Topic: Collaboration
Microsoft Teams goes live with new email integration, enterprise bots – ZDNet (Mar 14, 2017)
Last week Google announced its Slack competitor, and this week Microsoft is announcing the availability of its previously announced entry in this space: Teams. One big difference versus Slack is that Teams will be baked into every Office 365 enterprise subscription rather than being a paid standalone product, which should almost immediately make it available to many more people than Slack. In addition, it will be integrated into other parts of Office more fully than Slack itself. The big question then becomes whose implementation of the concept is better, and also to some extent whether people keen to use something other than email to collaborate will look to a startup or the company that actually runs their email – Microsoft is making the argument that it isn’t actually trying to replace email but instead offer another way to collaborate when email doesn’t make sense. To some extent, that actually has more credibility to me than replacing email entirely, which has always seemed a slightly unrealistic goal for Slack.
via ZDNet
Google goes after Slack and splits Hangouts into Chat and Meet – TechCrunch (Mar 9, 2017)
More announcements today from Google’s big Cloud event, with today’s focus being more on the end user tools rather than the infrastructure ones covered yesterday. The big news is that Hangouts is getting a bit more sophisticated, with a more fleshed out version of the meetings app now called Hangouts Meet and becoming a bit more like WebEx, and a second feature set which basically mimics Slack under the Hangouts Chat banner. Google is definitely getting stronger in some of these areas on the enterprise, although it’s surprising to me that we haven’t seen some of this stuff much sooner – Google has been using a version of Hangouts internally for years for its meetings, and I would have thought we’d have seen these more optimized tools long before now. But it’s getting there, and it’s starting to feel like the enterprise side is a lot more logical in its structure and feature set than Google’s consumer messaging and communication apps.
via TechCrunch
Amazon’s new Chime video calling service takes aim at Skype and WebEx – PCWorld (Feb 14, 2017)
Amazon’s most high-profile enterprise offerings are back-end stuff – AWS, obviously, but also a range of other services mostly designed for IT departments rather than the broad base of employees within a business. But it has tinkered with employee-facing services in the past, and now it’s getting into one of those big categories almost every enterprise end user uses (and probably mostly dreads): conference calls. It looks like Amazon has thought this through pretty well – there are a handful of little features which could address specific pain points, and the pricing seems reasonable compared to some of what’s out there too. I’m definitely tempted to try this myself with a view to potentially ditching my expensive and frustrating WebEx subscription. This feels like it could be a gateway to more end user-focused enterprise stuff from Amazon too – much more promising than some of its earlier efforts in this space.
via PCWorld (more on Techmeme)