Published 07 October 2020

Abstract

Microsoft Teams, announced in late 2016, has a flagship role in the Microsoft 365 communication, collaboration, content, and activities (3CA) domain. It also has a subtly strategic role across Microsoft’s family of cloud services, being built on Azure and offering strong synergy with LinkedIn and Dynamics 365.

Teams was already Microsoft’s fastest-growing business app before the 2020 pandemic, and the abrupt global shift to remote working and learning has led to explosive Teams usage growth. Most Teams users as of mid-2020 probably considered Teams a hybrid competitor to Slack for team channel-based chat and Zoom for audio/video calls and meetings. In both contexts, Teams also replaced earlier Microsoft 3CA apps, most notably Skype for Business.

There is much more to the rapidly evolving Teams 3CA value proposition, however. Teams began as a rushed-to-market competitive response to Slack, which, when launched in 2013, demonstrated that a modernized and mobile reincarnation of Internet Relay Chat resonated with email-overwhelmed workers.

But by serving as a streamlined 3CA desktop across Microsoft’s cloud services and embracing Microsoft’s newfound commitment to substantively supporting all leading enterprise platforms (not just Windows), Teams has consolidated, simplified, and modernized Microsoft’s 3CA capabilities. It also serves as the primary user experience for activity automations built with the Microsoft Power Platform, going beyond communication capabilities to address elaborate collaboration workspaces, workflow, and a new wave of AI-powered content and knowledge management services.

This report builds on the 3CA market overview defined in TechVision Research’s “Communication, Collaboration, and Content: Shifting to Contextual Activities” report to explain how Teams addresses 3CA market dynamics and how Microsoft customers can gain the most value from their Teams deployments.

Executive Summary

Microsoft’s product family focused on the communication, collaboration, content, and activities (3CA) domain over the last few decades has been something of a kitchen sink of partially integrated and overlapping apps and services. Outlook and Exchange grew to dominate enterprise messaging, but SharePoint’s market trajectory has been more like that of Lotus Notes: a powerful and widely deployed content/collaboration platform that was routinely leapfrogged by smaller specialists and often loathed and avoided by end users.

Microsoft Teams started as Microsoft’s competitive response to the surprising enterprise momentum established by Slack, which, when introduced in 2013, was essentially a new implementation of Internet Relay Chat with modern companion mobile apps. Slack clearly resonated with email- and meeting-overwhelmed enterprise employees and put more pressure on SharePoint’s already strained 3CA value proposition.

Thanks primarily to a combination of a clear product vision and fortuitous timing relative to the scope and maturity of Microsoft Azure infrastructure services, however, Teams has rapidly evolved and it is now the flagship Microsoft 365 focus for the full spectrum of 3CA capabilities. Teams is proving to be very effective in competing with communication-focused alternatives such as Slack and Zoom as well as with Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), now Microsoft’s only remaining comprehensive 3CA competitor. Teams is also the primary desktop environment for Microsoft’s collaboration, content, and activity automation capabilities.

This report explains how Microsoft Teams rapidly expanded from serving as Microsoft’s rushed-to-market “Slack killer” to becoming the hub of its 3CA user experience, consolidating and modernizing Microsoft’s 3CA capabilities and significantly raising the bar for 3CA competitors.

Starting with a tour of primary Teams end user features for IRC-styled channels and chat along with audio/video calls and meetings, the report continues with explanations of Teams building blocks including teams, tabs, templates, apps, and activities. Teams administration and architectural considerations are also reviewed. The narrative continues with an overview of challenges addressed by Teams, both enterprise customer 3CA challenges and product and competitive strategy challenges with which Microsoft has struggled in the 3CA domain.

The report concludes with recommendations for enterprise planners seeking to fully leverage the new 3CA opportunities facilitated by Microsoft Teams. As a preview, it’s important to understand that an enterprise commitment to Microsoft 365 makes Teams a no-brainer decision. Teams should also be expected to continue evolving and expanding rapidly, but with less disruption than, for example, what was experienced with major releases of SharePoint over the last 20 years. Effective Teams deployments require investments in Teams administration, templates, apps, and end user education. Teams enterprise customers should also plan to insist Microsoft continue playing well with others, including integration with widely deployed Microsoft cloud app competitors such as Salesforce and Workday.

As a high-level preview, the answer to the question posed in the report title is both of the above; Teams is both a safe enterprise 3CA bet for Microsoft enterprise customers and provides a strong incentive to commit to the full Microsoft cloud platform family.

Touring Teams

This section provides an overview of Teams and its capabilities, including highlights of Teams-related announcements at the Microsoft Ignite 2020 conference. If you are already familiar with Teams, you might still find a few surprises in the overview, as Teams is something of a chameleon.

A few quick Teams terminology tangents, before jumping into the tour:

• Microsoft used a doubly unfortunate naming convention with Teams. First, the thing a Teams user creates is a team, so the app and the thing created with the app have the same name. This leads to “Teams teams”, a clunky expression upon which Microsoft Word’s grammar checker frowns. Second, the “team” term doesn’t impart the full scope of what’s involved when a new Teams team is created; it would have been more accurate to call Teams teams workspaces, as they serve as shared containers for a wide range of 3CA services and resources.
• Microsoft has also created some confusion with its naming conventions for its productivity-focused cloud offerings. It started with the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), essentially offering online versions of Exchange Server and SharePoint Server, and later expanded the offering with licenses to the native Office apps and additional services, creating Office 365. More recently, Office 365 was rebranded Microsoft 365. For the purposes of this report, if you’re familiar with Office 365, just assume Microsoft 365 implies Office 365 with a revised set of complex license options designed to entice you to sign up for the highest-end version.
• Some Teams-integrated Microsoft apps have also gone through a few name changes, even though Teams was only released in early 2017. The original Flow app, for example, has been renamed Power Automate, and the original Planner app has been expanded and is in the process of being renamed Tasks. These changes reflect a theme we will revisit throughout this report: Microsoft Teams is evolving very rapidly, and it is serving as an impetus for Microsoft to consolidate and streamline its extensive collection of 3CA apps and services.

Our brief tour will cover the primary Teams capabilities, some Teams administration features, and a high-level overview of the underlying platform architecture upon which Teams was built.

As a final pre-tour consideration, note that Microsoft Teams, like Slack, is free. Teams used in conjunction with Microsoft 365 offers more advanced features (see this Microsoft page for details about the free version, and this page for a Microsoft 365 Teams feature comparison). The Teams experience for users with consumer Microsoft accounts as of late September 2020 was primarily limited to the mobile Teams app (installation guidance included “If you are looking for audio and video calling from your desktop, Skype is the best option.”), but Microsoft’s strategy for Teams is clearly focused on 3CA ubiquity.

Slack-Like (IRC-Like) Channels and Chat

Teams was announced in late 2016 as a competitive response to Slack, which is primarily used for channel-based chat conversations. Slack, in turn, can be considered a modernized reincarnation of Internet Relay Chat (IRC, created in 1988). Both Slack and Teams offer IRC conventions including:

• Multiple channels for conversation topics: you might have a marketing team in Teams, for example, with channels for product updates, customer issues, and competitive news
• Multi-threaded chat conversations within channels: supporting conversation topics and replies, along with the ability to embed multimedia (e.g., images, Office documents, and polls) and support for social conventions such as liking messages and @-mentioning other team members; conversations outside of team channels (direct messages and ad hoc group conversations) are also supported
• Bots: the ability to engage in conversations with apps as well as other (human) team members, with a wide range of options for integrating and interacting with apps
• Slash commands: shortcuts for common actions such as /busy to set your status to busy or /mentions to see where you have recently been @-mentioned

An example of the Teams chat user experience:

Figure 1: Microsoft Teams Chat Conversations (source: Microsoft)

As suggested in the example, Teams supports both desktop and mobile device platforms with a consistent user experience. Teams can also be used in browsers; indeed, Teams is essentially a modern web-based app, and the native Teams apps are thin, platform-specific wrapper layers.

To help users stay on top of Teams activities, an activity view consolidates notifications across teams, channels, and other interaction contexts. Teams also offers a wide range of notification setting options for personalization. For notification categories such as personal mentions, likes/reactions, and team role changes, for example, you can opt to receive banner notifications and/or email notifications, to show the notifications in the activity feed, or to disable notifications.

As an example of the Teams-triggered Microsoft product line consolidation theme, Teams has replaced Skype for Business for both team chat channels and audio/video calls and meetings.

Audio/Video Calls and Meetings

One area in which Teams has significantly leapfrogged Slack is for real-time calls and meetings. While Slack supports basic audio/video calls and meetings, Teams essentially started with the real-time communications capabilities Microsoft developed over the last couple decades and rapidly innovated with new real-time features after Teams, like Zoom, saw explosive usage growth due to the 2020 pandemic.

Together mode is an example of a Teams meeting innovation. As suggested in the example below, together mode provides a means of virtually recreating shared meeting spaces, with a variety of configuration options (e.g., simple conference room settings as well as the theater-style example below). Meeting participants are live – not just static icons – and Microsoft’s AI mapping technology is used to detect and display meeting participants’ faces and shoulders. This capability has also been used to showcase NBA game virtual audiences.

Figure 2: Microsoft Teams Together Mode (source: Microsoft)

Microsoft has been able to leverage longstanding partnerships with vendors that provide devices for meeting rooms, and offers its own meeting-related hardware products such as the Surface Hub (see this Microsoft page for an overview of Teams-compatible device categories).

Teams also supports phone calling with the Microsoft Phone System, and offers a variety of direct routing and calling plan options for seamless telephony integration. This domain is one facet of Microsoft’s expanding competition with Zoom, which also offers a variety of telephony services.

You may have noticed a pattern emerging so far, in our Teams tour:

• Microsoft developed (or acquired) a broad and deep set of 3CA-related technologies and services over many years, ranging from conversational platform services to specialized hardware for elaborate virtual meeting scenarios
• The Teams product engineering group was able to leverage the technologies and services to rapidly add new innovations and leapfrog competitors such as Slack
• The technologies and services aren’t exclusively associated with or bundled into Teams, however; they’re also available in other Microsoft app contexts (and to developers building on Microsoft’s Azure platform) in collections such as Azure Communications Services, as touted by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during his Ignite 2020 keynote

Teams’ meeting features highlight some of the ways Microsoft is leveraging machine learning technologies. Together mode uses sophisticated image processing to simulate in-person meeting spaces, for example, and a new meeting recap feature uses advanced multi-party speech recognition and transcription.

Figure 3: Microsoft Teams Meeting Recap (source: Microsoft)

Teams, Tabs, and Templates

Up to this point, our Teams tour hasn’t been a major departure from earlier Microsoft apps such as Live Meeting, Lync, and Skype for Business. The chat and audio/video/meeting capabilities are familiar from many communications and conferencing apps, although Microsoft has recently added some innovative features.

Briefly revisiting the communication/collaboration framework from our “Communication, Collaboration, and Content: Shifting to Contextual Activities” report, however, establishes the context for explaining how Teams also provides a wide range of capabilities traditionally associated with more workspace-oriented collaboration apps (i.e., not often associated in successful communication channel-oriented apps).

Figure 4: Common 3CA Channels, Workspaces, and Services

Following this framework, asynchronous communication in Microsoft 365 is split between Outlook/Exchange and Teams; synchronous communication and synchronous collaboration are addressed by Teams as well; and most of the related information architecture and infrastructure services are provided by a mix of Exchange, SharePoint, and Azure (such as Azure Active Directory and the new Azure Communications Services). SharePoint has traditionally been Microsoft’s primary focus for asynchronous collaboration, but now Teams is taking the user experience lead for that context as well.

Tabs are the mechanism with which teams can be extended into general-purpose collaborative workspaces. In the example below, for example, a team channel has tabs for conversations, files, 2018 Roadshow, and Usability Priorities. The Files tab, selected in this example, shows how Teams makes files associated with a team/channel seamlessly accessible, along with a set of file-related actions.

Figure 5: Microsoft Teams Files Tab (source: Microsoft)

It’s also easy to add new tabs to a channel; clicking the + to the right of the channel tabs list presents a list of apps available for new tabs (we’ll review the app options in the next section). Tabs added in the desktop or browser Teams versions also appear in the Teams mobile app.

This type of asynchronous collaboration workspace capability can also be used in Teams conversations that aren’t associated with a team/channel. You can add app tabs to 1:1 personal conversations and group conversations, for example, a handy option if you have ongoing conversation contexts that aren’t associated with a project managed in a Teams team.

You can also add (and “pin”) a subset of the app types to the personal navigation frame on the left-hand side of the Teams app (under the Activity, Chat, Teams, Calls, and other built-in app icons).

The ability to use teams with multiple channels and tabs is very flexible and powerful. It can also be a bit overwhelming, however, in terms of knowing which channels and tabs might be most useful for a given collaborative project. To help manage this complexity, Microsoft recently rolled out the ability to use team templates. Each template comes preconfigured with sets of channels and tabs for a specific group or project type. Microsoft provides a set of templates and enterprises can also create and manage custom templates.

Figure 6: Microsoft Teams Templates (source: Microsoft)

The team templates can be quite elaborate and provide a useful activity-focused jumpstart option for people new to Teams and its capabilities.

Apps and Activities

The workspace-related capabilities in Teams can be further extended with the use of app integrations, making it possible to use apps and related resources in team tabs. Clicking the plus sign to the right of a set of tabs (to create a new tab within a team/channel) presents an app type list:

Figure 7: Microsoft Teams App List

An app tab includes both an app type and a related resource, such as a specific Excel workbook, OneNote notebook, or Power BI dashboard. A team for a product group, for example, might include an Excel workbook detailing the latest pricing strategy, a OneNote notebook for sharing new product ideas, and a Power BI dashboard reporting the latest product sales.

With most app types, the embedded resources are dynamic and interactive, working with the latest source files and data. In other words, Teams benefits from the significant investments Microsoft made during the last decade to make its primary Office apps usable in browser apps (which are in turn embedded in Teams tabs), including powerful capabilities such as real-time collaborative authoring.

The Website app can be used to embed any web page in a Teams tab. If your enterprise has a collection of legacy, on-premises SharePoint Server apps, for example, and you’re not in a rush to rebuild those apps in Microsoft 365, you can use the Website app to share the legacy apps via a Teams tab.

Hundreds of Teams app options are presented by default, which can be a bit overwhelming; fortunately, Teams administrators can manage the collection of available apps within an enterprise.

There are some relatively new Microsoft apps in the top part of the app list, which Microsoft unsubtly reserves for its own apps. Planner and Lists provide two examples of how Microsoft’s app strategy has evolved to be more responsive to changing customer and competitive requirements.

Microsoft Project continues as Microsoft’s flagship app for professional project managers, but many enterprises have found less feature-rich (and expensive) alternatives such as Basecamp and Trello compelling for employees who need relatively basic project management features. Planner, introduced in 2015, offers capabilities popularized by apps such as Trello (which is also available as a Teams tab option, incidentally) and also, unsurprisingly, supports Project integration.

Lists, announced in mid-2020, is a lightweight database app with multiple view options, similar to popular cloud database apps such as Airtable — very similar, in terms of its general user experience (see, e.g., Airtable accuses Microsoft of copying its service), but, at least initially, lacking Airtable’s feature depth.

Lists also follows the awkward Teams naming convention; Lists lists are created within Teams teams.

Teams users creating new Lists tabs are presented with a set of options for creating new lists, including starting with a blank list, importing from an Excel workbook or other file type, and a collection of template options:

Figure 8: Microsoft Lists Templates

If you’re wondering what the counterpart to the Planner => Project pattern (modern and lightweight app to complement a traditional, full-featured app) is for Lists, incidentally, Microsoft Access would be the logical expectation, but it’s not, for reasons we’ll revisit in the Activity Anarchy section of this report.

Apps can also be used in non-team Teams contexts, for personal needs and for conversations that take place outside of team channels conversations. Apps can be added to the icon set on the left-hand side of the Teams app for personal needs (below the Activity, Chat, Teams, and other built-in icons). Adding the Planner app in this context, as an example, presents a view of all tasks across teams in which the Teams user is a member, their to-do list from managed in Outlook, and any tasks captured in Microsoft’s To Do app, providing another example of Microsoft leveraging Teams as a means of consolidating and streamlining its offering set.

On another name-change note, incidentally, Planner will soon be renamed “Tasks”.

App templates can also be created and used in Teams, making it easy to embed apps created with tools such as Microsoft Power Apps or the Teams bot capabilities. More Teams app details, including several examples, can be found on this Microsoft documentation page.

Teams-based apps can also go beyond the app embedding examples described so far in this section to include seamlessly embedded and web-centric user experiences. Microsoft introduced several such options during Ignite 2020 including:

• A wellbeing and productivity insights dashboard featuring integration with the Headspace meditation app (scheduled for 2021 availability)
• A “virtual commute” experience to help employees establish and manage work/personal time boundaries (also slated for 2021)
• A home site app option that integrates an enterprise’s SharePoint intranet site into Teams

You can find more details about the wellbeing/productivity and virtual commute features in a Microsoft post titled “New tools can help boost wellbeing and soothe unexpected stresses of working from home”; the home site option is described in a Microsoft post titled “Collaboration, communication and knowledge sharing with Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Project Cortex”.

Figure 9: Microsoft Teams Insights Home Dashboard (source: Microsoft)

For the last part of our Teams user experience tour, we’ll take a brief look at the activity-related capabilities in Teams. In keeping with overall 3CA market dynamics, the general idea with activities is to keep the focus on things users want to automate without being required to deal with traditional app development tools and techniques.

The general activity automation model was popularized by vendors such as IFTTT and Zapier. Microsoft adopted a similar approach in its Flow tool, introduced in 2016, and Flow was integrated with Teams in 2018. In yet another name change, incidentally, Flow was subsequently renamed Power Automate, but the “Flow” term was still used in the Teams user interface as of late September 2020. Since the workflow activities created with Power Automate are called “flows”, the name change eliminates the awkward term “Flow flow”. It’s possible the app will simply be called “Automate” within Teams, incidentally, with the full “Power Automate” term applied to the stand-alone desktop app/tool.

Within Teams, Power Automate flows can be used in team tabs, bots, and for personal apps (i.e., a flow can be added to the left-side icon bar of the Teams app). The Power Automate app starts with a set of templates for common activity automation scenarios (with the original Flow name used in this example):

Figure 10: Microsoft Power Automate Templates

Users are then guided through a step-by-step model to provide details required for the selected template. An example, using the “Notify the team when a new response is submitted” template:

Figure 11: Microsoft Lists Templates

Most Teams users seeking to automate activities for personal or team needs will likely leverage templates. For more elaborate activity scenarios, Power Automate is part of the Microsoft Power Platform, which also includes Power Apps, Power BI, and Power Virtual Apps. Power Platform details are beyond the scope of this report, but it is useful to consider this big-picture perspective from Ignite 2020:

Figure 12: Microsoft Platforms and Products (source: Microsoft)

To recap: Teams is the primary user desktop for communication and collaboration in Microsoft 365. Both Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 can be automated with the Power Platform, which is built on Microsoft Azure, and all the above are encapsulated within Microsoft’s identity, security, management, and compliance services.

Teams Admin

As this brief tour has highlighted, Teams has a broad scope and a wide range of extension points. To make it possible for enterprises to keep Teams deployments optimized for their needs, Microsoft 365 (in levels E3 and higher) includes a Microsoft Teams Admin Center for fine-grained control of Teams configuration options, templates, and more.

This diagram, from an Ignite 2020 update titled New Capabilities for Teams Management, captures the high-level scope of Teams admin controls:

Figure 13: Teams Admin Center Function Categories (source: Microsoft)

The Teams Admin Center interface is consistent with the overall Microsoft 365 admin model, making it easy to navigate and configure Teams options. Some admin options are available directly in the Teams app, such as managing team membership and member privileges. The Teams Admin Center is used for more detailed admin options, ranging from call plan details to available team templates and apps.

Figure 14: The Teams Admin Center Interface (source: Microsoft)

Teams can also be managed from the PowerShell command line, a useful option when addressing requirements such as bulk migration and integration actions.

Teams Architecture: A 3CA Chameleon

You may be wondering, after this whirlwind tour, how is came to be that Microsoft, the company that needed years between (often disruptive) major releases of products such as SharePoint Server, was able to quickly deliver an app as modern and flexible as Teams.

As explained in a late 2016 New York Times article titled Microsoft Puts Slack in Cross Hairs With New Office Chat App, Microsoft started Teams development in mid-2015 and announced it in November 2016, stunning Ignite 2016 attendees who had been told, a mere five weeks earlier, that SharePoint was still the center of Microsoft’s collaboration and content strategy. So how was Microsoft able to quickly create and deliver a competitive response to Slack that, in less than four years, was transformed from a multi-platform IRC-styled chat app into an expansive hub for nearly all 3CA needs, one that, even before its market uptake was dramatically accelerated by the 2020 pandemic, became the fastest-growing business app in Microsoft’s history?

The answer, semi-facetiously referenced in the title of this report, is that Teams is essentially a 3CA desktop built on a wide range of Microsoft cloud frameworks and services. Although BPOS, the first version of what eventually became Microsoft 365, was built on hosted versions of Microsoft’s on-premises Exchange and SharePoint Server 2007 products, Teams was built after the foundation of Microsoft’s cloud for productivity apps had been rearchitected atop its mature Azure cloud platform.

Teams can be considered something of a chameleon. Some Teams users consider it primarily a channel-based group chat app, while others think of it primarily as a Zoom-like successor to Lync, Live Meeting, and Skype for Business. For Teams users more focused on sharing project resources, the app feels like a much more accessible and modern replacement for SharePoint sites. For “citizen developers” focused on automating business processes, Teams provides a platform for sharing and managing workflow apps. For end users who have found consumer-oriented automation tools such as IFTTT and Apple Shortcuts useful, Teams provides a template-driven way to automate everyday work activities that can span a wide range of apps and services.

From an architectural perspective, however, as previously noted, Teams is essentially a relatively lightweight and web-centric desktop app that orchestrates a wide range of frameworks and services available in the Microsoft 365 and Azure cloud platforms. Here’s a partial Teams architectural overview from a Microsoft solution poster:

Figure 15: Teams Architecture (source: Microsoft)

As this diagram suggests, Teams is built primarily on OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and the browser-based versions of the Office apps.

In other words, there’s a lot of cloud service orchestration behind what appear to be simple Teams user actions. Elaborating on the architecture diagram above with some Teams activity examples:

• Creating a new team automatically generates a corresponding Azure Active Directory group and a team-specific SharePoint Online site (more precisely, creating a new team creates a new Microsoft 365 Group, which in turn creates related Azure AD and SharePoint resources)
• Files shared within teams are managed in SharePoint Online
• Files shared outside of team channels, in 1:1 or group conversations, are managed in OneDrive for Business
• Teams meetings and calendars are managed in Exchange Online
• Meeting recordings are managed in the Microsoft Stream service
• For compliance requirements, chat messages are archived in Exchange Online (not depicted in the diagram)
• Microsoft Planner (soon to be renamed Tasks, as previously noted) is also part of the Teams service orchestration stack, consolidating task views across multiple Microsoft app domains; there’s also a new Approvals app (not depicted in the diagram) that presents a consolidated view of approval workflows from SharePoint, Power Automate, Dynamics 365, and other apps that integrate with the Approvals app
• Since all underlying services referenced so far automatically populate the Microsoft Graph, all Teams actions and resources are also captured in the Microsoft Graph, making it possible to deliver Teams usage pattern analytics and insights
• App resources created in Teams tabs, such as shared Excel workbooks, lists, and team OneNote notebooks, are also stored in SharePoint Online; app resources used outside of teams are managed in OneDrive for Business (Microsoft Lists, incidentally, is currently built on the SharePoint Online-managed list services that have been available for several years, enhanced with new SharePoint Framework-based user experiences)
• App resources managed in non-Microsoft 365 apps are stored elsewhere; for example, using the Box app in Teams provides the ability to work with files managed by Box, and Trello projects embedded in Teams via the Trello app are managed in Atlassian’s cloud (on AWS)

Note that the Teams architecture snapshot above is not exhaustive, as, for example, Teams also leverages Azure Active Directory, Communication Services, and AI Builder capabilities. A deeper dive on Teams/Azure Active Directory details is beyond the scope of this report, but additional information can be found in Microsoft documentation resources including Microsoft 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams and Authorize guest access in Microsoft Teams.

To recap, Microsoft was able to rapidly evolve and expand Teams because the Teams app is more of a desktop viewer of resources and services that are parts of the Microsoft 365 and Azure cloud platforms. Teams may appear to be a multifaceted app to end users, but it’s more of a web-centric, service orchestrator desktop than a traditional monolithic app.

This architecture also means Microsoft can swap underlying frameworks and services without disrupting Teams users or apps built in Teams. Microsoft announced at Ignite 2020 that meeting recordings will be managed in SharePoint rather than Stream in the future, for example. It’s likely Microsoft will consolidate and modernize other parts of the Teams architecture over time, perhaps using its Cosmos DB service, which hadn’t yet launched when Teams was introduced, for chat runtime management in a future version of Teams.

This concludes our Teams tour. We’ll next turn to an overview of challenges addressed by teams, starting with enterprise customer challenges.

Enterprise Challenges Addressed by Teams

This section provides an overview of several longstanding enterprise 3CA challenges that can be addressed with Teams.

The 3CA Paradox of Abundance

The history of enterprise apps and services focused on 3CA domains, reviewed in detail in our “Communication, Collaboration, and Content: Shifting to Contextual Activities” report, has been something of a long and winding road.

Most enterprises are currently struggling to manage large and cumulative collections of 3CA apps and services, ranging from legacy on-premises products to modern and often narrowly scoped cloud apps from a variety of vendors. Enterprise employees also routinely use consumer-oriented apps and services to accomplish work activities, often much to the chagrin of their IT administrator colleagues.

The paradox of abundance theme has also been a challenge for enterprises primarily or exclusively focused on Microsoft apps and services, a topic we’ll dig into in more detail in subsequent sections.

Common consequences of the 3CA paradox of abundance include overwhelmed users and reduced productivity, as enterprise employees suffer from decision fatigue (too many 3CA options, and not enough clarity about which to use for a specific need), a pattern which generally results in more email (with files shared as email message attachments) and meetings.

Teams can constructively address the 3CA paradox of abundance by consolidating and streamlining 3CA capabilities in a unified 3CA desktop user experience. Rather than toggling between a collection of often poorly integrated and partially overlapping 3CA apps/services, Teams users can personalize their Teams desktop and manage all of their 3CA activities in a single app, with a consistent user experience across all of their preferred devices and platforms.

Security: Actual Results Have Varied

The historical 3CA app paradox of abundance has been conducive to what has euphemistically been called “inadvertent over-sharing”, with enterprise employees using email or insecure chat channels to share files. Many enterprises have also had challenges with employees signing up for low-cost cloud apps to work around what they perceive as gaps in IT-sanctioned apps, often creating significant security and content control vulnerabilities.

Having enterprise content and other resources out of IT control in apps and services often hosted by cloud app providers with unproven business models (and often questionable privacy policies) is clearly conducive to major problems.

Teams, when used effectively, can address these security and privacy challenges. As noted in the high-level Microsoft architecture diagram in Figure 12, everything that happens inside Teams is managed under consistent identity, security, management, and compliance controls. Microsoft 365 administrators have fine-grained control, and the Teams Admin Center can be used to control all Teams-related features.

Teams and its companion apps also populate the Microsoft Graph, making it possible to monitor and analyze Teams user activities for potential security policy issues.

Some smaller and specialized 3CA vendors may suggest Microsoft is engaging in classic FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) tactics, when it promotes Teams’ end-to-end security value proposition, but there is no question that Microsoft has a structural and strategic security competitive advantage with Teams by virtue of controlling everything from the underlying cloud data center regions to the end user 3CA desktop environment (in Teams rather than Windows).

Content Coordination and Control

Content management has been another “actual results may vary” domain for decades. Most enterprises rely on a mix of high-end and generally expensive enterprise content management (ECM) suites (e.g., OpenText), relatively simple file sharing and synchronization services (e.g., Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive), and web-centric collaborative authoring apps (e.g., Atlassian Confluence). While this mix-and-match deployment pattern can effectively address domain-specific needs, including ECM for highly regulated scenarios such as clinical drug trials and wiki-based apps for brainstorming projects, it creates significant challenges for enterprise-wide content coordination and control.

Although Teams is not a magical panacea for enterprise content challenges, it offers several advantages over earlier mix-and-match deployments:

• For highly structured content workflow scenarios, Teams can leverage Microsoft 365 Content Services for requirements traditionally associated with high-end ECM platforms, but with a seamless user experience that doesn’t require app context-switching
• For everyday file sharing and collaborative authoring, Teams builds on SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and the web versions of Office apps such as Word to facilitate permission-based content collaboration within team channels
• For more wiki-centric content collaboration, Teams users can add wiki or OneNote app tabs for content needs that are more effectively addressed with beyond-the-basics hypertext rather than more print-centric traditional document models
• All Microsoft 365 content management domains can be securely included within the scope of Microsoft’s search service and populate the Microsoft Graph, making content more accessible and useful in context
• Microsoft is also leveraging Azure-based machine learning models for content classification, entity extraction, and other advanced content management needs

The Microsoft FastTrack program also provides solutions for Microsoft 365 customer enterprises migrating from Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and other sources.

You may well be skeptical about the potential for Teams to address current enterprise content coordination and control challenges, if you have extensive experience with Microsoft’s earlier and generally disappointing product offerings in this domain; we’ll revisit that topic in the Content Chaos; SharePoint Sprawl part of the next section.

Microsoft Challenges Addressed by Teams

The previous section highlighted longstanding enterprise 3CA challenges that can be addressed with Teams. This section approaches Teams from another perspective, exploring broader Microsoft product family challenges that Teams holds significant potential to successfully address.

For context-setting: this may be hard to imagine today, as Microsoft and Apple periodically trade places as the world’s most valuable company, but Microsoft was in a far more precarious position when Satya Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer as Microsoft’s CEO in early 2014. A brief review of related challenges and how Teams is playing a pivotal role in addressing them will explain both how Slack was able to become a surprisingly strategic competitive threat to Microsoft and how, ironically, Microsoft’s aggressive response to Slack, with Teams orchestrating the charge, has left Microsoft better prepared to compete not just with Slack but also with other 3CA and cloud competitors ranging from Amazon to Zoom.

Platform Plight; Desktop Dilemma

Microsoft’s traditional, on-premises enterprise platform control likely peaked around 2005. At that point, Windows PCs were the enterprise devices most employees used at work, and Internet Explorer (IE) dominated the Windows browser market. The first wave of smartphones was emerging, and Windows Mobile was a sufficiently strong contender to lead Google’s co-founders to acquire Android as an attempt to neutralize the potentially existential competitive threat that Microsoft could leverage Windows Mobile to lock Google out of smartphone information services.

Less than ten years later, Microsoft’s control of the enterprise computing and communication domains was facing unprecedented challenges. The Windows business was under siege, with Windows 8 floundering and Windows Phone (the successor to Windows Mobile) vanquished by Android and iOS. Microsoft’s browser monopoly had abruptly ended, as Google Chrome and Firefox displaced IE. Google was also able, during this period, to establish G Suite as the first major competitor to Microsoft Office in a generation, in part because G Suite offered a more modern and web-centric user experience than the traditional native-client (and primarily Windows-focused) Office apps.

Microsoft’s platform plight after 2005 is significant in the Teams context because it also led Microsoft to lose control of the enterprise desktop user experience, when its enterprise platform monopoly disintegrated. Enterprise employees spending an increasing amount of their workdays using non-Microsoft smartphones and tablets (along with Macs, often favored by people using iPhones and iPads) were far more likely to be receptive to mobile-first, cloud-first, and social-centric 3CA apps such as Basecamp, Slack, and Trello. Microsoft had even inadvertently assisted the new wave of 3CA competitors by shifting its Office apps to standards such as Open XML, during the peak of its enterprise market dominance.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella observed, in his Ignite 2020 keynote, that sixty percent of PC users’ time is spent in browsers. In the enterprise today, that likely means Chrome or Firefox, although IE’s successor, Microsoft Edge (ironically now built on the Google-bootstrapped Chromium open source project) is gaining momentum. It’s a safe bet that much of the remaining forty percent of PC users’ time is spent in Outlook, as Microsoft’s control of the enterprise messaging domain has remained strong, but its monopoly in the enterprise user desktop experience has been dramatically reduced since 2005.

Teams is a game-changer in this context because it offers a modern and consistent 3CA user experience across leading enterprise device types and platforms. TechVision Research has learned, in working with many large organizations on Digital Enterprise strategies, that user experience is consistently the most important factor in engaging internal and external shareholders, so this aspect of Teams is very significant. Teams is also highly complementary with Outlook, and the ability to seamlessly embed other apps and resources in Teams means most enterprise employees using Teams will spend less time in browser clients and more time working with related resources via Teams.

To revisit the architectural themes referenced earlier in this report, Teams was essentially built on the shoulders of giants, especially (and increasingly) Microsoft Azure and the Microsoft 365 family of apps and services. Microsoft’s long-term investment in making its Office apps accessible in modern web-based environments (i.e., the Office Online app family) was another pivotal Teams enabler. But Teams pulls those and other resources together in a new 3CA-centric desktop model that provides a compelling option for enterprises that were previously struggling to manage the 3CA paradox of abundance and highly variable security offered by smaller 3CA competitors.

Content Chaos; SharePoint Sprawl

Many enterprise decision makers are likely to be skeptical about Teams’ potential to productively address longstanding content coordination and control challenges, as Microsoft frankly has had an underwhelming track record in advanced content and knowledge management solutions.

It introduced an elaborate Knowledge Network for Office 2007, for example, that was focused on expertise location and other then-popular “enterprise 2.0” capabilities. Content services have long been included with SharePoint, but the SharePoint content architect and end user experiences, prior to the recent availability of SharePoint Framework, were problematic (in many respects appearing like circa 1996 web pages). As a more recent example, Microsoft launched an elaborate “Project Infopedia” at Ignite 2015, again seeking to address market needs for more advanced content and knowledge management, but Infopedia, like the SharePoint Knowledge Network nearly a decade earlier, was cancelled before reaching general availability.

Teams, however, is likely to help Microsoft leapfrog its content competitors. As previously noted, Teams is more a desktop-style app that orchestrates a range of cloud services than it is a traditional monolithic 3CA app; it just happened to come along when Microsoft’s cloud platforms had evolved to serve as stable, scalable, and secure collections of related services. Teams also both feeds and leverages the Microsoft Graph, facilitating a wide range of content analytics features.

Teams end users and 3CA-focused template and app developers will also benefit from forthcoming content-related capabilities including Project Cortex, which essentially represents a restart of the knowledge management and expertise location capabilities Microsoft product planners had in mind for the company’s earlier content/knowledge management initiatives. Project Cortex was introduced in late 2019, and the first Cortex deliverables were announced at Ignite 2020 in a new SharePoint Syntex offering.

Syntex is likely to succeed where Infopedia and other earlier Microsoft initiatives failed in part because Syntex leverages Azure-based machine learning (ML) models. In a pattern similar to the Azure Communications Services leveraged by Teams, Microsoft has organized (in its AI Builder) a variety of custom and prebuilt ML model types on Azure, including category classification, entity extraction, form processing, object detection, and prediction. The content-centric ML services are used in Syntex and are also available to content and app developers through Power Apps.

Microsoft’s Fluid Framework is another new technology that will extend Microsoft’s beyond-the-basics hypertext content capabilities. For the purposes of this report, you can essentially consider Fluid Framework to be a modern and internet-centric means of delivering the types of interactive and dynamic compound document model experiences Microsoft had in mind for its Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technology, when it was introduced in 1990 (i.e., when many of the Microsoft engineers now working on the Fluid Framework hadn’t yet been born…).

Microsoft introduced an app called GigJam in 2015 for highly dynamic and interactive collaboration, starting with a canvas on which users could create and share a variety of content types (e.g., spreadsheets and graphs). GigJam was previewed at Ignite 2015 and quietly retired two years later after failing to build much market momentum, but the technologies developed and user model insights Microsoft gained through GigJam likely influenced Fluid Framework. Overall, today’s cloud- and internet-centric platforms have finally made the seamless content collaboration model embodied in GigJam a practical reality, and Microsoft has open-sourced Fluid Framework, so it won’t be constrained by proprietary licensing issues like OLE was.

Microsoft SharePoint was another major Microsoft 3CA challenge before Teams was introduced. The on-premises SharePoint Server product line had circuitously evolved to be a bit like Lotus Notes/Domino in many respects: a 3CA platform with a lot of historical baggage, critical dependencies on a partner ecosystem (e.g., to address workflow and document management gaps), and a generally unhappy end user community.

TechVision Research’s “Communication, Collaboration, and Content: Shifting to Contextual Activities” report provides a detailed overview of how, by the time Microsoft introduced Teams in late 2016, the SharePoint franchise had long been stagnating and struggling. Microsoft appeared to be hedging its SharePoint bets at its Ignite 2015 conference, for example, with a new Office 365 Groups service for lightweight team 3CA needs, Infopedia, GigJam, and Delve (a desktop and mobile search app spanning SharePoint and other Office 365 content services).

Fast-forwarding from Ignite 2015 to Ignite 2020, Office 365 Groups essentially provided the membership and container foundation for Teams, facets of Infopedia have resurfaced as part of Project Cortex, GigJam’s innovative 3CA model appears to have directly inspired the Fluid Framework, and the search capabilities envisioned for Delve, extended with the Microsoft Graph, are available throughout Microsoft 365.

There’s no question that SharePoint is still strategic to Microsoft, but it’s important to understand that “SharePoint” is a brand name that’s now used with two very different Microsoft offerings:

• The on-premises and increasingly legacy SharePoint Server product line, which has been evolving since SharePoint Portal was introduced in 2001
• SharePoint Online in Microsoft 365, which has a subset of SharePoint Server features and essentially represents a fresh start on Azure infrastructure services and the SharePoint Framework (SPFx)

Another reason you can be confident SharePoint will remain a significant part of Microsoft’s 3CA story is the fact that Jeff Teper, “the father of SharePoint” from its inception, except for a Microsoft corporate strategy role during 2014 – 2015 (a time period culminating in what some likely saw as an existential crisis for the SharePoint community at Ignite 2015), is the Microsoft Corporate Vice President responsible for SharePoint, OneDrive, and (since February 2020) Teams.

From an enterprise Microsoft 365 user perspective, however, it’s likely SharePoint will be considered primarily the name for the enterprise intranet, with related resources increasingly accessed through Teams. In other words, SharePoint is likely to be increasingly invisible to Microsoft 365 users and developers, and relegated, from a direct end user experience perspective, primarily to a relatively narrow intranet portal role. Even Syntex, despite being branded “SharePoint”, will likely be considered a Teams feature by most Microsoft 365 users.

Activity Anarchy

Turning to activities, Microsoft’s app and tool offerings have been another challenge domain. There has been considerable disruption in Microsoft’s enterprise end user apps and developer tools over the years with, in the past, no central focus for automating activities.

On the app side, Microsoft’s offering set has often reflected either its org chart (i.e., internally competitive Microsoft product divisions) or actions taken to address competitive threats. At Ignite 2015, for example, Julia White, then leading the Exchange business, introduced Office 365 Groups, with heavy emphasis on Exchange-provided services and OneDrive, but without much of a role for SharePoint. Microsoft also introduced the Delve app at Ignite 2015, built by its FAST search team in Norway, and in some respects at odds with the traditional SharePoint value proposition.

Examples of product strategy detours in the competitive reaction domain include Groove Networks (acquired in 2005), which was acquired in part to deliver a competitive alternative to the offline-work features in Lotus Notes (as well as to “acquihire” Lotus Notes and Groove Networks creator Ray Ozzie, who subsequently replaced Bill Gates as Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect). Groove was later repurposed as SharePoint Workspace, an app quietly retired after a single major release failed to garner much enterprise enthusiasm.

Microsoft’s 2012 Yammer acquisition, focused on neutralizing a competitive threat from then enterprise social leader Jive, was another competitive reaction detour. In theory, SharePoint Server was then Microsoft’s comprehensive enterprise social solution; in reality, SharePoint simply wasn’t competitive with Jive. Yammer’s role in Microsoft’s product family was ambiguous from the start, further complicated by Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype a year earlier. Microsoft Lync, then its chat and real-time communication client, was rebranded as Skype for Business, with confusing Yammer overlap.

These Microsoft dynamics resulted, before Teams was introduced, in an Office 365 3CA app paradox of abundance. An enterprise employee in late 2016 starting at the Office 365 home page, for example, would by default be presented with a view such as:

Figure 16: late 2016 Microsoft Office 365 Home Page

This type of app overload was conducive to the decision fatigue pattern previously referenced, leading many users to default primarily to Outlook and email messages with file attachments. And here’s a snapshot from a “what to use when” guide from Microsoft partner 2toLead, captured at Ignite 2015:

Figure 17: An Office 365 What-to-Use-When Guide, mid-2015 (Source: 2toLead)

This Consumer Reports-inspired approach reflected a great deal of Microsoft product line insight, and a related 2toLead Ignite 2015 session was very popular, but it also represented a level of complexity that was likely to overwhelm most end users.

Teams made it possible for Microsoft to consolidate and streamline its many 3CA-related apps and services. Indeed, Teams represents a superset of the Office 365 apps listed in the figures above (e.g., adding Approvals, Lists, and Tasks), but does so in a user experience desktop model that’s far more approachable and usable.

In addition to wrangling the many Microsoft 3CA-related apps into a coherent desktop user experience, Teams can also be used to encapsulate and share legacy 3CA applications, adding them as Teams tabs (using the Website app). This option makes it possible to migrate to Teams from legacy 3CA apps as business needs justify.

Microsoft’s tool set for non-professional developers has also been a bit of a kitchen sink. SharePoint “citizen developers” seeking to build workflow or database list-centric apps on SharePoint, for example, might have started with:

• Native SharePoint forms tools, which, until SPFx launched, were very basic
• SharePoint Designer, a SharePoint companion tool for HTML editing and workflow definitions
• InfoPath, an XML forms tool that was essentially all that survived from an ambitious project chartered to reimagine Office in XML, circa 2000
• Programmability features in the Office apps such as Visual Basic for Applications and Visual Studio Tools for Office
• Access, Microsoft’s traditional PC desktop database
• The short-lived Access Services service that integrated Access and SharePoint (i.e., used SharePoint as the backend for shared Access databases, retired after one major release)
• An expansive ecosystem of third-party tools created to fill gaps in the Microsoft product set, including forms and workflow tools from vendors such as AgilePoint, K2, and Nintex
• Most likely: a mix of several of the above

With the shift to the Microsoft Power Platform, as suggested in Figure 12, all the tools in the list above should be considered obsolete. With Power Automate (a.k.a. Flow) and Power Apps at the center of Microsoft’s new strategy for no-/low-code app developers, Microsoft has delivered a consistent and coherent app dev framework that works across leading enterprise platforms and makes it possible for developers to focus on their activities rather than juggling a variety of Microsoft and third-party tools that weren’t designed to work together.

Cloud Competition

Last but certainly not least in our list of Microsoft challenges addressed by Teams is Microsoft’s strategic need to compete with other cloud platform vendors, especially AWS and Google Cloud Platform, and cloud line-of-business app vendors, especially Salesforce and Workday.

Although Microsoft was arguably a bit late to the enterprise cloud business, relative to Amazon and Google, it has made massive investments in its network of data center regions and related technologies. Satya Nadella noted at Ignite 2020 that Microsoft now has sixty-one data center regions around the world, more than Amazon or Google.

Teams complements Microsoft’s cloud businesses in several respects:

• Microsoft 365: Teams provides a compelling 3CA desktop and creates a strong incentive for Microsoft 365 enterprise customers to migrate from competitive alternatives such as Slack and the 3CA apps within G Suite.
• Azure: Teams builds on a large (and growing) collection of Azure services and has strong synergy with Microsoft’s Azure-based Power Platform. Enterprises using Teams build resources in Azure Active Directory and the Microsoft Graph, for example, creating strong incentives for enterprise customers to favor Azure rather than AWS or Google Cloud Platform in hybrid deployments.
• LinkedIn: the desktop, app, and automation features in Teams can be productively extended with LinkedIn integration, ranging from a variety of recruiting and other human resources activity domains to the use of LinkedIn profiles in Microsoft 365 person profiles (profile cards).
• Dynamics 365: Teams is also highly complementary with Dynamics 365, especially since both are built on the Microsoft Power Platform. Microsoft is likely to seamlessly integrate additional activity and analytics domains across Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 in future versions of its Approval and Tasks apps, for example. Microsoft app cloud competitors such as Salesforce and Workday will also be able to integrate with Teams, but they won’t have the end-to-end integration available across Microsoft’s cloud offerings.

Overall, although Teams began as a rushed competitive response to Slack, its modern architecture and Microsoft cloud services integration made it possible for Microsoft to rapidly expand it from Microsoft’s “Slack killer” into a foundational part of Microsoft’s overall 3CA and cloud value proposition, significantly raising the bar for all of Microsoft’s cloud competitors.

Conclusion and Recommendations

To revisit the question posed in the title of this report, it’s clear that Microsoft Teams is a safe enterprise 3CA bet. It’s also clear that Teams pulls Microsoft 365 customers further into Microsoft Azure, and offers strong synergy with LinkedIn and Dynamics 365.

To recap with a 3CA-centric summary of Teams:

• Communication: Teams provides chat (in channels and 1:1/group) along with audio, video, and meeting capabilities. It is highly complementary with the enterprise messaging features in Outlook/Exchange, and indeed directly leverages many Exchange Online services.
• Collaboration: each team builds on Azure membership services and a collection of content/collaboration services in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business. Teams makes it much easier for Microsoft 365 users to share and collaborate on resources created with the Office apps (e.g., Word documents, Excel workbooks, SharePoint presentations) along with resources managed in more recent apps such as Lists and Tasks. As with Slack, effectively leveraging Teams makes it possible for enterprises to dramatically reduce their dependencies on email and difficult-to-control email message file attachments.
• Content: Teams enables users to focus on their content rather than the apps used to create the content, and the forthcoming Fluid Framework will further extend the beyond-the-basics hypertext capabilities in Teams. Teams users can focus on information resources in context, collaboratively leveraging content without worrying about juggling multiple apps or copying/pasting content among apps. The ML model-based content processing capabilities in Project Cortex will also extend Teams-related content management and analytics.
• Activities: Teams provides a consolidated activity stream across Microsoft 365 apps and leverages underlying Microsoft 365 social services to simplify engaging others in activities (e.g., @-mentioning them to bring them into an activity context). Integration with Power Automate and apps such as Approvals and Tasks also greatly simplifies enterprise workflow needs that were previously often addressed with a mix of difficult-to-integrate tools.

The rest of this section includes some high-level recommendations for enterprises considering Teams as the foundation of their enterprise 3CA strategy.

An Enterprise Microsoft 365 Commitment => Teams is a 3CA No-Brainer

Teams is a fundamental part of the Microsoft 365 suite, and the scope of its role for enterprise 3CA needs will continue to expand over time. As such, enterprises using Microsoft 365 should plan to fully leverage Teams as their 3CA desktop focus.

Enterprises not fully committed to Microsoft 365, in contrast, should avoid (or minimize their use of) Teams, even though a free version of Teams with many useful capabilities is available, because Teams implicitly represents a major commitment to Microsoft’s cloud platforms.

There have been many Microsoft-related “suite versus best-of-breed” debates over the years, and enterprise decision-makers with extensive on-premises SharePoint experience, in particular, may be apprehensive about placing a strategic bet on Teams, since many facets of SharePoint Server, in particular, were so far from best-of-breed that they often warranted the purchase of theoretically redundant third-party apps and services (or Microsoft acquisitions of overlapping apps/services such as Yammer). Teams is built on a modern and extensible architecture, however, and does not entail functional compromises relative to Slack or other alternatives.

Microsoft 365 enterprise customers who have already deployed Slack should plan to migrate employees to Teams, as Teams is most useful when all employees rely on Teams for their 3CA needs, fully populating the Microsoft Graph. Microsoft provides Slack migration guidance and also offers Teams deployment planning resources within its FastTrack program.

To get full 3CA value from Teams, enterprises should also migrate from earlier 3CA Microsoft products. Skype for Business has been obsoleted by Teams, for example, and enterprises should also look for opportunities to either migrate existing Yammer communities to Teams or to make Yammer communities that can’t currently be migrated to Teams accessible within Teams (team membership was limited to 10,000 in September 2020, for example, although the limit was to be raised to 25,000 by the end of 2020; Yammer supports much larger communities).

As a final high-level Microsoft 365-related Teams consideration, it’s important to understand that, even though Teams is freely available, its capabilities, including security features, are a function of an enterprise’s Microsoft 365 license level. Microsoft is unsubtly trying to entice enterprises to sign up for its E5 license level, and E3 is the minimum level required for many Teams security and compliance features. See this page for a matrix of Teams features by Microsoft 365 license level and this page for a complete overview of Microsoft 365 enterprise licensing options. On another Microsoft 365 “freemium” note, cloud-based phone system capabilities are also licensed separately and are detailed on the Microsoft Teams Calling page.

Check Google Workspace and Google Cloud Platform Assumptions

Many enterprises have extensive Google Workspace (the revised and renamed product formerly known as G Suite) deployments, and Google has established Google Workspace as the only remaining full-spectrum enterprise competitor to Microsoft 365 over the last several years. Google Workspace offers a complete set of 3CA capabilities to compete with Microsoft 365, and Google Cloud Platform provides the underlying infrastructure services that compete with corresponding 3CA services in Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft is productively addressing new 3CA opportunities with Teams, and the onus is now on Google to demonstrate that it can consolidate and streamline corresponding Google Workspace capabilities to effectively compete with Teams-led Microsoft 3CA improvements. The Google G Suite: Now Under New Management section of TechVision Research’s “Communication, Collaboration, and Content: Shifting to Contextual Activities” report provides an overview of some recent developments that highlight recent Google Workspace updates, and we would not be surprised to see Google accelerate its 3CA efforts, perhaps including some strategic acquisitions (with Slack being the most obvious candidate).

Enterprise decision makers need to understand, however, that the latest phase of Google/Microsoft 3CA competition is not simply an issue of productivity app file formats (both can use Open XML) or directory synchronization. User experience is going to play a pivotal role, and if Teams proves more compelling to enterprise end users (and app developers) than the new Gmail app-led Google client counterpart to Teams, Microsoft will establish a significant competitive advantage and many Google customer enterprises will likely opt to start migrations from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365.

Plan for Rapid Teams Architectural Evolution

Enterprise planners who are accustomed to traditional on-premises product release cycles, often spanning multiple years in the case of products such as SharePoint Server, should expect a very different upgrade cycle for Teams. Like other cloud service-based apps, Teams is evolving very rapidly, in terms of both its user experience and its underlying architecture. Microsoft will also continue to add complementary apps, as it did recently with Tasks, Lists, and Approvals.

The Teams admin center can be used to manage Teams-related settings and resources, so updates don’t need to be counterproductively abrupt or disruptive, and most of the changes since Teams was released in early 2017 have been feature-additive or entailed relative superficial changes (with some still in process, e.g., changing the name of Flow to Automate). The recent addition of Teams templates will also be helpful in this context, as enterprises will be able to build collections of standard Teams templates, specifying the channels and apps to be available for different 3CA workspace needs.

As Microsoft’s 3CA desktop focus, Teams will also continue to benefit from Microsoft’s investments in Microsoft 365 apps and services such as its Fluid Framework for collaborative hypertext authoring and the Project Cortex AI-based content and knowledge management capabilities.

Teams administrators and app developers should also expect Teams to continue evolving. Teams (along with underlying service platforms such as Exchange and SharePoint Online) is now entirely based on Azure storage services, for example, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see Microsoft leverage some of its recent database innovations such as Cosmos DB in a future Teams update, perhaps as a much larger-capacity alternative to the currently capacity-constrained SharePoint-based Lists app. However, Microsoft is likely to continue supporting Teams Microsoft Graph APIs, and to offer migration guidance if necessary, as it did for the Skype for Business to Teams migration.

It’s important to note that Teams, as a rapidly evolving and ambitious Microsoft engineering effort that started in 2015 and builds on a number of underlying frameworks and services that are also rapidly evolving, still has some occasional quirks when orchestrating its underlying service frameworks. When creating a new team channel, for example, the corresponding Exchange-managed channel mailbox isn’t immediately accessible, suggesting there’s some room for improvement in terms of Microsoft 365 service coordination. This type of quirk will likely be addressed as Microsoft continues to expand its network of global data center regions and to refine the cloud-based versions of Exchange and SharePoint on which Teams is built.

Invest in Teams Admin, Templates, Apps, and End User Education

Enterprise 3CA deployments in the past have often been managed in what might be considered a modified “Field of dreams” philosophy: if you deploy it, they will come. In other words, the general approach was to make a collection of 3CA-related apps available and to let employees default to the combinations of tools that were most familiar and productive for them.

This approach did not often work well, in part because, as noted in the Content Chaos; SharePoint Sprawl and Activity Anarchy sections of this report, Microsoft, for much of the last twenty years, had a habit of routinely disrupting and expanding its 3CA offering set, often through large acquisitions that frankly shouldn’t have been necessary if their original product strategies were working as planned.

Teams provides enterprises with the opportunity to do a 3CA reset. A successful Teams deployment, however, entails planning and management.

As a starting point, Microsoft provides extensive documentation on Teams deployment planning. The documentation includes pragmatic guidance such as onboarding early adopters and monitoring usage and feedback before finalizing an enterprise-wide rollout.

It’s also useful to invest in enterprise-focused templates for common 3CA needs. These vary by industry and don’t need to be elaborate or expensive to be productive. There’s also likely to be a vibrant community for Teams template resource and best practice sharing.

In addition to team templates, it’s also good to explore options for Teams app templates to address common process-centric needs within your enterprise. This can start with an inventory and review of existing workflow apps that can be modernized and streamlined in Teams. This is another deployment planning domain for which Microsoft provides detailed documentation.

End user education is another important Teams investment area. As Teams is something of a chameleon app, employees may not discover all its most useful capabilities on their own, and high-level Teams training can help users understand 3CA scenarios for which Teams can be useful. Large enterprises with workforces spanning multiple generations can also benefit by providing training based on employee experience patterns; for example, employees who have historically worked primarily via email, in-person meetings, and phone calls are likely to have different Teams perspectives than people relatively new to the workforce who may have used Slack, Google Docs, and other modern apps in school.

TechVision Research offers workshops and consulting for enterprises seeking to take full advantage of the new 3CA opportunities made possible through Microsoft 365 and competitive 3CA alternatives. Please see our Consulting Services overview for additional details.

Insist Microsoft Play Well with Others

Microsoft has undergone a multifaceted transformation since Satya Nadella became CEO during early 2014. In its most aggressively competitive early days, Microsoft had a reputation for not playing well with others, engaging in practices such as making key Windows APIs available to Microsoft product groups but not to other software vendors building on Windows, providing itself a structural competitive advantage for apps such as Microsoft Office. Microsoft also developed a reputation for treating non-Microsoft platforms such as macOS as (very distant) second-class citizens for Microsoft apps.

During Nadella’s CEO tenure, in contrast, Microsoft has sincerely embraced open source, including major acquisitions such as GitHub and open-sourcing substantial technologies such as its new Fluid Framework. The company has also dramatically improved its support for non-Microsoft platforms, with Teams and other modern Microsoft apps available on Android, iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Microsoft also offers a Linux client for Teams, a practical necessity if Microsoft hopes to make Teams successful in all education and research domains.

Enterprises deploying Teams should provide clear feedback to their Microsoft account teams if they see evidence that Microsoft is reverting to any of its previous-generation hardball competition tactics with Teams. For example, if your enterprise is committed to Salesforce or Workday and observes Microsoft playing favorites for Dynamics 365 in Teams, that should be flagged as unacceptable. Dynamics 365 should compete on its own merits relative to incumbent market leaders such as Salesforce and Workday, not based on Microsoft insider advantages for integrating Dynamics 365 with Teams or other parts of Microsoft 365.

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