Microsoft has launched Teams with its most popular features as it looks to beat its biggest rival Zoom.
Microsoft Teams is looking to take over the market of its biggest rival Zoom with the launch of a massive overhaul of one of its most popular features. In a news on December 1, Microsoft announced a number of enhancements to its quick call service, Teams Calling.
Microsoft says the use of this feature rather than a formal meeting has “skyrocketed,” in recent months with users making over 650 million calls in October—up 11 fold over March of this year. On average, as Microsoft says, calls are just one-fourth the length of a typical meeting.
The updates to Teams calling include a more streamlined calling experience by new things like the dial pad, call history, voicemail, contacts, and settings—into a single location.
Meanwhile, as calls are recorded Teams admins lead the advantage of Teams and OneDrive or SharePoint integration and can select to make OneDrive or SharePoint the default recording storage location, instead of Stream. The recordings can then be shared with external guests, with quicker access to transcripts, and greater storage capacity.
More Teams calling features
Teams calling has also added CarPlay support using Siri to make and answer calls; spam identification and the ability to transfer calls between mobile and desktop.
Users can also now make call merge for both PSTN and VoIP calls. And as part of another sleek update starting in early 2021, Teams users will be able to adjust their settings to cap the amount of data used during video calls based on network availability.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has launched voice-enabled channels:
A new collaborative calling capability to integrate call queues into a specific channel, for collaboration and information sharing before, during, and after the call.
As Microsoft says, IT or HR help desks can now be managed from a channel so available team members can answer the call, and easily share information about service tickets. Starting in early 2021, Teams users will have the option to create new voice-enabled channels.
Microsoft also announced on December 1 to push its hardware options such as Teams Displays via the Lenovo Thinksmart view, integrating voice assistant Cortana. On the other hand, Teams will be available on low-cost phones by Yealink and AudioCodes in early 2021, Microsoft said.
At the same time, Microsoft is also launching an upgraded Teams “Device as a Service” offering as monthly payments from 2021.
Teams VS Zoom
An epic battle between Teams and Zoom in 2020, with each service looking to leapfrog the other with new features and updates.
Microsoft has so far differentiated itself through its integrated features with services such as Advanced Communications, but Zoom quickly launched its own similar edition, along with highly sought after end-to-end encryption that Teams lacks.
But Microsoft launched free Teams video calling indefinitely for Thanksgiving where Zoom offered a free service only for the day.
Zoom was once far ahead with features, but Teams is certainly catching up as Microsoft bringing the latest features.
