Microsoft Teams, the company’s enterprise collaboration toolkit, has added a massive 12 million daily active users in just seven days; over 1.7 million new users every day over the past week on average. Teams is now tracking 44 million daily users — more than double the 20 million Microsoft reported in November 2019 earnings.
Microsoft revealed the figures today as it rolled out new features including a real-time noise suppression feature (for background noise like conference call participant typing noises, or, presumably, wailing children), a virtual “hand raise” feature, industrial hardware integrations and the promise of a chat pop-out to streamline workflow.
The company also announced a new software licensing scheme for “frontline” workers dubbed “Microsoft 365 F1” that will be rolled out on April 1, 2020.
This will include products like Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Yammer, Stream and Enterprise Security + Management and will cost $4 per user, per month.
Teams, of course, is not the only game in town.
Rival Slack says it has been fielding huge numbers of enquiries from users or potential users about its ability to scale — and says it is ready, willing and able to do so.
Slack is deployed in different AWS data centers around the world to ensure redundancy. The company said “we hold ourselves to a 99.99% Service Level Agreement—no more than 4.3 minutes of downtime per month.”
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Unusually, the company said it had an existing “pandemic playbook” and has been making good use of it.
Remaining somewhat quiet was Facebook for Business, which also offers video conference and other enterprise collaboration tools.
See also: Customer Service Amid a Pandemic: The Good, Bad and the Ugly
