Microsoft, the windows maker recently made some major announcements at its Build 2021 developer’s keynote and the industry is going to face serious competition from Microsoft this year.
During the keynote, Microsoft announced that it is making some major improvements to its Teams platform. MS Teams was first compared to be similar to Slack’s workplace application but Microsoft is making sure that Teams evolve from a basic chat application to a standalone collaborative platform and the announcements made by the company at its recent keynote is evidence of this goal.
MS Teams is meant to be a more collaborative platform and it is not just for talking and communicating with your co-workers, it allows collaborative apps to be installed within Teams to make the experience productivity-rich and these additionally installed third party ‘collaborative apps’ will also allow users to manage Asana projects or even build custom applications that best suit XYZ company’s needs, as mentioned in a report by Engadget.
As an update, Microsoft is previewing Teams with a more Fluid Framework that will allow work components like text field, table or list to be easily copied to another Teams conversation or any app from the Microsoft Office 365 suit. This new framework will significantly enhance the overall productivity on MS Teams and most importantly, users can edit the documents in real-time as well, shifting the focus from the traditional productivity framework to tiny bits of collaborative resources that can easily be shared across platforms.
Furthermore, Microsoft is also working on adding media streams on Teams which will enable real-time translation, real-time transcription and real-time note-taking, according to the announcements made at Build 2021 keynote. As mentioned before, Teams already allows third-party collaborative applications to be installed within the application and it could hamper the privacy of the workplace. The windows maker is taking action on this issue by allowing IT admins to control how applications use the given resources.
Teams is also allowing whiteboard apps to take over the main window on the platform. This will allow users to scribble ideas and thoughts onto the whiteboard in real-time, together as colleagues. It is similar to the traditional whiteboard meetings or classroom teaching, except it’s digital.
On the other hand, market competitors like Google are also playing around and making its workplace suits more advanced and capable for users. Google is also pushing for major collaborations and this is where Microsoft might actually prove to be a better workplace productivity application than any other in the industry.
