Microsoft Teams is a team collaboration platform developed by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

as part of the

Microsoft 365 Microsoft 365 (previously called Office 365) is a product family of productivity software, collaboration and Cloud computing, cloud-based Software as a service, services owned by Microsoft. It encompasses online services such as Outlook.com, One ...

suite. It offers features such as workspace chat, video conferencing, file storage, and integration with both Microsoft and third-party applications and services. Teams gradually replaced earlier Microsoft messaging and collaboration platforms, including

Skype for Business Skype for Business (formerly Microsoft Lync and Office Communicator) is a discontinued enterprise software application for instant messaging and videotelephony developed by Microsoft as part of the Microsoft 365 (formerly Office) suite. It wa ...

Skype Skype () was a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for IP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also had instant messaging, file transfer, ...

, and

Microsoft Classroom Microsoft Classroom was an online blended learning platform for schools that aimed to simplify grading assignments and student communication in a paperless way. It was introduced for Office 365 Education subscribers in April 2016. On May 18, 2 ...

. The platform saw significant growth during the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

, alongside competitors such as

Zoom Zoom may refer to: Arts, entertainment and media Film * ''Zoom'' (2006 film), starring Tim Allen * ''Zoom'' (2015 film), a Canada-Brazil film by Pedro Morelli * ''Zoom'' (2016 Kannada film), a Kannada film * ''Zoom'' (2016 Sinhala film), a Sr ...

, Slack, and

Google Meet Google Meet is a video communication service developed by Google. It is one of two apps that constitute the replacement for Google Hangouts, the other being Google Chat. It replaced the consumer-facing Google Duo on November 1, 2022, with ...

, as organizations shifted to remote work and virtual meetings. , Microsoft reported approximately 280million monthly active users.

History

On August 29, 2007, Microsoft acquired Parlano, the developer of the persistent group chat tool MindAlign. Years later, on March 4, 2016, Microsoft considered acquiring Slack for $8 billion. However, the proposal was reportedly opposed by

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American businessman and philanthropist. A pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, he co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend ...

, who advocated for focusing on enhancing

instead. Lu Qi, then executive vice president of Applications and Services, had led the initiative to pursue the Slack acquisition. Following Lu's departure later that year, Microsoft announced Microsoft Teams on November 2, 2016, at an event in New York City, positioning it as a direct competitor to Slack. Teams launched worldwide on March 14, 2017. The service was initially led by corporate vice president Brian MacDonald. In response to the launch, Slack published a full-page advertisement in ''The New York Times'' welcoming the competition and outlining its product philosophy. Although Slack was used by 28 companies in the

Fortune 100 The ''Fortune'' 500 is an annual list compiled and published by ''Fortune'' magazine that ranks 500 of the largest United States corporations by total revenue for their respective fiscal years. The list includes publicly held companies, along w ...

, ''

The Verge ''The Verge'' is an American Technology journalism, technology news website headquarters, headquartered in Lower Manhattan, New York City and operated by Vox Media. The website publishes news, feature stories, guidebooks, product reviews, cons ...

'' wrote that executives would question paying for the service if Teams provides a similar function in their company's existing

Office 365 Microsoft 365 (previously called Office 365) is a product family of productivity software, collaboration and cloud-based services owned by Microsoft. It encompasses online services such as Outlook.com, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, programs form ...

subscription. However, '' ZDNET'' noted that the platforms initially served different markets, as Teams did not support external users, making it less appealing to small businesses and freelancers, limitation Microsoft later addressed. In response to Teams' announcement, Slack deepened in-product integration with

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

services. In May 2017, Microsoft announced that Teams would replace

in Office 365 Education. A free version of Teams was released on July 12, 2018, offering most core features at no cost, albeit with limits on users and storage. In January 2019, Microsoft introduced updates targeting "Firstline Workers" to improve Teams’ performance across shared or limited-access devices. In September 2019, Microsoft announced the retirement of Skype for Business in favor of Teams, which took effect on July 31, 2021. In early 2020, Microsoft introduced a

push-to-talk Push-to-talk (PTT), also known as press-to-transmit, is a method of having conversations or talking on half-duplex communication lines, including two-way radio, using a momentary button to switch from voice reception mode to transmit mode. H ...

"Walkie Talkie" feature aimed at firstline workers using smartphones and tablets over Wi-Fi or cellular networks. The COVID-19 pandemic significantly boosted usage of Teams. On March 19, 2020, Microsoft reported 44 million daily active users. In April, the platform logged 4.1 billion meeting minutes in a single day. A public preview of Microsoft Teams for Linux was released in December 2019, but the Linux client was discontinued in 2022. In July 2020, Microsoft shut down its

video game livestreaming The live streaming of video games is an activity where people broadcast themselves playing games to a live audience online. The practice became popular in the mid-2010s on the US-based site Twitch, before growing to YouTube, Facebook, China-b ...

platform Mixer, and announced that some of its technologies would be repurposed for use in Teams. On February 28, 2025, Microsoft announced that

would be fully retired on May 5, 2025, with users given options to export their data or transition to Microsoft Teams.

Usage

Underlying software

Microsoft Teams, as part of the Microsoft 365 suite, utilizes

SharePoint SharePoint is a collection of enterprise content management and knowledge management tools developed by Microsoft. Launched in 2001, it was initially bundled with Windows Server as Windows SharePoint Server, then renamed to Microsoft Office ...

and

Exchange Online Outlook on the web (formerly Outlook Web App and Outlook Web Access) is a personal information manager web app from Microsoft. It is a web-based version of Microsoft Outlook, and is included in Exchange Server and Exchange Online (a component ...

. Each Team, Shared Channel, and Private Channel has its own Microsoft 365 Group and SharePoint Site used for file storage. Messages are stored in

Cosmos DB Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service offered by Microsoft. It is designed to provide high availability, scalability, and low-latency access to data for modern applications. Unlike traditional relational databas ...

and are journaled to

mailboxes. Private messages, including messages in Private Channels, are journaled to the sender and recipients' mailboxes. Public Channel messages are journaled to their corresponding Team's group mailbox, whereas, messages from Shared Channels are journaled to their own mailboxes . Contacts and voicemail are stored in

. Microsoft Teams client is a web-based desktop app, originally developed on top of the

Electron The electron (, or in nuclear reactions) is a subatomic particle with a negative one elementary charge, elementary electric charge. It is a fundamental particle that comprises the ordinary matter that makes up the universe, along with up qua ...

framework which combines the

Chromium Chromium is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Cr and atomic number 24. It is the first element in Group 6 element, group 6. It is a steely-grey, Luster (mineralogy), lustrous, hard, and brittle transition metal. Chromium ...

rendering engine and the Node.js JavaScript platform. Version 2.0 client was rebuilt using the Evergreen version of Microsoft Edge WebView2 in place of Electron.

Features

Chats

Teams allows users to communicate in two-way persistent chats with one or multiple participants. Participants can message using text,

emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis; , ) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from type ...

s, stickers and

gifs The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on June 15, 1987. The format can co ...

, as well as sharing links and files. In August 2022, the chat feature was updated for "chat with yourself"; allowing for the organization of files, notes, comments, images, and videos within a private chat tab.

Teams

Teams allows communities, groups, or teams to contribute in a shared workspace where messages and digital content on a specific topic are shared. Team members can join through an invitation sent by a team administrator or owner or sharing of a specific URL. Teams for Education allows admins and teachers to set up groups for classes, professional learning communities (PLCs), staff members, and everyone.

Channels

Channels allow team members to communicate without the use of email or group SMS (texting). Users can reply to posts with text, images,

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...

s, and

image macro An image macro is a piece of digital media featuring a picture, or artwork, with some form of text superimposed. The text frequently appears at the top and bottom of the image. Image macros were one of the most common forms of internet memes in t ...

s. Direct messages send private messages to designated users rather than the entire channel. Connectors can be used within a channel to submit information contacted through a third-party service. Connectors include

Mailchimp Mailchimp is a marketing automation and email marketing platform. "Mailchimp" is the trade name of its operator, Rocket Science Group, an American company founded in 2001 by Ben Chestnut and Mark Armstrong, with Dan Kurzius joining at a later ...

, Facebook Pages,

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

Power BI Microsoft Power BI is an interactive data visualization software product developed by Microsoft with a primary focus on business intelligence (BI). It is part of the Microsoft Power Platform. Power BI is a collection of software services, app ...

and

Bing News Microsoft Bing (also known simply as Bing) is a search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service traces its roots back to Microsoft's earlier search engines, including MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and Live Search. Bing offers a ...

Group conversations

Ad-hoc groups can be created to share

instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of synchronous computer-mediated communication involving the immediate ( real-time) transmission of messages between two or more parties over the Internet or another computer network. Originally involv ...

, audio calls (VoIP), and

video calls Videotelephony (also known as videoconferencing or video calling) is the use of audio signal, audio and video for simultaneous two-way communication. Today, videotelephony is widespread. There are many terms to refer to videotelephony. ''Vide ...

inside the client software.

Telephone replacement

A feature on one of the higher cost licencing tiers allows connectivity to the

public switched telephone network The public switched telephone network (PSTN) is the aggregate of the world's telephone networks that are operated by national, regional, or local telephony operators. It provides infrastructure and services for public telephony. The PSTN consists o ...

(PSTN) telephone system. This allows users to use Teams as if it were a telephone, making and receiving calls over the PSTN, including the ability to host "conference calls" with multiple participants.

Meeting

Meetings can be scheduled with multiple participants able to share audio, video, chat and presented content with all participants. Multiple users can connect via a meeting link. Automated minutes are possible using the recording and transcript features. Teams has a plugin for

Microsoft Outlook Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager software system from Microsoft, available as a part of the Microsoft 365 software suites. Primarily popular as an email client for businesses, Outlook also includes functions such as Calendari ...

to schedule a Teams Meeting in Outlook for a specific date and time and invite others to attend. If a meeting is scheduled within a channel, users visiting the channel are able to see if a meeting is in progress.

Teams Live Events

Teams Live Events replaces Skype Meeting Broadcast for users to broadcast to 10,000 participants on Teams,

Yammer Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) is an enterprise social networking service that is part of the Microsoft 365 family of products. It is used mainly for private enterprise social software, communication within organizations but is also used for net ...

, or

Microsoft Stream Microsoft Stream is a corporate video-sharing service which was released on June 20, 2017 that replaced the existing Office 365 Video. In 2021 Microsoft announced Stream would be re-platformed onto SharePoint and fully integrated into Office 36 ...

Breakout Rooms

Breakout rooms split a meeting into small groups. This is often utilized for collaboration during trainings or any environment where having all participants speak at once could be disruptive or unfeasible. Breakout rooms can be set by the hosts to a certain length of time, after which all participants will automatically rejoin the main meeting room.

Front Row

Front Row adjusts the layout of the viewer's screen, placing the speaker or content in the center of the gallery with other meeting participant's video feeds reduced in size and located below the speaker.

Education

Microsoft Teams for Education allows teachers to distribute, provide feedback, and grade student assignments turned in via Teams using the Assignments tab through Office 365 for Education subscribers. Quizzes can also be assigned to students through an integration with

Office Forms Microsoft Forms (formerly Office 365 Forms) is an online survey creator, part of Office 365. Usage Forms allows users to create surveys and quizzes with automatic marking. The data can be exported to Microsoft Excel Microsoft Excel i ...

Protocols

Microsoft Teams is based on a number of Microsoft-specific protocols. Video conferences are realized over the protocol MNP24, known from the Skype consumer version. VoIP and video conference clients based on SIP and H.323 need special gateways to connect to Microsoft Teams servers. With the help of

Interactive Connectivity Establishment Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) is a technique used in computer networking to find ways for two computers to talk to each other as directly as possible in peer-to-peer networking. This is most commonly used for interactive media such ...

(ICE), clients behind

Network address translation Network address translation (NAT) is a method of mapping an IP address space into another by modifying network address information in the IP header of packets while they are in transit across a traffic Router (computing), routing device. The te ...

routers and restrictive firewalls are also able to connect, if

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network, forming a peer-to-peer network of Node ...

is not possible.

Integrations

Microsoft Teams has integrations through Microsoft AppSource, its integration marketplace. In 2020, Microsoft partnered with KUDO, a cloud-based solution with language interpretation, to allow integrated language meeting controls. In June 2022, an update was released using AI to improve call audio through the elimination of background feedback loops and canceling non-vocal audio.

Anti-trust controversy

In July 2023, the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the primary Executive (government), executive arm of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with a number of European Commissioner, members of the Commission (directorial system, informall ...

opened an

anti-trust Competition law is the field of law that promotes or seeks to maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies. Competition law is implemented through public and private enforcement. It is also known as antitrust ...

investigation into the possibility that Microsoft unfairly used its

office suite Productivity software (also called personal productivity software or office productivity software) is application software used for producing information (such as documents, presentations, worksheets, databases, charts, graphs, digital paintin ...

market power to increase sales of Teams and hurt its competitors. The next month, Microsoft announced it would make Teams an optional part of the

bundle, and provide more information to software developers to allow Teams users to transition to competing software with their Teams data. In early 2023, Microsoft updated Teams to open links from chats in

Microsoft Edge Microsoft Edge is a Proprietary Software, proprietary cross-platform software, cross-platform web browser created by Microsoft and based on the Chromium (web browser), Chromium open-source project, superseding Edge Legacy. In Windows 11, Edge ...

instead of the default browser set by the user. In June 2024, the EU Commission charged Microsoft with antitrust violations for bundling Microsoft Teams into the Office suite.

References

External links

* {{Authority control

Teams A team is a group of individuals (human or non-human) working together to achieve their goal. As defined by Professor Leigh Thompson (academic), Leigh Thompson of the Kellogg School of Management, " team is a group of people who are interd ...

Microsoft cloud services Application software Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on science and technology Software associated with the COVID-19 pandemic IOS software Android (operating system) software Windows software Collaborative software Web conferencing TypeScript software