Microsoft Teams: Education and Government have to wait
Microsoft pulled back the covers on Microsoft Teams, their answer to Slack, in New York today. For more information about Teams, take a look at the official blog post on the Office blog as well as Brad Sam’s article over at Petri, “Microsoft Unveils Teams, Its Slack Competitor.”
I admit that I’ve never used Slack before and haven’t been chomping at the bit for yet another collaboration tool. After watching the announcement, however, I’m interested in giving Teams a try. Microsoft mentioned only commercial customers this morning, so I asked our campus account rep when we would be receiving Teams. She said:
Unfortunately Microsoft Teams is not available to Education and Government customers at this time. We have started investing engineering work to ensure future readiness for Education and Government, and will communicate roadmap after commercial GA. I will keep you posted.
I hope that engineering work doesn’t take too long, because this looks like Teams could be a useful tool here at our university.
Update Nov. 3, 2016: I received additional info from my rep this morning. She passed along an FAQ they states:
Microsoft Teams will come to EDU tenants, but the timeline has not been locked yet. At this time this is all the information that we have.
While we wait, here are links to training along with the official introduction video for Teams.
- Introducing Microsoft Teams (in Preview) (Microsoft Virtual Academy)
- Microsoft Teams: Step-by-step intro for using, enabling and managing the experience (Microsoft Mechanics)
- Microsoft Team Spaces (Microsoft Tech Community)