Over the past couple of years, Slack has hogged the spotlight in the team messaging space. Slack, for those unfamiliar, is a messaging app for teams. Now, Microsoft is working on a direct Slack competitor under the Skype brand, according to MSPowerUser.
Skype Teams is going to be Microsoft’s take on messaging apps for teams, MSPowerUser reports. It will include a lot of similar features which you’ll find on Slack. For example, Skype Teams will allow you to chat in different groups within a team, also known as “channels”. Additionally, users will be able to talk to each other via Direct Messages on Skype Teams.
Skype Teams will also feature Threaded Conversations, which is a major feature that’s lacking on Slack. With Threaded Conversations, you can simply reply to a message on a channel by clicking on the reply button and anyone else can join the thread whenever they want — just like Facebook Comments, or Disqus Comments.
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Microsoft, of course, isn’t leaving out some of the core features of Skype on Skype Teams – it will be able to make video calls in a channel or privately, schedule online meetings, which can be quite useful for large teams.
Skype Teams also works with other services to make the chatting experience even better, and we expect Microsoft will allow bots from its Bot Framework to work with Skype Teams. Lastly, the service will feature Office 365 integration (for things like PowerPoint, Word, etc), which is going to be a very useful feature for businesses who use Office 365.
