Microsoft has shown what's next for Teams. The platform will become more and more similar to Skype and will help to better plan work and personal life
The Covid-19 emergency seems to have given a strong acceleration to the development plans of Teams, the app for videoconferencing and smart working of Microsoft. The Redmond-based company, in fact, during the online event during which it also announced that Office 365 will become Microsoft 365, made it clear that several new features are coming for Teams.
New features that will bring it closer to Skype, another app in strong rise due to the quarantine. Teams, in essence, will change a lot of skin leaving the work environment for which it was born and opening up to the management and organization of appointments and communications for private life. Microsoft has unfortunately not communicated when this will happen exactly, but then again it is also understandable that in this period even a giant like Microsoft has difficulty in making predictions and reliable programming. However, it seems only a matter of a few months, but sooner or later we'll see a new Teams.
Microsoft Teams: what's going to change
During the event, Microsoft announced that there are currently 44 million users worldwide who are using Teams, a sharp increase over the past months. When the announced changes are introduced, Teams will be able to manage, in two separate spaces, appointments with work and personal chats. There will also be the possibility to create non-work to-do lists, which can be assigned to different members of the "family team". From the point of view of structure, then, not much will change: in theory, you can already manage your personal appointments with Teams, but in the future it will be easier to keep them separate from the work ones and not to make confusion between the two groups of things to do and people to contact.
Skype's growth
If Teams comes close to Skype, though, it's also because Skype is growing at a whirlwind pace in these weeks of home isolation: Microsoft claims a 70 percent growth in daily users compared to February and a 220 percent increase in minutes of calls and video calls made by users, which rise to 40 million. In recent months, Microsoft has done everything to push the use of Skype, introducing new features such as "Meet Now" (Immediate Meeting, in Italian), which offers the possibility to have people who don't have a Skype account participate in video meetings. And this, in turn, is a feature taken from Teams. The two services, therefore, are progressively getting closer and more and more similar.