Five years of Microsoft Teams
This past March 14th, Microsoft Teams turned 5 years on the market. The leader collaboration and communication hub started as an internal hackathon project. From 2017 to today, Teams’ usage has exponentially grown, being now considered the fastest growing business app in Microsoft history.
From the beginning, Microsoft made Teams part of the Microsoft 365 business subscriptions, with no additional cost. Later on, in July 2021, they announced it as the replacement tool for Skype for Business. Furthermore, to keep up with one of its initial competitors, Slack, Microsoft launched a free version of Teams to its lineup.
The took off of Microsoft Teams
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft Teams took off growth-wise. In 2019, it had 20 million active users, and by March 2020, shortly after the official lockdown started, Teams was at 44 million daily active users.
During this time, Teams grew 10X, and recently Microsoft announced they had reached 270 million monthly active users.
The constant changes
Microsoft has continued to release new incremental and major features for this hub every week. Lately, the company has focused heavily on telephony features, and integrating it in the Microsoft stack as the hub moves forward.
One of the major features Teams is working on launching this month is the Teams Connect collaboration capability, also known as Shared Channels. This feature will allow users to fully use Teams suite of collaboration capabilities with external contacts in other Azure AD organizations, just as they do with internal users.
We know that Teams is not the only platform for work in the Microsoft stack, however, it has been a major focus in the past couple of years and will remain a focus point, for both Microsoft and customers.
Working with this platform, going through the Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams transition, and keeping up with the constant innovation, has been a journey for our team and our customers. If you want to start your Teams journey today, do not hesitate to contact us. Our certified Microsoft experts are here to help.
