Microsoft Teams Reaches General Availability Around the Globe for Office 365 Commercial Subscribers

Today Microsoft's Kirk Koenigsbauer, the Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Office, hosted a webcast to announce the General Availability of the companies new chat workspace service.

As he describes the new tools that are part of Microsoft Teams, Koenigsbauer said this service delivers a universal toolkit for collaboration so people can do their best work.

With the General Availability of Microsoft Teams it is now available in 181 countries and in 19 languages. Since announcing the preview last November more than 50,000 companies began using Microsoft Teams.

Currently they are seeing a 30% growth in usage month over month and more than 100 new features have been added to Microsoft Teams over the last four months and its preview period.

However, one key and highly requested feature, the ability to invite external guests into a Team environment will not ship until this June. That means only members of your organization can be part of a team right now. Other coming features include Outlook integration and a developer platform which will be discussed at Microsoft Build this May.

Koenigsbauer did mention that they plan to be rapid and responsive to customer requests for features which is great but I do wonder how they missed shipping this without guest access implemented. That is such a critical option for teams these days since many members can be outside of the company.

We tested out Microsoft Teams during the preview period last fall so you can see some of those tips and how-to's linked below. Also be sure to check out Lisa Schmeiser's look at Microsoft Teams that is available over at the SuperSite: Windows.

Here are some additional resources for Microsoft Teams plus the on-demand replay of this mornings launch webcast:

Our coverage of Microsoft Teams:

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