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Holiday season might be upon us, but Microsoft shows no signs of slowing down. This month, it brought a series of fresh updates to Teams, not to mention crossing another usage milestone – even as its competitor Slack got picked up by the CRM giant, Salesforce, for a whopping $27.7 billion. 2021 looks to be pretty bright for Microsoft Teams, as it continues its incredible run of innovation and growth.
For this edition of monthly Teams updates, UC Today’s Rob Scott sits down with Tom Arbuthnot, UC Solutions Architect, Microsoft-certified master, some-time Santa Claus, and MVP. Make sure to watch the video for their unique Yuletide-ready headgear, and a detailed exploration of:
- 115 million Microsoft Teams daily active users (DAU) 🎅
- Gartner Magic Quadrants 🦌
- Teams Public Preview Program 🎁
- AI Noise Suppression ⛄
- SfBO admin portal being retired 🤶
- Apps in Teams Meetings ❄️
Let’s look at the top highlights from the conversation and key takeaways for 2021, but before that here is a quick message from us at UC Today:
“We’d like to thank all our viewers and listeners for tuning in this year. We’ll be back with more Microsoft Teams news in 2021! Have a wonderful Christmas and New Year.” – from Rob & Tom
The Elephant in the Room: Slack Acquisition and Its Import for Collab
Right before we recorded this podcast, the rumour mills were up in arms about salesforce buying Slack, the pros and cons of the move, and what it means for collaboration as a whole. Rob put it simply, saying: “I'm pretty sure they can afford it, and, it adds a little bit more value to their proposition too.”
Indeed, as a sales and marketing process enabler, Salesforce could definitely gain from Slack’s ground-breaking work in the field of collaboration, a space that it tried to occupy with Chatter. “A comms platform fits well into their dynamics for sure, and it would be a massive upgrade from Chatter, which is a bit of an also-ran at the moment,” Tom said.
Since this video, the acquisition was finalised, with the promise of together taking on UCaaS giants (think Microsoft Teams).
On that note, let’s look at Microsoft’s recent usage milestone.
115 Million DAU and Growing, Plus Another New Usage Metric
Looking back at Microsoft Teams’ growth, it has been a steady graph so far, pointing upwards.
“The first numbers we got were July 2019, that was 13 million. Then November 2019 – 20 million, March was significantly up, reaching 44 million in 2020. And then pandemic time it just went off the charts to this 115,” Tom noted.
But is this growth sustainable?
The answer would seem to be yes. “115 million is still well below Office 365 numbers, so there's still more room for growth there potentially. Office 365 as a service has a much higher user base, meaning that the addressable market is potentially still huge for Microsoft going forward,” Tom pointed out.
Microsoft is also trying to steer the conversation around usage in a manner that highlights its collaboration capabilities. Here’s what Tom had to say about it.
“They want to land this new metric called daily collaboration minutes, comprising the sum of all the minutes in a 24-hour period across meetings, chat, document, collaboration, co-authoring, etc. They are trying to shape a metric that says Teams are something you live in for your day, not something you jump in, do your meetings and jump out of. This is a message they're constantly trying to land – that Teams is your workspace, your hub, your collaboration space. It’s not just meetings or phone calls.”
This makes perfect sense when you consider Microsoft’s ultimate goal is to make Teams your one-stop answer for communication and collaboration, both internal and external.
Caveats You Might Have Missed in Microsoft Teams’ Gartner MQ Positioning
Last month, we spoke about Gartner recognising Teams in not one but two of its Magic Quadrants.
In December, we delved a little deeper, unboxing its implications for buyers who used Gartner MQs as well as those actively considering Teams.
MQs are no longer the watertight categories for product classification that they used to be – a reflection of Teams’ diversification and Microsoft’s ultimate intentions. “Gartner’s got an interesting job these days. They used to have these very discrete Magic Quadrants, and it was very obvious which vendors fit in which Quadrant. But now, you have this ambiguity. Is Teams meetings? Or is Teams UCaaS? Or, is Teams bigger than UCaaS, also including collaboration?” said Tom.
Interestingly, Gartner did not go all out in endorsing Teams. “They called Teams’ 99.9 SLA. Traditionally, in the telephony space, we talk about things like 5-9s. Most UCaaS vendors will do at least 99.9 – but they'll probably do 99.99,” Tom pointed out, which might put Teams at a slight disadvantage.
This also speaks to a curious trend of uptime priorities. “It's interesting to me how little that [UC uptime] comes up in conversation these days. Even with everybody working remotely and everybody needing the cloud for everything, the SLA for just UC seems to be less important than it was five years ago. It just doesn't seem to come up as much with cloud services,” Tom said.
In terms of uptime, Microsoft could be trying to solve the problem with Survival Branch Appliances (SBAs) that let users maintain local telephony independent of the cloud service or your internet connection. But does this make-up for the less-than industry-best uptime for Teams collaboration? Tom doesn’t think so – “Frankly, for me and my daily workflow, I could lose telephony long before I could lose meetings and collab. I've got a mobile that lets me do PSTN calls as a backup if needed, but if I lose cloud-based meetings, then my day is pretty much gone.”
Teams Public Preview Program is – Finally – Here
Public beta programs are always of interest to the tech community, and with a platform as large as Teams, this is relevant to the customer community as well.
“Microsoft has always had an Office program where you could elect to be in the early ring. Over the years, it's had about a dozen different names – but the basic idea is you're kind of on a beta early test version. You get to test, you get to give feedback, and you also get to see what's coming before your organisation sees it,” Tom told us. This is particularly critical given Teams’ current pace of change, helping organisations to keep up.
Despite its 2017 release, this is the first time Microsoft is opening Teams beta to customers who elected to be in Office early ring. But as they say, better late than never, and the program would make a major difference to small and large organisations alike – including UC Today.
“One of the frustrating things is that we're talking about these new features on UC Today. But we don't get them actually for quite a long time! So, it would be nice to jump in the early ring and have every one of the UC Today gang in preview,” Rob said.
