Yammer, the precursor to Teams, grew fast with its take on enterprise microblogging. You can substantially reduce dependence on your e-mail inbox when a team chat application works well across multiple devices. Teams need well-executed chat tools to get things done. Slack-based gaming communities are growing rapidly as well.

It's the hot new thing for interoffice chat and is also attracting developers who use it for team chat, project management, and sharing code snippets. In fact, Slack says 77 of the Fortune 100 have signed up.Įnterprises that use older collaboration solutions like Jive or Connections are finding their workers are gravitating toward Slack because it offers consumer-grade ease of use and a 'freemium' business model that reduces friction further. Today, Slack is used by teams inside many companies, including eBay, Ogilvy, Salesforce, Samsung, Urban Outfitters, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Existing collaboration solutions aren’t as easy to use as they should be. So what do the rise of Slack and the launch of Teams tell us about the future of workplace collaboration? Here are five takeaways. By May of this year, Slack had 3 million daily active users, including 930,000 paid seats, according to VentureBeat. The user population increased 3.5 times over the previous year. Slack was valued at around $3.8 billion in its last funding round in March. The company launched in August 2013, and has since raised $540 million in funding. Slack has had phenomenal growth as a startup in the team chat space over the past couple of years. Teams will be available in desktop, mobile, and web versions. Like Slack, the Teams group chat app allows team members to chat with colleagues via threaded conversations within specific message channels, direct messages or video. Microsoft Teams will be integrated into the Office suite of applications. The launch is a clear response to Slack’s strong growth as a workplace tool for communications and file sharing that reduces reliance on company e-mail. On Wednesday Microsoft announced Teams, a group chat application that competes directly with Slack.

Slack teams