Microsoft's latest effort to release us from 'Reply All' hell faces some pretty stiff competition.
If you waste an hour each day wading through your work inbox in search of important messages then you'll appreciate the concept of business-grade messaging apps. These chat-style apps are perfect for keeping all those company-wide memos out of your inbox – reminding people not to leave old milk in the office fridge – along with those convoluted email chains which insist on CCing everyone in your department.
When consumer-grade chat apps first arrived on the scene, it didn't take long for people to start using them at work – although they didn't necessarily have the blessing of their IT department.
After a while business-grade chat services seized on this opportunity. You might think of them as Facebook for the workplace, an idea not lost on Facebook which recently launched Facebook at Work.
Years ago Google Wave aimed to wean us off email, but it was before its time and withered on the vine. These days Slack is the darling of the business-grade messaging app scene. It started out as a chat room-style, in-house messaging app but these days it has 4 million daily users and supports voice and video chat along with third-party integration with a wide range of services – including Giphy to keep the millennials happy.
Now Microsoft wants a slice of the action with Microsoft Teams, a new business-grade chat service baked into Office 365 and available as a public preview.
Microsoft Teams bears more than a passing resemblance to Slack – right down to built-in support for memes and animated GIFs – and is also open to third-party plugins. It also supports the idea of in-app bots to handle specific tasks, you can think of them as stripped-down AI agents like Siri waiting to do your bidding.
You might think that Microsoft was late to the party, as usual, but to be fair it was actually unfashionably early. Microsoft has offered similar tools for enterprises for years, with unified messaging apps like Lync, but it took hip and nimble competitors like Slack to make them cool.
Slack's freemium model also puts these tools in the hands of small businesses, giving them a free taste with the option to pay for advanced features. The fact that Microsoft Teams is tied to Office 365 means it will struggle to win over some small operations, but its tight integration with the Office suite might tempt larger businesses to defect from services like Slack.
Do you use something like Slack at work and is it a blessing or a curse? How could business-grade messaging make your life easier?
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