Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams combines chat, video meetings, calling, file collaboration and application hosting in one workspace, integrated with Microsoft 365, and is sold within Microsoft 365 plans as well as separately, with editions for education, small business and enterprise.

Being the place files and conversations already live is what makes Teams different from a meeting tool, and it is also the strongest criticism of it. A document discussed in a channel stays with that conversation rather than in an inbox, which is genuinely better, and the same design means a busy organisation accumulates hundreds of channels nobody can find anything in.

Hosting applications inside the client is the part most organisations underuse. A workflow, an approval or a dashboard surfaced as a tab in the channel where the relevant team already sits is far more likely to be used than the same thing behind a separate login, which is why Teams became a deployment target rather than only a communication tool.

Licensing is where this purchase is actually decided, since Teams arrives inside most Microsoft 365 business and enterprise plans, and the practical comparison for an organisation already paying for those is not against a competitor's features but against the cost of adding a second vendor. Rates are published within the Microsoft 365 plan range rather than for Teams alone.