In terms of progress, Microsoft Teams is moving along nicely. Back in January, the company confirmed the service has been adopted by 30,000 organizations in 145 markets. Clearly, the full global roll out and general availability in March have helped elevate Teams further. As for the new features, Microsoft has introduced a new ability for Azure Active Directory customers to be added as a guest in a team. This addition opens the door to more users entering Teams. The company says it has 870 million Active Directory user accounts. More importantly, this new feature points to Microsoft lowering the walls around Teams. While the service is only available to Office 365 customers, perhaps the company would one day make it available to all Microsoft Account holders, at least for guests. The company also announced today additional support for Bots in Teams. Available now is Botkit, one of the most popular tools for creating bot and automation solutions. Additionally, Microsoft also announced integrations with GitHub, Atlassian’s JIRA Service Desk, Core and Software, as well as Bitbucket Cloud. Inclusion of Atlassian is interesting and shows Microsoft is willing to work with competitors. Last week, Atlassian launch its own workplace chat platform that will directly rival Teams and Slack.
Integrating Skype for Business
Last week, a leak from inside Microsoft suggested that the company will fold Skype for Business into Microsoft Teams. The result will be one service instead of two, helping Microsoft to dominate the workplace chat space. Microsoft had previously introduced a deeper collaboration as part of its strategic partnership with Adobe. The Adobe Sign e-signature tool is now included as Microsoft’s preferred solution in Office 365 and Dynamics 365. In the other direction, Microsoft Teams will be Adobe’s preferred service for its Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Experience Cloud services.
