Shulou(Shulou.com)05/31 Report--

Two years after its launch, the Microsoft team is faster than team chat competitor Slack--, in large part because of the free service the team offers as part of its Office365 subscription. This is based on a Spiceworks survey of 900 IT decision makers in North America and Europe.

The results show that the team is now the second most popular business chat app, with 21 per cent of respondents using it, compared with 3 per cent in a similar Spiceworks survey in 2016. This is ahead of the third-ranked tool, Slack,Slack, the popular independent team chat tool used by 15 per cent of the companies surveyed. (this is a slight increase from 13% in 2016.

The most popular tool is another Microsoft application, Skypefor Business. Forty-four per cent of the companies surveyed used the technology, up from 36 per cent two years ago. The usage of another competitor, Google chat, has fallen to 11% from 16% two years ago. The workplace of Face book remains at 1%, but there are no statistics for the Cisco Webex team (formerly Cisco Spark).

In addition, Spiceworks reports that the team will achieve the fastest growth in all business chat applications over the next two years. According to the survey, 41 per cent of respondents expect to use teams by 2020, with Slack accounting for 18 per cent.

The growth of the Microsoft team is due to its availability in Office365 subscriptions. Office Productivity Suite is used by 155 million enterprises worldwide, keeping teams in the hands of a large audience.

"the increase in Microsoft team usage may be affected by the fact that Office365 users can use it at no extra cost," Spiceworks wrote in a company blog post. " Considering that more than half of the enterprises use Office365, the team would like to give it a try.

Larry Cannall, director of research at Gartner, says the addition of Office365 is only a factor in team growth. "more importantly, by replacing Skype for Business Online, Microsoft can introduce the team to many customers," he said. " As a result, the IT organization is trying to find the best way to deploy teams successfully and sustainably.

The team emerged as a competitor to Slack in 2016 and has been at the heart of Microsoft's communication and collaboration strategy ever since. Over time, Skype has been replaced by business online. Microsoft has also launched a free team version to attract users other than Office365 users.

Microsoft said at this year's Ignite conference that there are now 329000 organizations using teams around the world, up from 125000 a year ago. Frank, vice president of communications operations at MIT? "that's about twice the growth rate we see from Slack," Frankshaw said.

Still, the Spiceworks report and Microsoft statistics show only part of the picture; the actual usage is not very reliable.

Microsoft does not provide the total number of daily active users for the team. Unlike Slack, Slack has 8 million daily active users, including 3 million paying users. Slack declined to comment on Spiceworks's report.

According to Cancel, although Microsoft has some advantages due to existing relationships, the enterprise deployment of team chat apps is still in its early stages. "We are just beginning to introduce really good enterprise collaboration tools," he said. " Microsoft is not an inevitable winner here, but their success in email, instant messaging and productivity applications will certainly affect corporate decisions.

According to Spiceworks, Skypefor Business and Microsoft teams are most commonly used by large and medium-sized enterprises, while Slack is usually deployed by smaller organizations.

It also shows that although email is still the most popular workplace communication tool (99% of respondents use it), the overall demand for business chat applications is still growing. The adoption rate is highest among large organizations (70 per cent, compared with 53 per cent in 2016), followed by medium-sized enterprises (61 per cent, up from 38 per cent two years ago), and finally small businesses (58 per cent, up from 42 per cent before).

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