Microsoft Teams turns one year old, and promotes the vision for smart communications

This week marks the first anniversary of the global release of Microsoft Teams . Teams has since grown significantly in terms of both new features and customer usage. Today, 200,000 organizations in 181 markets and 39 languages ​​use Teams, including AP Moller – Maersk, ConocoPhillips, General Motors, Macy's, NASCAR, Navistar, RLH Corporation and Technicolor with SharePoint Development Company.

Teams for smart communications and collaboration

Last year, Teams evolved and became the ultimate hub for teamwork. Based on the power and scale of Office 365 with over 120 million users, Teams offers collaboration based on chats, meetings, calls and soon full corporate voice communication capabilities. All of this is supported by Microsoft Graph, which enables rich AI capabilities. As part of Office 365, Teams uniquely provides these features on a scale, with corporate-level security and compliance standards to meet the needs of a global business .

To promote our vision for smart communications, we are introducing new Teams features that will be available later this year, such as:

Cloud recording - Allows one-click recording of meetings with automatic recording and timing, allowing all team members to read captions, search the conversation, and play all or part of the meeting. In the future, it will also include face recognition, so that comments can be made to specific participants in the meeting.

Built-in messaging - People who speak a different language will be able to communicate seamlessly with others by translating channel posts and chat.

Voice interaction with Cortana for devices that support Teams - You can easily make a call, attend a meeting, or add other people to a Teams meeting using voice commands in native language. This feature will be extended to IP phones and conference room devices.

Blur video background - Blurring your background during video calls will allow other participants in the meeting to focus on you rather than what is behind you.

Teams Meeting Proximity Detection - This feature will make it easy for you to detect and add a nearby Skype Room System device to any meeting.

Mobile meeting sharing - Meeting participants will be able to share a live stream of video, photos, or screen from their mobile device.

These new features increase the range of new features added to Teams over the past year, such as guest access, new ways to interact with apps, and new meeting and calling features.

Today, we are also introducing new corporate-level calling capabilities to Teams, such as consulting transfer and call assignment and consolidation. We also introduce Instant Routing , which will allow customers to use their existing Teams telephony infrastructure for calls. When you combine a Microsoft Call Schedule or Instant Routing with our Office 365 Phone System, Teams becomes a complete voice communication service. These new features are expected to be available in the second quarter of 2018.

Smart communications for your devices

The hardware plays a crucial role in providing a consistent high quality video and voice experience. We announce that Teams now supports a full range of call and meeting room devices, including the following:

Microsoft Collaboration Devices - The Microsoft Surface Hub is a powerful large-screen all-in-one group collaboration device. Microsoft Teams will be natively supported on the Surface Hub, thus enhancing the Teams capabilities in Surface Hub spaces and meeting rooms.

Conference Room Systems - Lenovo and HP are joining existing Logitech, Crestron and Polycom partners to transform the conference room experience with rich audio, HD video, in-center control and one-click attendance. All Skype Room Systems devices will support Teams meetings.

Connections with existing equipment - Teams will certify new solutions from BlueJeans, Pexip and Polycom to support interoperability for Teams meetings with existing hardware investments.

Office and Conference Phones - New office phones from AudioCodes and Yealink - and new conference room phones from Crestron, Polycom and Yealink - run a native Teams app for a stable and enhanced calling experience.

Mobile Phone Stations - New Plantronics mobile phone stations combine the Teams experience with mobile office features for mobile users.

To learn more about the Teams portfolio of devices and their timeline, visit the Microsoft Tech Community blog .

Developing Teams application ecosystem

No ecosystem would be complete without the applications that make it thrive. We recently introduced a new store at Teams that features a wide variety of tools and services from our partners. Some of the most popular applications among Teams customers are Adobe Creative Cloud, Hootsuite, InVision, Polly, SurveyMonkey, Trello, Wrike, Zoom.ai and many more.

Read what our customers say

As we celebrate our first birthday, the most interesting are the stories of companies like RLH Corporation, Technicolor and General Motors, for which Teams is really changing the way people get in touch, innovate and drive business.

RLH Corporation- In 2014, when Greg Mount became CEO of RLH Corporation, the parent company of various hotel chains such as Red Lion Hotels, GuestHouse and America's Best Value Inn, he changed the company's physique from a local Northwest company to a company with nationwide scope. Since then, RLH Corporation has acquired many hotel chains and grown from 62 to more than 1,100 hotels in just three years. To manage change and cultivate a consistent culture within the company, RLH Corporation began using Teams last year. They looked at other chat-based collaboration tools, but because they were already using Office 365 and Power BI, Teams was the obvious choice. Now, all company employees use Teams. The leadership team has gone from a communication process based on personal contact and print to real-time interaction and data flow.