebooks to the groups in teams, and if you added an already existing group and went to the OneNote bit, it’d just created a new one and not ported the old one in. Microsoft’s solution at the time was to “Copy and Paste the old notebook into the new”… Silly stuff like the way it handles IMs alongside Skype for Business and the fact you cant change the bucket view in the planners and stuff. Give it a little time and it’ll be a good solution to tie in all your O365 stuff without having a bunch of MS applications open on your desktop or webapp tabs open in your browser.

1 Spice up
5

My biggest issue with Teams, is the fact its one more thing to install etc.

Why hasn’t Microsoft combined the features of Teams/Outlook/Skype for Business/Sharepoint Groups/Yammer/and whatever else I’m missing into 1 applications that could do all of these features?? It gets to be a bit much when I’m having to check 3 different places for contact with a coworker.

22 Spice ups
6

I turned the feature on and took a look at it, buttttttt, that is as far as I made it.

5 Spice ups
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They started doing that with File Explorer in Windows 10. AGGGGG

5 Spice ups
8

Yes and IMHO, it sucked. We have been using Slack for a few years and Teams felt like a Slack meets Skype rip off. The flow and UI was classic MS clunky and I didn’t like the layout. Messages in Threads vs rolling replies. We tested it out because of our O365 subscription to see if we could replace Slack with it but quickly found out that its not a replacement or supplement. Since we have Skype and Slack, there is not need to add a third application to the mix.

MS needs to re-think what they want to do with it.

2 Spice ups
9

If they see Slack installed, probably. Haha

4 Spice ups
10

We’re replacing Trello with Teams across the company. However there is definitely issues with having Teams running in a hybrid environment. You need Exchange Online for a lot of the functionality in Planner to work. A lot of things in Planner just plain do not work in the Teams desktop application.
It’s definitely got potential, but Microsoft should not have made such a huge split between the desktop version and online version. They also shouldn’t have tried integrating Groups into Planner/Teams.

2 Spice ups
11

We use G Suite primarily. So even though we have Office 365, we prefer Google For our Current Needs.

1 Spice up
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I’ve used it within my department - only for the video meeting and audio meeting.

The video quality on it seems to be better than SFB.

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Our IT team is currently testing it even though we don’t really have a use for it. We chat either via our phone HUD or through Skype for Business-- or we just face each other and speak.

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We’re just starting ti push it to the users. As long as we can convince them it’s for PROJECT teams and not DEPARTMENTAL teams, it’ll help.

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Using it and liking it. There are a few planned features like external communication that I am waiting for but for the most part it is working great for us.

16

I have access to it at work and do use it but I realized that the software is kind of buggy and extremely bloated for what it is. I was/am not impressed by it and realize that Slack does the same but WAY better (from a performance perspective, features and reliability). Sorry MS; I don’t like it…

Just my two cents…

2 Spice ups
17

Slack

18

It is?

2 Spice ups
19

Wait. It uses Planner? Forget it. I’m out.

20

It’s a neat idea, but lazy execution makes it not very practical yet in my opinion.

It just ties together a bunch of services that have already been available through office 365 into yet another portal. We added our Zendesk tickets to it which is cool, but it lacks so much of the features that make Zendesk usable for us.

Also, the desktop version is just a framed web page, we’ve shot down requests for the desktop app because it’s just not worth our time. In fact, the web page has more functionality than the desktop app.

3 Spice ups