Microsoft Teams

PROS

• Highly customizable
• Tightly integrated with other Microsoft Office apps
• Plentiful integration options
• Included with Microsoft 365 business accounts and Windows 11

CONS

• Most effective only in a Microsoft-centric environment
• Compartmentalized design gives an air of formality and rule-following that may inhibit open dialogue
• Can be difficult to find the conversations you need
• Not all features available in testing

MICROSOFT TEAMS SPECS

ALL SPECS

Teams, the business messaging and video conferencing software from Microsoft, is like IKEA's self-service section. If you know how it works, you probably make your way through it with ease. If you're a customer coming down from the showroom, however, it could take a while to find the right aisle, bin, and shelf where you'll finally grab a nondescript box that hopefully contains what you need. But who really knows? Everything is in its place, as long as you know the system for finding it. Likewise, Microsoft Teams is orderly and hyper compartmentalized, but frustrating to navigate. You may have to dive four layers deep (Teams > Team > Channel > tab) to find a conversation. Every time you create a new Team within Teams, the number of places you might have to go to find information or answer a question increases exponentially. Microsoft Teams has powerful features, copious tools, and innumerable places to hold conversations with colleagues, but you may find yourself asking, "Where the heck are they?"

Teams isn't just a chat app. Microsoft has done significant work outfitting teams with video conferencing and voice over IP (VoIP) telephony features. Given its potential, Teams is a top collaboration choice, but typically only for groups already using Microsoft products. And that doesn't mean you'll like it. Similar to other Microsoft products that are highly customized before rolling out to a massive organization, how well Teams works depends a lot on your org's specifications.

With Teams, there's a real love-it-or-leave-it sensibility. Those in the leave-it camp might look to Slack, the Editors' Choice pick in the team messaging category. Its design makes communication faster, more open, perhaps messier, but also more fun.

What's New in Microsoft Teams?

With the launch of Windows 11, Teams comes built right into the new operating system. In Windows 11, a Teams icon shows up by default in the toolbar, and you can use it to send a message to anyone on any device, so long as you have their phone number or email address. According to Microsoft, you should be able to send a message to anyone from any instance of Microsoft Teams, not just Windows 11, and add people to a group chat via SMS. However, in testing, it didn't work. After typing in a standard US phone number, Teams kept displaying the message "We couldn't find any matches."

In February 2021, Microsoft announced an "employee experience platform" called Microsoft Viva, which we still could not access when testing the app in April 2022. Viva is essentially a fancy and interactive upgrade to the intranets of yore. Instead of being a webpage with in-house information for company employees, it has interactive elements that change for each person, sort of like a dashboard. For example, new hires might see training modules and other learning modules designed for onboarding employees. We have to withhold judgment on Viva until we can access it.

Other relatively new features include the ability to use templates to create new Teams. Templates come with premade channels, user settings, and installed apps for specific use cases, such as crisis response and event management. Microsoft supplies templates that you can use out of the box or customize, and there's an option to build your own templates as well. One thing missing is the ability to create private channels in the templates, however.

You've long been able to set a personal status to let other people know when you're available, busy, or temporarily away from your workstation. Now, there's an option to appear offline even when you're logged in. That way, you can access information in your Teams account without telling anyone you're online. There's also a simplified global notification setting, the ability to muffle background noises, and read receipts, which are enabled by default in group chats of up to 20 people. Admins can disable it.

How Much Does Microsoft Teams Cost?

There are two ways to get a Microsoft Teams account. One is to sign up for a free account, and the other is to have a Microsoft 365 Business or Enterprise account, where the app is included.

The free Teams account requires a Microsoft account or ID of any kind, such as a login for Outlook.com. With this account, you can invite up to 299 more people to join you, although everyone must also have a Microsoft account to use the app. You get all the primary features and only miss out on unique integration with business Office apps, such as scheduled meetings, Microsoft SharePoint access, and things of that nature. You also don't get a full roster of support or security and compliance tools for administrators. Free users can have video and audio calls up to 60 minutes with as many as 100 participants, and you get all the standard features such as screen-sharing and custom backgrounds.

The paid version of Teams that comes with Microsoft 365 adds all the tight integrations with Microsoft Office apps, plus 24/7 support and business-grade tools for administration, security, and compliance. You can have up to 300 team members, unless you have the enterprise edition, which is good for as many people as you need.

In conclusion, Teams costs a lot less than Zoom, less than Slack but not by a huge margin, and about the same as Flock and Twist. But Microsoft gives you other Office apps and storage space included for the price, making the value quite high.

Microsoft Teams' Difficult Interface

Microsoft Teams is easiest to use as a desktop app for macOS or Windows. The web app is nearly as good as the desktop apps. There are mobile versions for Android and Apple iOS devices that work fine when you're on the go, but the desktop and web apps are easier (a truly relative word) to navigate.

On the left side of the interface, you get not one but two left rails for navigation, plus several tabs in the main window, and number of which depends on your organization's configuration. The tabs may include Activity, Chat, Teams, Meetings, Calls, Files, and any apps you've installed. At least you can customize the sidebar a little by pinning your favorite apps and chats to the top. 

Let's focus on the tab called Teams, since it's the heart of communication for a team messaging app.

Teams: They're Best Restricted

When you click Teams, you see a list of teams, or different groups of people. This setup is unlike Slack, where Channels are in the primary navigation bar. Microsoft Teams instead has you first compartmentalize people into Teams. You might have an all-company team, a Sales team, human resources (HR) team, or some other group. You can create any teams you want, but fair warning: the more teams you create, the harder it becomes to navigate the app. As a result, it pays to plan your team structure out in some detail and restrict the number of users who can create new teams.

Within each team you have channels. You might assume that the channel is where people on the same team communicate via text chat synchronously or asynchronously, but you'd be wrong. A channel is merely the next layer of organization. Each channel has its own tabs, which you can customize, too. A tab called Posts is likely where most team communication happens, but you can also have tabs for wikis, Microsoft Word documents, OneNote notes, and more.

To understand the extent of Team's compartmentalized nature, we must dive yet one layer deeper. When you write something in Posts, it shows up in a feed. Anyone who reads your post will see a little Reply link at the bottom of it. Using the Reply function to a post creates a thread, whereby all additional comments to that post become contained below it. Visually, it's quite different from Slack's threads, which shoot off to the right, or even Twist's set up, which packages conversations into an email-like view.

In any event, Teams collapses long threads to minimize the amount of space they use. You can toggle open a thread any time, but they collapse by default at a certain point. The result is a highly organized interface, but one that feels like it has a lot of rules. By contrast, Slack often feels like a place where people are less inhibited to speak up, not that everyone uses that lack of inhibition wisely. Teams doesn't have that vibe. Instead, because of its structure, it feels like there are rules to follow.

Customizing Team Spaces

Any time you create a new channel, you get three default tabs: Posts, Files, and Wiki. You can keep all three, delete some, or add new tabs. The number and type of tabs you can add is tremendous. In addition to those already mentioned, there are tabs for Microsoft Excel, PDFs, YouTube, Evernote, Trello, Zoho CRM, and many more.

You can customize these spaces to a fine level, creating a space to store all the knowledge, raw information, and insight your team collectively keeps. Let's say for example an ad-sales team has a Posts tab for ongoing discussions, a Wiki filled with talking points for selling clients, an embedded Excel sheet showing rates for ads, and one more tab that points to a web page showing real-time news related to the business. That could all be in one channel. The ad-sales team could in fact have multiple channels within their team, perhaps a second one for brainstorming and a third for watercooler conversations.

The downside of this arrangement is the real risk that people may not see all the conversations that are relevant to them because they have to check several tabs within each channel to make sure they aren't missing anything. A global notifications icon helps with this a little, but there's always a fine balance between allowing all notifications and simply being able to keep one eye on an ongoing conversation.

No matter how you view it, the fact of the matter is that Microsoft Teams gives you tight control and the power to organize and deeply compartmentalize team interactions, which is in stark contrast to the free-wheeling group stream-of-consciousness you're likely to find in a Slack channel. Is that good or bad? It depends how your team members communicate best and how much communicating you want them to do..

Important Included and Missing Chat Features

As a team messaging app, Teams has many features you'd expect to see, plus a few that are unique. Among the ones you'd expect are things like being able to turn any word into a searchable tag by adding a # to it. Or how about an edit button? After you write and post a message, you have an option to edit it, which most messaging apps let you do now, though it wasn't always the case. Pinning any post saves it to the top of a sidebar, letting you keep important details in view. If you want to keep a channel private, it's easy enough to leave it as invite-only. Those features are all fairly standard.

If you're used to other business messaging apps, you may lament the lack of a "@here" option to alert anyone who's part of a team or group message of an important post.

One of Teams' more unusual features is the ability to write one message and then post it to multiple channels. For people working in internal communications, it helps to broadcast important information quickly to those who need to see it. It also seems handy given how easy it is to lose track of where information lives—just put it everywhere.

Another nice feature is calendar integration because here in Teams, it's complete enough that you can actually schedule appointments from the view in Teams, whereas in some other apps, you get a read-only view.

Video Conferencing, Audio Calls, and Screen Sharing

Most team messaging apps now offer video calling, audio calling, and screen sharing, either natively or through third-party add-ons. Microsoft Teams does, too. It works on the desktop, web, and mobile device clients, though on mobile devices, you must install the Teams app to join a call. You can't do it from a mobile browser.

You can make one-on-one calls or group calls with audio only or video, with screen sharing and group whiteboard options, too. In Teams, you can start a call anytime you see a video camera or phone icon. Click someone's name, and there it is. If you call someone and they don't answer, you can leave a voicemail. When viewing Posts, there's a camera icon in the upper right corner to start a call and invite everyone in that Channel to join you.

When you see a video camera icon next to a conversation, it means there's a video call in progress that you can join. No one has to dial you in, so to speak. Just click or tap and go. Video calls in Teams are separate from Skype conversations, so you don't have to worry about the back-end server implications of your Skype or Skype for Business accounts.

Teams does something unusual with the chat history of a video call. It saves it. The chat of your previous video calls resurfaces next time you talk to the same people. I can see how that would be useful in recurring meetings.

In testing, calls held up all right but the video quality had a noticeably lower resolution when viewed in the web app as opposed to the desktop app.

For scheduling calls, Teams has some nice tools and integrations with Outlook not found in most other team chat apps. You can schedule a call in advance, for example, and get an alert before it begins. You can schedule recurring calls, too. With the appropriate permissions, you can view someone's Outlook calendar to find a good time for a meeting. There are also options to designate an organizer or host prior to group calls.

Video Calling Features

While participating in a video meeting, you can choose whose video feed you want to see and pin it in your view. It works for multiple speakers at a time. So if you join a large group meeting and you want to watch your manager's reactions, you can.

Teams has several features that are less common in team messaging apps and more typical in video conferencing software, such as Zoom Meetings and ClickMeeting. For example, participants can virtually raise their hands during a meeting and they can apply a virtual background. Teams gives you background images to use, but you can also upload custom images. While some people see virtual backgrounds as a purely fun or aesthetic feature, they also help protect your privacy.

Teams has a few more video calling features worth noting. For example, you can record meetings so people can watch them later as videos. A virtual whiteboard is included where participants can brainstorm together, or you can make the whiteboard read-only and use it more for presentation purposes. Another advanced feature is the ability to give control of your keyboard and mouse to another person when you're sharing your screen, which is helpful when you want someone else to control your slides while you present. You can also use it for light tech support. Teams offers breakout rooms, a feature generally used in big meetings to send smaller groups into private pow-wows and then have everyone reconvene as one large group. Zoom has all those features, too, but Slack doesn't.

A more advanced accessibility feature is live captioning with speaker attribution. Another accessibility feature worth pointing out is that the app is available in 53 languages.

You can't live stream to a social media site, such as Facebook or YouTube. However, there is a "yet" attached to that statement, according to a Microsoft representative, and there are other ways to leverage social media in Teams at large. For example, let's say you have a training video hosted on YouTube that you want to share with a Channel. You can connect Teams to YouTube and create a tab that hosts the video for colleagues to watch right in the Teams interface.

Other Options for Meetings and Calls

For offices that have been with Microsoft for a while, it might take some time to figure out how you want your call system to work, as there are multiple options. For example, some features from Skype for Business have been rolled into Teams. Currently, you can connect Skype and Teams to some degree, but only for the consumer version of Skype. For business users, how Skype and Teams work together depends on how you set it up (see the link for details).

Teams does support VoIP calling features, in that you can call anyone with a phone using Microsoft's cloud-based PBX. When you click the Calls tab in Teams, you have a choice to open a dial pad and dial a number. The calling feature supports softphones on desktop and laptop computers and on iOS and Android devices. It also supports a limited number of desk telephones. Integration is still evolving, so be sure to read the company's document about Microsoft Teams Phone, however, if this is a particular concern.

More advanced options for producing video calls let you turn them into professional-looking broadcasts. Tap into the Network Device Interface support, and producers can convert each presenter's or speaker's video into a discrete video source that can be used in the video streaming production tool of your choice. According to Microsoft, other advanced back-end changes in the works will give administrators more options as to how video is managed, such as restricting outgoing or incoming video and managing bandwidth.

Video calling capabilities in most team messaging apps don't match everything you get from a dedicated video conferencing service, though Microsoft Teams Meeting comes close. If you'd rather use another service, you can integrate your Teams account with several video calling apps, including Zoom, BlueJeans, Cisco Webex Meetings, and others. PCMag's Editors' Choices in this category are Zoom, Webex Meeting, and ClickMeeting, although that last one isn't currently supported by Teams.

If instead you're looking for a full-featured cloud PBX for your company, our current top picks are RingCentral MVP and Intermedia Unite. However, as mentioned, Microsoft now has its own dedicated cloud PBX space, Microsoft Teams Phone. While it isn't a top pick overall in our VoIP tests, it's still another attractive option for seriously Microsoft-centric shops since it, too, has a lot of integration with the rest of the Microsoft 365 stack, including Teams.

Notifications and Curbing Distractions

As with other team chat apps, whenever someone mentions your name with an @ symbol or sends you a direct message, you receive a notification. You can also receive notifications for replies to conversations you start, replies to conversations that you've joined, any activity in channels that you follow, when certain team members appear as Available, Unavailable, Offline, and more. You can customize any option you enable so that you see a banner message, banner message and email, or only an update in the feed.

Teams' notification settings aren't bad, but Slack has richer options, and they are a huge selling point for that service. You can enable and disable dozens of options. For example, Slack has a Do Not Disturb setting that you can run on a set schedule. Another option tells Slack to push notifications to your mobile device instead of the desktop when you've been inactive on the desktop for a period of time, and you get to choose how long.

The ability to selectively silence notifications is crucial for a team chat app's efficacy and an individual's ability to focus. With both Teams and Slack, you can turn notifications on or off for each channel. You must go to each channel to change it, however, rather than the application settings where all the other notification options live.

Speaking of distractions, Teams supports GIFs from Giphy, embedded images and polls, and other screen candy that makes the space more interactive, visually stimulating, and either fun or terribly annoying. Without leaving the app, you can create memes by clicking on a design, cartoon, or image and plugging in text. You can use emoji in your channel names if you like. Slack doesn't even allow for uppercase letters or spaces in channel names.

Apps and Integrations

Teams can integrate with a long list of other apps and services, though it has especially tight integration with other Microsoft apps, as you might expect. With Office apps, Teams supports integrated real-time content creation with Office Online for free accounts and Office desktop apps for paid accounts.

Integrations work differently depending on which app you choose. For example, if you connect to Asana, you can get updates about activity happening in the work management app as well as create new tasks from the Teams interface.

With other apps, such as those by Microsoft, you pull them into your interface as a new tab. Connect a Microsoft OneNote account to a Channel, for example, and you get a tab that contains one of your notebooks. It's completely interactive as if you have OneNote open in a browser tab.

The only problem, as mentioned, is that Channels can get really busy with too much information, and then it becomes extremely difficult to find what you need.

Squarely a Microsoft Product

Microsoft Teams earns points for being highly customizable, supporting a wide range of apps and services for integration, and hitting all the major features one expects to see in a business chat app. The growing video conferencing capabilities are also attractive. How well it'll work for you comes down to two major points: How your organization sets it up, and how the people in your organization use it. If you're not really diligent with this tool, it becomes a maze of information rather than a source of one.

The organizations likely to use Teams to its full potential are those already heavily invested in a Microsoft workplace. Many of the points of differentiation between Teams and its competitors are how deeply you can connect it with other Microsoft apps. If you're a Microsoft house, you probably already have Teams, so it's really more a question of whether you and your teammates want to use it. 

If you have a choice in your team messaging app, Slack remains an Editors' Choice winner and a favorite among users, despite its high cost. Slack's video calling features aren't the best, however, and so we recommend a different app for that, such as Editors' Choice winners Intermedia AnyMeeting, WebEx, and Zoom.