Microsoft Teams rolls out to Office 365 users around the world

As we reported last week, Microsoft is today launching its own business collaboration tool in an effort to fend off the challenge from Slack.

Teams is now available to Office 365 users in 181 markets and 19 languages. Where Teams is likely to score over its competitors is in its close integration with other Office products and with Skype for Business.

Microsoft Teams provides threaded, persistent chat to keep all users engaged. The company has added many new communication features since the preview version, including audio calling from mobile devices, plus video on Android, which is coming soon to iOS and Windows Phone. It's also listened to customer requests, including adding the ability to email a channel, with attachments, sending messages with markdown-based formatting, and receiving notifications about all posts in a channel.

Other companies have been quick to offer integration with the new product. Micro app platform Sapho for example has added Teams integration to provide employees with access to personalized and relevant information and workflows that will help them work smarter.

"By integrating with Microsoft Teams, the new chat-based workspace in Office 365, Sapho is contributing to our vision for changing the way employees get work done," says Brian MacDonald, corporate vice president of Microsoft Teams at Microsoft. "Sapho will allow our customers to harness the full value of Teams by surfacing updates and actionable activities from all of their systems of record into a single Teams view. We're excited to have Sapho help our customers improve their collaboration and productivity."

Microsoft's launch video for Teams is below. There will also be an Ask Us Anything session on the Microsoft Tech Community on March 22, 2017 at 9 am PDT.