Microsoft Teams is a chat-based workspace in Office 365

Microsoft's answer to Slack, which is Microsoft Teams, was announced earlier today. Microsoft Teams—the chat-based workspace in Office 365—is now generally available in 181 markets and in 19 languages. Since announcing the preview in November, more than 50,000 organizations have started using Microsoft Teams

Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president of Microsoft Office, shared what’s new in Microsoft Teams and talked about how customers are using Office 365 to collaborate and deliver great results.

Microsoft Teams provides a modern conversations experience, with threaded, persistent chat to keep everyone engaged. Microsoft has rolled out many new communication features since preview, including audio calling from mobile devices, plus video on Android, which is coming soon to iOS and Windows Phone. And we’ve addressed numerous customer requests, adding the ability to email a channel, including attachments, send messages with markdown-based formatting, and receive notifications about all posts in a channel.

Microsoft Teams builds on the company's expertise in video, voice, chat and can seamlessly shift between a text platform to voice or video depending on what the team or project needs at the time. This solution allows users to work the way they want and that's pretty powerful.

If you are an Office 365 commercial subscriber, you will gain access to Microsoft Teams today.