Microsoft announces consumer edition of Microsoft Teams

Microsoft recently celebrated the third anniversary of Microsoft Teams, a collaboration software that is the hub for teamwork and group chat in Office 365. Due to the recent coronavirus outbreak, Microsoft saw an unprecedented spike in Teams usage, and Teams now have more than 44 million daily users, a figure that has grown by 12 million in just the last seven days. And those users have generated over 900 million meeting and calling minutes on Teams each day this week. Until now, Teams was used only by enterprise and SMB users. Today, Microsoft announced the consumer edition of Microsoft Teams.

Instead of relying on ad supported chat services such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and others, Microsoft is now proposing Microsoft 365 users to use Teams consumer edition for their everyday communication with family and friends. Microsoft also highlighted some new consumer focused features that are coming to Teams for Life, read about it below.

• Teams is your mobile messaging hub. Start a video chat, assign tasks to people, edit calendars, send a GIF, and access cloud storage, right from your group chats.
• Access multiple calendars, activities, and shared tasks all in one place with Teams. With this centralized view, events, photos, and videos are always available within your group chat, so everyone stays in sync.
• Share documents, tackle projects together, build a family budget, or help with homework using Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Everything saves securely in the cloud and is available on any device.
• Help your family rest easy when you’re running late with location sharing. Plus, with Teams you can confidently store and share information like passwords, rewards numbers, or login information.

Teams consumer edition will be available later this year. You can sign-up for Teams for Life preview here.