Microsoft is celebrating the second anniversary of Microsoft 365 – a selection of services and apps intended to help users enhance and transform their workplace collaboration experience. At the heart of Microsoft 365 is the incredible Microsoft Teams application – the fastest growing product ever released by Microsoft and one of the leading solutions for collaboration software today.
Since it’s launch, Microsoft has been telling us just how successful Microsoft Teams is. However, for the first time this week, the company also revealed the daily active user numbers for the app for the first time. Over 13 million people are now using Teams daily, and 19 million people use it every week.
Celebrating Continued Growth
As the popularity of Teams continues to grow, Microsoft is keen to make sure that the application is available to groups all around the world – regardless of their industry. This week, Microsoft announced a range of new capabilities to support the modern workplace, including:
- Time-sensitive communications: Priority notifications will ping recipients mobile every two minutes until a response is received, while read receipts indicate when messages sent have been seen by your colleagues
- Communication management: Announcements will allow team members to share relevant news in a channel, while cross-posting will ensure you can send a message across multiple channels at once. Channel moderation will also help business leaders to control what gets shared in a channel
- Firstline worker support: The new time clock solution in Teams Shifts will allow employees to clock in and out of shifts from within Teams. Additionally, targeted communications mean that business leaders can message people in specific roles at the same time when they @mention a role name in a post
- IT administration: The Teams client is available now to existing installations of Office 365 ProPlus and Policy packages are available in the admin centre. Policy packages apply pre-defined policy sets across Teams functions
Microsoft Teams also announced their commitment to building a stronger partner ecosystem in teams, working with companies like Genesys and Five9 for contact centre solutions, and NICE and Verint for call recording. Microsoft has also teamed up with REPL to support workforce management.
Casting a Shadow Over Slack
The latest announcement from Microsoft isn’t just an insight into how well Microsoft Teams is doing in the current marketplace – it’s also going to have a direct impact on the app’s position over Slack. This is the first time that Slack has announced their daily active user number, which places it ahead of Slack. Slack only has 10 million daily active users as of its last announcement (although that was at the start of the year), meaning that Microsoft Teams is officially the most popular collaboration tool on the market.
For months, it’s only been possible to speculate on how quickly Microsoft Teams has been growing. We had to assume that Slack was leading the pack due to an absence of numbers from the Microsoft group. However, now, we have absolute evidence that Microsoft Teams is the number one tool for team collaboration. That’s a pretty impressive way for Microsoft to celebrate the second birthday of Microsoft 365.
