
Microsoft Teams, the new chat-based workspace in Office 365 - algorithmsRcool
https://products.office.com/en-US/microsoft-teams/
======
commandar
As somebody working in the healthcare industry, this is the killer feature for
me:

>Q. What level of security and compliance does Microsoft Teams support?

>A. Microsoft Teams is expected to be Office 365 Tier C compliant at launch.
This broad set of global compliance and data protection requirements includes
ISO 27001, ISO 27018, EUMC, SOC 1 Type I & II, SOC 2 Type I and II, HIPAA and
FERPA. Microsoft Teams also enforces two-factor authentication, single sign on
through Active Directory and encryption of data in transit and at rest.

The last time I'd looked into it, Slack was explicitly not HIPAA-compliant and
therefore a non-starter for my team. We've basically had to stick to a
combination of Hangouts for general chat and internal email for any HIPAA-
covered data, so this would be a big win for us.

~~~
agumonkey
Could you tell us what desires you have and what issues the healthcare
industry is hitting with computer based tech ? As an ex computer fanatics I
wanted to make medicine all digital and smooth (naive), I see it's not there,
yet I'm not in Health so I have no idea what are the reasons. I expect "world
chaos" to be part of them.

~~~
commandar
If I'm understanding your question correctly, the single biggest obstacle in
healthcare informatics today is interoperability. The industry grew up in a
pretty ad hoc way and the result is that closed-off silos of data are pretty
much the norm; every vendor has their own ideas about how data should be
handled, and getting different systems talking to each other is a full-time
job (my job, coincidentally).

HITECH and the ACA have forced the industry to start making meaningful steps
toward real interop, but I'd say we're at least a decade out from it being
less of a nightmare than it is now.

~~~
cscharenberg
I agree. Integration is exceedingly complex. Data is stored and interpreted
differently in every system, even if they share the same EMR, due to
configuration differences in workflow, data setup, software versions, etc.

You can't exchange data without thoroughly understanding the clinic workflows
that generated it or will be using it. It's all time-consuming and hard.

I work on a patient portal consuming data from the EMR, and even that is
tremendously complicated to present medical data safely and correctly to a
person.

\--

Sibling comment mentioned wanting to work in Health IT. The big market problem
in healthcare is small companies doing good innovation (usable patient-side
workflows, modern clinical tools, shiny things) running into the consolidated,
massive EMR systems. The first question when they approach a healthcare system
will be "Are you integrated with Epic/Cerner/whatever?" and if not, they will
be sent away. Or be ready to embark on a very long, slow process and integrate
deeply into workflows, data APIs, etc.

When a system consolidates their EMR (driven by real needs but also Meaningful
Use incentives), it forces standardization and special one-offs become much
harder. Getting a doctor interested in using a new device or software means
working within the whole EMR - the staff doesn't have the time or leeway to go
use tools that don't integrate, just because a doctor really wants it. That
doctor needs to align large groups, get agreement, and it's going to take a
lot of time and money.

It all comes down to interoperability/integration. Building cool stuff in
healthcare is really easy since most of the tech in use is outdated and slow
moving. But interoperability - required to sell into healthcare systems - is
really, really tough.

~~~
commandar
> "Are you integrated with Epic/Cerner/whatever?"

The irony being that those tightly inegrated solutions tend to be some of the
worst offenders in terms of being a nightmare for interop and walled-off
silos. But they're popular because the pieces they do offer generally work.

And totally agree that the opportunity is there for highly targeted
applications that cater to specific healthcare niches because the downside of
the huge top-down systems is the fact that they're more generalized. But you
have to be able to integrate them into that larger EMR environment for them to
be realistically useful.

That said, the facility I'm at now (midsize, ~400 beds) took a best-of-breed
approach and... well, there's a reason I say current interop is _bad_. It's
appealing on the clinical side because groups like surgery or the ED or even
endo get to run software designed to cater specifically to their needs, but
the backend integration ends up being a huge exercise every time anything
changes.

------
mbesto
This is exactly why Slack is not a defensible product.

1) The UI/interaction/UX can (and obviously will) be replicated, which has
been slack's biggest value proposition.

2) There's no "stickiness" for companies. None of the data in chat is really a
"system of record" and the switching costs are minimal. 3rd party
bots/integrations are the only thing that really make it sticky for companies.

3) The IP isn't really all that interesting. Chat based systems have been
around since day 1 of the TCP/IP protocol and it's design patterns are pretty
well known. In other words, the tech can be replicated.

4) It's not solving a core technology problem for most business without
introducing additional problematic externalities.
[http://www.businessinsider.com/i-used-to-be-obsessed-with-
sl...](http://www.businessinsider.com/i-used-to-be-obsessed-with-slack-but-
now-im-dropping-it-completely-heres-why-2016-3)

~~~
unethical_ban
What do you mean, not defensible? As in, it shouldn't exist, or there's no way
it can be profitable long-term?

I think it's a great product experience, but as you say, without adding more
value, it can be replicated by Zulip/Rocket.Chat/Mattermost/Cisco
Spark/Microsoft Team/ you name it.

~~~
tedunangst
As in it doesn't have a moat.

------
EduardoBautista
When Office 365 came out, I mostly compared the price to Google Apps and
didn't really think Office 365 brought that much value.

Now, you can have a Google Apps, Slack, Trello, and Evernote alternative for
your business under one subscription. Even if you choose the plan for
installed Office applications on your computer, the price is still much more
attractive than having to get a subscription for every one of the competitors.

Edit: They even have a Zapier and IFTTT competitor:

[https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/](https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/)

~~~
Touche
Whats funny is that Google Wave was basically a direct predecessor to these
types of apps and they killed it before the technology really had a chance to
catch up to the vision.

~~~
Analemma_
Yes! I'm so glad somebody else remembers Wave, it seems to have disappeared
into the dustbin of history. I _loved_ Wave before it was killed, and while I
know a lot of people still hold grudges over Reader, Wave is the axed Google
product I miss most. The fact that you could have multiple threaded
conversations in the same chat room was one of the best features for me, and
Teams seems like the first descendant to have that. That alone is a plus over
Slack.

~~~
addicted
Ah, wave.

I wish instead of just throwing it at the world, hoping for people to figure
out what to do with it, Google had used it as infrastructure to build a
variety of applications.

The problem with Wave was that it was too open ended for most people to figure
out. Those who did figure out, loved it, and were burnt when Google shut it
down. I still don't think there is a good equivalent to wave at the moment.

~~~
Analemma_
> The problem with Wave was that it was too open ended for most people to
> figure out. Those who did figure out, loved it, and were burnt when Google
> shut it down.

Yeah, this tallies with my experience. I was in two separate Wave teams
(Waves?), one for a six-person software team and one for a large-ish social
group of non-technical people. The software team took to it immediately and
loved it; the social group was mostly baffled and used it sparingly.

If Google had only iterated on it they'd be a in a great spot right now, but I
guess eventually every big technology company has their "Microsoft moment"
when they kill a product only to see that category take off years later.

~~~
digi_owl
Thinking about it, i feel that Wave shutting down was a turning point for
Google.

It was built on XMPP, and allowed anyone to spin up their own Wave server that
could talk to any other such server (iirc).

At the time Google (and also Facebook) used XMPP as the backend for their
messaging service, and was even working on a extension for video and voice
communications (libjingle?).

But then all that was scuttled, and they moved the messaging onto the
proprietary Hangout. I guess they could not figure out how to monetize a
distributed system like XMPP and instead switched to putting everything in a
silo.

Then again, Hangout was tied closely to G+, and G+ was the brainchild of a ex-
MS exec that was described as a "cookie licker" (meaning he would try to tie
whatever other projects he learned about into his own) after his departure
from Google.

~~~
Touche
The turning point was when Larry Page became CEO. For years Google tried to
beat Facebook with open specs/protocols like XMPP, but there was also Activity
Streams and others (PubSubHubbub). None of those really took off.

I think Larry Page made the company more product focused and a few successes,
like Hangouts, "validated" that it was the better approach than focusing on
open protocols.

------
Edd314159
Strange choice of hero photo to promote a chat-based virtual workspace: a team
of people sitting around a table, thus having no need for the product.

~~~
LyalinDotCom
As a Microsoft marketing person this really made me laugh :-)

~~~
shostack
As a fellow marketer can you comment on what the decision making process would
be like for something like a product hero image?

------
andrewla
The cheapest plan for Office 365 that includes this is the $5/user/month,
which undercuts Slack's pricing.

It also includes a bunch of other stuff that I'm far less excited about; I
wish they had gone with a more a la carte approach. I'm not confident that
I'll be able to easily integrate this with the identities that I routinely
use.

Also, it seems like an unwieldy name -- "I'll 'team' that to you", or "let's
discuss this on 'team'"? I guess you'll just use "chat" and assume that
context conveys the remainder.

~~~
basch
[https://stratechery.com/2016/oracles-cloudy-
future/](https://stratechery.com/2016/oracles-cloudy-future/)

>Consider your typical Chief Information Officer in the pre-Cloud era: for
various reasons she has bought in to some aspect of the Microsoft stack
(likely Exchange). So, in order to support Exchange, the CIO must obviously
buy Windows Server. And Windows Server includes Active Directory, so obviously
that will be the identity service. However, now that the CIO has parts of the
Microsoft stack in place, she is likely to be much more inclined to go with
other Microsoft products as well, whether that be SQL Server, Dynamics CRM,
SharePoint, etc. True, the Microsoft product may not always be the best in a
vacuum, but no CIO operates in a vacuum: maintenance and service costs are a
huge concern, and there is a lot to be gained by buying from fewer vendors
rather than more. In fact, much of Microsoft’s growth over the last 15 years
can be traced to Ballmer’s cleverness in exploiting this advantage through
both new products and also new pricing and licensing agreements that heavily
incentivized Microsoft customers to buy ever more from the company.

~~~
mercer
I once worked for a very big company that decided to use Microsoft SharePoint
to unify all the forms of communication that had developed over the years.
They hired a Microsoft consultant to help them out and I was basically her
assistant during the entire process. This consultant was pretty expensive.

What I remember most is that she acted more like a salesperson than an actual
help at getting SharePoint working in the company. She'd relentlessly suggest
features or solutions that happened to require a newer version SharePoint, and
obviously there were all sorts of other Microsoft solutions that would ease
the company's pains.

It seems like a very clever approach, but I couldn't help but hate the role
she had, and it made me want to avoid Microsoft at all cost... or at least
until I'm not the one affected by the decisions she pushed the company
towards, I guess.

~~~
basch
Microsoft is rapidly moving away from this type of situation. You buy 365,
always have the latest version, have nothing on prem to maintain, can beta
test everything in the cloud before general release, AND most importantly,
youre not getting an empty infrastructure/platform that isnt useful out of the
box.

Sharepoint by definition required an architect or someone to flesh it out.
Microsoft is taking on that role of turning a skeleton into a body.

Their pricing is more like (a made up example): Exchange $2, Sharepoint $2,
Skype $2, OR Everything + BI, Teams, Groups, Planner, Flow, PowerApps and
whatever else they make/dreamup this week for $3. It makes no sense to buy 2
things from Microsoft over the bundle. The pricing is even more apparent when
you look at their mobile management offerings, and its cheaper to buy 4
products than it is to buy 2. So now that you are "getting Teams and Planner
for free" you might as well try using them before shelling out for Slack and
Trello. Plus compliance worries are handled.

Also, it's fairly easy to "leave exchange and sharepoint document libraries"
if your setup and permissions arent complicated. Microsoft is pulling an
Apple, and abstracting the filesystem away so you use Planner directly to
store planning data, in a proprietary, non exportable format, instead of
having a storage locker to store files. These "freebies" exist to make it more
painful to leave the ecosystem once you have them up and working. That said i
am guessing most companies dont have a ton of buyin to things like Planner or
PowerBI yet.

------
devy
I really like the fact that Microsoft stresses the security of this product:

    
    
        Broad compliance standards support
        Data encryption at all times, at-rest and in-transit
        Multi-factor authentication for enhanced identity protection
    

The only other thing I think they didn't mention in the feature set that Slack
is much better is 3rd party API integrations.

~~~
artursapek
I've found Slack's API integrations to be mostly used as distractions from
work, but that may just speak to the team more so than Slack

~~~
krisdol
If you don't find its API integrations useful, then why use slack over just
about any other communication software?

For us, the API integrations are huge. Slack is our one-stop hub for finding
out what's happening throughout the company with integrations for PM tools,
Monitoring, Alerting, Deployments, Build Systems, Support Emails, AnswerHub,
GitHub, etc.

And of course, giphys.

~~~
mahyarm
It's general chatroom infrastructure where you don't have to be invited to
join a chat room. @heres , good mobile clients and so on are part of the
package.

------
probe
Two really unique things I think this product does

1) The use of GIFs/memes. While this seems silly, it is actually a big deal
because it lowers the formalization of communication. Having used this
product, you just have much better free flowing conversation and many times
these "fun" items help you get the message across significantly better (ex.
asking for updates or bumping things can now be done in a funny way).

2) Creation of a horizontal matrix. Having tabs is awesome because it makes
information more compartmentalized and helps keep the priority the same on
each screen. This essentially adds an extra layer of depth into the product
without overcomplicating things (and imagine one day having ability to live
edit documents on a tab, while chatting and seeing metrics). Keeping a multi-
dimensional communication design model is very scalable to mixed reality too.

Essentially I see MSFT Teams as "Slack meets Google Hangouts meets Email", and
see it doing very well from a product sense. However, their business strategy
of bundling with O365 will not help them hit SMB, which is a conscious
decision I think they made. I would have actually used Teams as a trojan horse
to capture stickiness and then upsell users to O365, but overall still excited
to see where this goes.

~~~
robbyking
FWIW, Slack offers Giphy integration.

~~~
mjrbrennan
I've used the Giphy integration, and unless I was using it wrong it is
horrendous. You can just write /giphy <word> and it will pick a random gif for
you, and most of the time they are completely irrelevant.

------
ijafri
Microsoft is charging $6/month/user for online office/teams/1tb storage/50gb
email storage/skypebiz/conference calling

Slack $7/month/user just for teams :///

anyhow i hate office so i am gonna stick to gsuite..

~~~
thesimpsons1022
not trying to insult you or anything but microsoft probably doesn't really
care. make most of their money from contracts with companies with thousands of
people.

~~~
monkmartinez
Yep, not to mention entire cities and state governments. Also, the entire
Military and Military Industrial Complex...

------
slackoverflower
Whether or not Slack has the better product or not, Microsoft will blow past
them in terms of paying customers. Slack has 1.25 million paying customers as
of now. Microsoft announced it signed a 400,000-employee comppany on launch
day. They can easily sign Coca Cola, Macy's, McDonalds and Unilever in a
matter of months, which could bring them at most 10 million paying customers.
Microsoft has the power of existing customers to connect to. This is very much
the Snapchat vs. Instagram Stories situation but for team communication.

~~~
brazzledazzle
The point might be moot but there is a difference between enterprise licenses
and active users. In some big multinational business a subscription with a
service like Office 365 signed and paid for at the parent corp level often
means dick. Services like this are sometimes a negotiable value add so it may
not even be on the radar in terms of implementation for the parent corp. Even
when it is many child companies/divisions have a lot of latitude to choose how
they collaborate because the bureaucratic corp IT groups are often unaligned
with the child companies and focus on cost cutting. Ultimately they are
inherently focused on providing a least common denominator solution which
often ends up sucking equally for everyone.

To put it another way, look at something like SharePoint. Microsoft will
happily tell you it has a ton of users. They might tell you that it's quite
profitable. But SharePoint is a just a terrible piece of shit that everyone
hates but IT departments drag everyone to it kicking and screaming.

So subscriptions will get purchased, contracts signed. Microsoft will make
money. But will they take mindshare? Maybe Slack won't be able to
differentiate enough. Time will tell but today employees actually want Slack.

------
overcast
WHAT was Slack thinking writing this?!

[http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/2/13497766/slack-
microsoft-t...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/2/13497766/slack-microsoft-
teams-new-york-times-ad)

Is this the worst ad in the history of advertising? HUGE publicity for
Microsoft, with a schoolboy level of condescending, passive aggressive
nonsense. Not sure what they were thinking with this one, especially with an
opening line doing nothing but praising their competitor.

The confidence(arrogance) is astounding.

~~~
Mithaldu
The "do it with love" part is especially funny as their support doesn't
actually give a shit what their customers think or feel. They'll happily give
you absolute bottom-of-the-barrel effort canned copy-paste responses to
carefully written and considered bug reports, indicating the agent neither
actually read nor remotely understood what you were writing about.

Slack doesn't have a box to stand on to tell others how to treat people.

~~~
overcast
That part was almost unreadable, it was so cringe worthy. "Made with Love"
movement is a meme in itself at this point.

~~~
BoorishBears
At the risk of sounding like a grump, something about the emojis in software
movement really aggravates me. When I see "Made with love" or the hideous
heart eye smiley, something makes me just not want to use the software that's
showing it.

~~~
brynjolf
I agree. I guess it is to seem more like buddies, I think it is strange
dynamic. I am paying for the product, I don't want an emoji response.

------
vthallam
Haven't tested Teams yet, but very shrewd move by Microsoft. They lead in the
productivity suite with Office/Skype/Sharepoint etc in enterprises and a slack
competitor which tightly integrates all their services is a wonderful
addition. As someone mentioned on this thread, they could have picked a better
name "Let me microsoft team it to you" sounds weird.

~~~
slackoverflower
"Post it on Teams" I don't think people say "I'll slack it to you" either.

~~~
adamsoad
I sometimes hear: "I'll send it on Slack" which sounds alright to me.

------
asidiali
HIPAA compliance...nice, just killed all the "secure email/chat for
healthcare" startups out there, since this is coming from the makers of
Outlook/Office/every enterprise machines' OS.

Wonder how long until Slack upgrades their compliance.

------
fuzzy2
So I just tried the desktop app and it’s terrible. Fuzzy fonts almost
everywhere, feels sluggish. It keeps nagging about the mobile apps.

And then it popped up randomly over an hour after closing it, happily
informing me that I got the latest updates. Thank you, but no.

The web app refuses to work with anything but the _very_ latest browsers. Why?
Probably no reason at all. It also doesn’t work in IE, which is kind of sad.
It also consumes humongous amounts of memory, as does the desktop app.

The avatars, blurry too, of course, are embedded as Base64 Data URIs. Why?

All in all this is _yet another_ collaboration tool from Microsoft. It feels
very rushed.

------
aarpmcgee
Seems like a shame that it is bundled with the overhead of Office 365. Makes
Slack feel like a lighter-weight option.

~~~
deanclatworthy
What overhead? If you don't want the other stuff don't use it.

~~~
gtirloni
Would it be much cheaper and easier to activate if it wasn't bundled with
Office 365? I think that's where aarpmcgee was getting at.

In any case, this looks like a much better value proposition than Slack.
However, I can test Slack in a second by going to their website. If I want to
test MS Teams, I need to think about Office 365, sign up, find where to enable
it, etc. Right now signing up for Slack is friction-less.

~~~
douche
I believe that they are offering the tier of Office 365 that includes this
(along with all kinds of other stuff) for less than Slack costs per month.

------
Yabood
We're a team of five people all remote and in different time zones. We use
Slack, and its been great, but we also use Office 365. Teams with its wide
integration with all the different MS products is really cool. What I see
missing here is mobile apps, and 3rd party integration. Once those are
available we'll have no reason to pay the extra $300 a year for Slack.

~~~
mingyeow
why office 365 vs google docs?

~~~
devopsproject
not op but office365 includes desktop versions of word, excel, outlook, etc
and they are faster and have more features.

~~~
enraged_camel
Not all license types include the desktop apps. Lower-tier licenses are web-
only.

~~~
shmed
Pretty sure Web only became totally free a couple years ago. All paid version
include desktop version too.

------
dmode
I won't trust Microsoft to make the Mac version of this product as good as the
Window's version. There is a long history of Office development that supports
this conclusion. If you use Mac in your workplace, probably best to stay away
from MS stack

~~~
ccurrens
From what I can tell, it's written in Electron. I assume they did this so that
they could share the code base between desktop (win/mac),
ios/android/winphone, and web -- keeping the features sets the same on all
platforms. VS Code is the same way and that works beautifully on Mac. I expect
that same for this.

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft (Azure) but have no relation to Office or
Microsoft Teams.

~~~
dmode
It is not about the technology platform. You still have to dedicate resources
to ensure feature parity across both OS systems. When MS starts selling Teams
to huge enterprise customers (e.g., Walmart, Ford, GM etc.) that are on 99%
Windows platform and the feature request and pressure starts building, where
do you think the resources would go ? It is not MS fault, it is the nature of
their business. Windows based enterprises are their bread and butter and
that's what they will prioritize. I work for an enterprise Cloud company, and
we prioritize IE because of this reason.

~~~
Analemma_
> It is not about the technology platform. You still have to dedicate
> resources to ensure feature parity across both OS systems

It _is_ about the technology platform, because the amount of resources
necessary to ensure feature parity is a function of the platfrom. Word for
Windows and Word for Mac are probably two separate giant monsters of
early-90's C++ and keeping them in sync is agony. Assuming Teams is written in
Electron, the amount of work is nowhere near the same; _not_ having feature
parity across operating systems is probably harder than having it.

~~~
golf1052
Word for Windows and Word for Mac are much closer together than you may
realize. Pretty interesting talk about cross platform Office.

Part 1: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HROqnw-
nf4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HROqnw-nf4) Part
2:[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGMoRu5yrVc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGMoRu5yrVc)

~~~
Analemma_
Ah, interesting. I always just took it for granted that the old Office
codebases were huge beasts, but maybe not. Thanks for the info!

Still, no matter how nice that codebase is, I assume they can't beat Electron
for ease of X-platform compatibility.

------
softwarefounder
1) Is this a cloud/online product, or does it require desktop installation? 2)
I see it mentioning the a Preview is available, but I can seem to find it on
my Office 365 apps panel (I'm a Business Premium account/user).

~~~
Periodic
1) It's both cloud based and has a desktop app. I believe the demo screenshots
I saw were all in the browser though. 2) There was a mention that it wasn't
available immediately but should start showing up somewhere in the dashboard
around 1:30 EST. You might have to find it somewhere deep in the settings if I
remember what someone else showed me. I.e. it's not in the main app grid by
default and has to be enabled.

------
forgotAgain
If they offered it a la carte I would be a lot more interested. Our company is
just getting over Microsoft hegemony. I'll never be part of getting back into
that by buying Microsoft services that are intertwined.

~~~
sumitgt
Buying the cheapest SKU of O365 that has Microsoft Teams is actually cheaper
than per-person cost for Slack.

~~~
forgotAgain
For now it is. If service income is to replace on premise licenses the price
will have to go up.

~~~
krisroadruck
Disagree. People had fairly long upgrade cycles on desktop office before
office365. A subscription provides more reliable income.

~~~
forgotAgain
Most of Microsoft's income comes from businesses. They already use a
subscription service called Software Assurance. That's the income they will
need to replace.

------
ebel
[https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5055/5405231875_927598741d_z.j...](https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5055/5405231875_927598741d_z.jpg)

------
nikolay
The requirement to have an Office 365 account will not allow it to grow. I
understand Microsoft wants people to pay for Office 365 and then for more and
more services, but they need to have a free tier so that influencers can try
out their solutions, and then the money will come on its own! So, the "new"
Microsoft is not really "new" in its marketing strategy. I was unpleasantly
surprised that as a developer I cannot use Hyper-V on Windows 10 Home either
as the Hypervisor is free with macOS.

~~~
blahi
Gees, I guess they will be constrained to their 60M paying customers and their
1,2B employees.

Tough life.

~~~
nikolay
Well, you oversimplify things, and that's a very typical fallacy. Just like
they have a market today, without something to keep people loyal, it can
dissolve pretty quickly. Look at Apple! With their arrogance and laziness,
they are going down the drain fast. Android runs on 9 out of 10 phones, people
are swapping Macs for Surface, and things didn't look like this not so long
ago! Arrogance and laziness killed MySpace, too!

You always need to flirt with your customers and mostly - with the
influencers! Microsoft used this strategy to flirt with developers!

------
Ftuuky
Maybe now my office will stop with those endless email chains.

------
orware
Since this was harder than you expect it to find on the main announcement
page...the page you want to go to in order to actually access teams is here:
[https://teams.microsoft.com/](https://teams.microsoft.com/)

And the app downloads page is here:
[https://teams.microsoft.com/downloads](https://teams.microsoft.com/downloads)

I'm getting an error on my end though after following their activation steps
so I need to figure out why it's doing that. (Shows me
"errorCode=AdminUserLicenseNotPresent" so maybe there's an extra step I have
to complete that wasn't mentioned)

~~~
sumitgt
Maybe you have to get your enterprise admin to enable it?

~~~
orware
I am the Enterprise Admin...that's what I'm confused about, since I already
went through their simple 3 steps to get started video which was essentially
just flipping a switch in the Office 365 Admin area. I expected it to work
right away, but then couldn't see where the actual main page for Teams was, so
I kept on looking and eventually found it, but even so, it didn't seem to
allow me to login yet...right now I'm chalking it up to them not being fully
ready for everyone to use it.

~~~
Kratisto
Ever figure this out? I did the same thing today! I enabled it, and both the
app/browser version say I need to enable it. Already did, but maybe it just
takes a little while.

~~~
orware
Hi Kratisto...yup I did. It appears that Teams isn't actually for our type of
organization yet (since we're an EDU organization using Office 365...seems
like it won't be available to us until early next year so we'll have to wait
until then from the responses I received back from our Microsoft sales people
over at Computer Land).

------
dfar1
+1 for adding another great option. The more options the better...

-1 for no shame when coping the design.

------
kyaghmour
I saw a few comparisons to Slack and Google Wave.

But, seriously, this is likely more like Microsoft Groove (originally from
Groove Networks) brought to the web. This idea has been around for a very long
time.

------
TorKlingberg
How does this relate to Skype for Business (previously Lync)? Is it a update
and rebrand of group chat, or something separate?

~~~
basch
if you start a private chat with a user, and they have never logged into
Teams, it sends them a Skype for Business message. So I can be using Teams and
they can still be using S4B

the team chats are threaded with embedded documents, likes, emojis etc

------
red_admiral
This actually looks really good, and considering the security/compliance
features I'm seriously thinking of moving from Trello to "plans". It comes
close to trello for UI and considering it's available through my organisation
it means I can put non-public data in my weekly task lists too.

------
agumonkey
Somehow reminds me of Google Wave.

------
muad
Slack Killer.

I have been saying for a while that Slack is not a defensible product and that
their customer base is notoriously fickle.

As microsoft, google, and apple begin integrating chat more directly into the
OS Slack will see its market share vanish.

------
denfromufa
Can I setup MS Teams without IT Admin?

~~~
sabarn01
depends on how your tenant is setup

------
JustSomeNobody
Yammer with a new skin?

~~~
ohitsdom
To the other replies suggesting similar products from different vendors,
you're missing the point. Microsoft bought Yammer in 2012 so could have very
well used a lot of the same tech under the hood of Teams.

------
restapi
Looks quite good, maybe worth to try it...

------
hhsnopek
Creative name for a slack clone...

------
mtgx
Whatever happened to Microsoft's billion dollar Yammer acquisition? Has it
already been added to the company's write-off fall of fame?

Hmm, kind of looks like it, doesn't it?

[http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/26/microsoft-is-killing-
yamme...](http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/26/microsoft-is-killing-yammer-
enterprise-in-january-2017-will-start-integrating-office-365-groups-first/)

Is Skype next?

~~~
seren
The headline is misleading, it is only that Yammer is not a standalone product
anymore but is part of the Office365 suite.

~~~
mxfh
Apparently the whole yammer team was working on this, since it's still not
possible to edit and update post on yammer. Which is a pain to write longer
posts with.

------
elcct
Great, but would I trust Microsoft with my data? I don't think so.

~~~
zephyrvinay1985
but you would trust slack with your data ? Also Microsoft has on prem version
so you don't have to trust anyone

~~~
elcct
I thought they don't have on prem version. Cool!

------
frik
Will it come to on-premise SharePoint 2016 (or later) too? Or is this just a
cloud-only service?

------
ungzd
I don't understand how chat service can be so intertwined with printer-first
applications (Word, Excel).

~~~
garysieling
A lot of large documents are team efforts, and you'd start with a discussion
outside the document before it moves into comments inside.

~~~
ungzd
So if company prefers printed documents and bureacracy, why not just talk by
telephone or use Microsoft Lync? Why they're trying to combine these dusty
office things with hipster web interface?

~~~
garysieling
It's not necessarily a question of preference; sometimes your employer may be
contractually required to write specific forms of documentation.

Excel can also be very effective as a small database - I did some volunteer IT
work for a co-op grocery store that runs their entire business operation off
spreadsheets.

------
snarfy
It doesn't scroll new messages, but instead shows a button "New Messages" that
you must click or mouse wheel scroll.

We tried using Teams last night for release coordination. This misfeature made
it practically unusable. It's a seriously dumb feature. I'm still a bit
baffled that someone actually designed and developed it, thinking it was a
good idea.

~~~
jpalmer
Presumably this works exactly like Skype. All new messages are scrolled but if
you manually scroll up to read old messages you'll get a button for "new
message" that you must click on to resume. Which makes sense in that you don't
want the screen to automatically advance if you are manually scrolling for old
messages.

~~~
douche
No, they broke this in one of the more recent updates. It never scrolls to the
bottom once you get more than one window full of messages automatically
anymore.

