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by NovaPenguin
1234 days ago
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Teams is one of those things that feels like we should have solved this like 10 years ago. Same thing with online payment systems - how is it that we didn't have that stuff completely solved like 20 years ago? I mean I know the answer deep down but seriously - Some folks did solve it, a lot did not or don't want to. Can't keep a job on a complete software package. |
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Teams is not primarily a chat client, it's one of many front ends for Microsoft Office 365 (now M365). It's backed by SharePoint, you can share documents through Teams which are also available in Explorer through OneDrive, in the web through your Microsoft account login, on mobile through Microsoft apps, and you can edit them in the Office classic interface, in a web browser, or in the Teams interface, while other people are editing them.
Teams is backed by the Microsoft Graph which yes makes it so you can add chatbots to Teams channels, but also means you can add listeners and webhooks from events that happen in your company, e.g. when someone in Microsoft Planner makes a task it can update a Team channel, or when someone
Teams is a voice and video chat like Zoom but it's backed by the Active Directory permissions, and that means you can federate with other organisations and allow calls internal/outbound but only to linked organisations. It's tied to LinkedIn (which Microsoft own) for contact lookup and user directory seraching.
Teams is backed by Microsoft Azure features, even before this GPT announcement, for transcription and recording and upload.
Teams integrates with Office so that when your status changes, that shows up in Outlook for people trying to email you, or in Outlook you can make a 'new Teams meeting' from the same interface as making any other meeting, and Teams meetings show up on your calendar, but it's a calendar in M365 not on your desktop so you can go the other way and see your calendar in the Teams interface and join Teams calls from there.
From inside Teams' client, as well as searching chat history, the search finds people in your organisation and shows you organisation structure, who reports to whom.
Teams has a plugin architecture / app store inside it, for adding things like Wikipedia search.
Teams is scriptable through the same Azure / Graph API as all the other Microsoft Cloud systems, and manageable through the same web interface, with the ability to set permissions on which admin teams can enable/disable which Teams features.
And all of this has the UX that a company of non-tech people are used to - Microsoft Office, Windows - and that a large company with Microsoft offerings is already managing through web management.
Nobody is hooking Zoom up so that someone editing a spreadsheet in Excel on their desktop and someone editing a spreadsheet in Zoom chat are both collaboratively editing the same file at the same time live. Nobody is hooking IRC up so you can see sharepoint libraries in it. Is anybody hooking Slack up to be an app store that connects into your existing Microsoft ecosystem so departments can build workflows from PowerBI over SharePoint documents to Slack? So that the Microsoft Bing search that you get by default in Edge logged in with your company Microsoft account also searches your Slack chat history and surfaces results in the same window as the web results and search results for all other company documents you have permission to access?
Microsoft is building / has built the walled garden lockin of the next decade or more, and it's compelling despite parts of it being sub-par or having poor UX, because the user is the organization not the individual, and the benefit is more than the sum of its parts. The MS Office lockin is history, OpenOffice isn't even playing the same game.