Microsoft has finally lifted the veil on their Slack competitor, which will be known as Microsoft Teams.

Teams, like Slack, is a chat-based work-space. Since this product is from Microsoft, it will rely on you having an Office 365 account.

As of the November 2nd, Teams is available as a preview to Office 365 customers in 181 cuountries, and 18 languages. As mentioned this is for Office 365 customers, but at this time, that is limited to Enterprise and Business customers.

Why develop a tool like Teams? Microsoft sees that there has been tremendous change in how teams communicate with each other, as well as tremendous opportunity opportunities to improve communications even further.

Should Slack be worried? I think they should, and apparently are since they felt the need to take a full page ad out in the New York Times. With Microsoft Teams having full integration into Office 365, which is a clear leader in this space, the ability to integrate with you existing workflows will be or should be seamless. Here are a few reason Microsoft mentioned in their blog post helping to drive that message home.

• Exchange is the undisputed leader in corporate email and according to Gartner has “80 percent share of companies using cloud email with revenue above $10 billion.”
• SharePoint provides intranets and content management solutions to more than 200,000 organizations and 190 million people.
• Yammer is the social network for work, enabling cross-company discussions for 85 percent of the Fortune 500.
• Skype for Business provides real-time voice, video and conferencing and hosts more than 100 million meetings a month.
• Office 365 Groups is our cross-application membership service that makes it easy for people to move naturally from one collaboration tool to another.

Teams is expected to be out of preview by early 2017. Check out the full post on the Office Blog!