Microsoft Teams: Office 365 is the tool for Modern Businesses

Microsoft announced Teams for Office 365 subscribers waaaay back in November 2016. A #Slack competitor at heart, but bundled into the Office 365 ecosystem.

At first, I didn’t really understand the value of yet another instant messenger (don’t we already have Skype for Business?) but I’m slowly being won over. The ability to send automated messages to team chats (think alerts or call information from an urgent client call) is where Slack really started to pick up steam, and Teams has included these features.

All of that is neat and is probably worthwhile by itself, but this morning I discovered that Microsoft has included indexing and search of Teams when searching in your mailbox. Wow!

Petri.com explains the newly added feature in this excellent blog post: Teams Adds to the Office 365 Compliance Story

Here’s the key point:

• Team and 1:1 chats are captured in the mailboxes of the participating users. For example, if John and Pat have a 1:1 chat, copies of the chat are recorded in both their mailboxes.
• Contributions made to a chat in a channel are recorded in the group mailbox belonging to the team.

This effectively gives you and your team another way to discover information that is relevant to the task at hand, but it also gives companies a tool to ensure compliance and mitigate risk of E&O exposures. Since chats are logged in the participants mailbox it’s easy to keep all of the information in one place.

Office 365 is really shaping up to be the tool for the modern workplace.