Microsoft Teams gets massive uptake to address COVID-19

Microsoft Teams, which combines chat, meetings, calling, and Office 365 document collaboration, is marking its third anniversary by sharing new features to enhance the ability of businesses to communicate and collaborate remotely.   

Microsoft says that this sudden, globe-spanning move to remote work, due to the coronavirus and recent lockdown restrictions, will be a turning point in how we work and learn. Solutions that enable remote work and learning across chat, video, and file collaboration have become central to the way businesses work. The company has seen an unprecedented spike in Teams usage, and had more than 44-million daily users as of last Friday, a figure that had grown by 12 million over the previous week. And those users e generated over 900-million meeting and calling minutes on Teams every day last week.  

Microsoft has announced an array of product innovations across different aspects of the Teams experience – many with a tie to meetings. These include: 

• Real-time noise suppression, which will minimize distracting background noise (e.g., keyboard typing, vacuum cleaner), allowing you to hear what’s being said.  
• The raise hand feature, which will let anyone in a virtual meeting send a visual signal that they have something to say without having to interrupt the current speaker.  
• Offline and low-bandwidth support, which will let you read chat messages and write responses — even without an internet connection — making it easier for you to move things forward no matter where you are.    

For more information on getting Teams for a small to medium business for free, click here.