It’s been less than two months, and Microsoft’s already made another massive leap in its daily active user count. On March 19, we reported Microsoft announced it had jumped to 44 million daily active users. The collaboration giant reported gaining 12 million new users in a single week. Forty-four million daily active users were impressive, so we thought. But today, the company’s added 31 million more users in under two months, totaling a 70 percent uptick in traffic, Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, revealed during a recent call with investors.
Nadella also said, two-thirds of Teams users interact with or collaborate with files inside of Teams, and that Microsoft has seen triple the amount of organization integrating with its popular Teams app as usual. Microsoft, much like Zoom, saw a huge uptick in meeting participants – 200 million meeting participants in a single day in April. Video conferencing powerhouse Zoom reported 300 million meeting attendees in April.
In the spirit of transparency, I want to add, Zoom previously stated it had “more than 300 million daily users’ with ‘more than 300 million people around the world using Zoom during COVID-19’ This was not true, Zoom’s since deleted any references to the latter. Today, the company says it has ‘300 million daily Zoom meeting participants.’
This miscommunication can paint a different picture than what it really means, so making the distinction is key in this instance. Daily meeting participants include multiple meetings, meaning if you have five Zoom or Teams meetings each day, those get counted five times.
On the innovation front, Microsoft has also been hard at work, adding several long-requested features. Now Teams users can use custom backgrounds, which allow them to replace backgrounds in Teams meetings. According to Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, Microsoft 365, Jared Spataro, the company’s working on a lot more on that front:
“In the future, we will also include the ability to upload custom images”
The company even added the raise hand feature, which lets meeting participants indicate they have something to say during a meeting by clicking on the ‘hand-raise icon.’ Providing further insight into what’s to come, Spataro said later this year, they’ll bring real-time noise suppression into the Teams chat platform. This game-changer will rely on artificial intelligence to reduce distracting background noises like loud typing and barking dogs.
And the COVID-19 pandemic’s caused large enterprise collaboration and communications companies like Microsoft into a corner and forced them to grow even bigger. Just last month, Microsoft saw a new daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes in one day, a 200 percent increase (up) from 900 million in mid-March.
According to Spataro, the company’s witnessed 183,000 users in 175 countries relying on Teams for education. Following this announcement, the collaboration giant added two new ‘highly requested features’ – an end meeting option for meeting organizers and the ability to download participant reports.
In more recent Microsoft news, a new and convincing cyber attack that appears to be a notification from Microsoft Teams is making its rounds, researchers at Abnormal Security found. Scammers are doing so to steal Office 365 credentials. The scam’s said to have targeted as many as 50,000 different Teams users thus far.
