When Teams was announced last year, it was a closed shop. Despite Microsoft’s recent plays for the open source community, the Slack competitor was not playing the game. Little changed when Microsoft Teams was globally launched in March. However, since then, Microsoft has slowly been opening its enterprise communication and collaboration tool. This was first evidenced at Build 2017, when the company revealed it will allow developers to create Teams apps and place them in the Office Store. Obviously, Microsoft is making this move to increase adoption rates for the platform. In a similar vein, the company’s roadmap shows that it is also opening integration with cloud storage. At the moment, Microsoft Teams only allows support for the company’s own OneDrive service. Starting the end of June, other third-party providers like Google Drive and Dropbox will be supported. The Office 365 Roadmap discusses how users will interact with these apps: “Users will be able to upload/share files from additional cloud storage services in Microsoft Teams channels and chats. We will provide details on which storage services will be available, by the end of June. This feature will be on by default. To give you more control, each individual cloud storage provider will be configurable in Office 365 admin center; including the ability to enable or disable specific cloud storage services. This will provide flexibility to allow only the options your organization needs to use.”
Microsoft Teams
Since its full launch three months ago, Teams has gained important new features and integrations. Microsoft has added Trello support, Channel Creation for Android, Channel Linking, and video calls on iOS. Teams was launched last year as a direct competitor to Slack. We discussed at the time how the service put Slack under major pressure. By tapping into Office 365, Teams has millions of ready-made users.
