What Is Microsoft Teams? Slack Competitor Announced Wednesday

Microsoft announced its Slack competitor, Microsoft Teams, at an event in New York City Wednesday.

Microsoft’s event kicked off with a video, offering a few jokes. “We were just here, last week,” it said. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella went on stage to talk about the “art of the team,” as the company said, going over different ways groups and teams can work differently.

Nadella describes Teams as, “a chat-based workspace…designed to facilitate real-time collaboration while building up the institutional knowledge of a team.” Microsoft Teams makes it easy to chat, schedule meetings, write notes and make plans.

Microsoft Teams offers plenty of emoji integration to make work conversations more fun. You can also move between different teams, something that’s more challenging with Slack.

As rumored, Microsoft Teams features threaded chats, allowing different conversations to be groups together, along with integration with Skype for voice and video calls built into the app. The company has also added Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

Microsoft is launching Microsoft Teams across a variety of mobile platforms, including iOS, Android and Windows Phone. The company is expected to integrate its Teams software into Microsoft Office, Skype and the company’s Office 365 services.