Microsoft Teams just turned two years old, and the office messaging and collaboration app is adding an assortment of new features.
Microsoft said Teams is now used by over 500,000 organizations. While it does not break out the total number of daily active users, Microsoft said over 150 of its organizations had over 10,000 active users each.
Lori Wright, the general manager of workplace collaboration at Microsoft, said the company wanted to better support frontline workers, such as those in manufacturing, healthcare, the automotive industry, and more.
"They have traditionally been underserved by technology," Wright told Business Insider. "We built Teams knowing the vast majority of the connected world does have a mobile phone."
There are other office messaging apps on the horizon competing with Microsoft Teams. Slack, the $7.1 billion startup that recently filed to go public, says it has over 85,000 paying customers and more than 10 million daily active users.
Wright said that what makes Microsoft Teams stand out is that it's an all-in-one product, combining the features that workers most want.
"Whether you're using a chat-based workspace, online meetings, or calling, each of those companies provide a component part of that story," Wright said. "Teams is really about the end-to-end solution. You have the messaging, meetings, and calling all bundled together. If you have three different solutions and are paying three different prices, you can get that all through Microsoft."
New features
Along with providing some usage numbers, Microsoft added a handful of new features to Teams, including the ability to automatically add subtitles to a video call as the speaker talks.
"Regardless of where you are — in a coffee shop or airport where you can't hear what's happening — you can see it on a screen," Wright said.
A feature called "intelligent capture" makes a person standing in front of a whiteboard look transparent on a video call so that they aren't blocking the board, and a whiteboard feature can save what's written on a physical whiteboard as a digital copy that others can interact with.
Other new features include customized backgrounds for video chatting, secure private channels, information barriers, data loss prevention, and a live-events feature.
"Gone are the days of the cubicle and silos, and companies are ushering in these more collaborative workspaces," Wright said. "The core of all of this is moving from individual achievement to being more about teamwork and shared success. It is teamwork that's driving the highest performances."
