A free chat and video app
Microsoft Teams is a free app designed for chat and video meetings. The app is geared towards business conferences and can host up to 10,000 individuals with a paid account.
Features
Microsoft Teams allows users to create teams, channels, and conferences to chat with team members that are online. These options make it ideal for business or educational environments. The video conference feature of the app allows for communicating face to face with team members as well.
The app can host up to 10,000 individuals, and potentially up to 250 individuals with the free version of the software. The sheer scale of Microsoft Teams sets it apart from the competition and allows for it to be useful to both small businesses and massive corporate structures. As a bonus feature, users can also customize their backgrounds.
Drawbacks
Microsoft Teams, while massive, lacks micro-management potential due to a few features it misses. Teams don’t have co-browsing or breakout room functionality, meaning that users cannot be placed in separate rooms or share a browser window remotely. This detracts from the app’s value since the presence of breakout rooms is a requirement in many educational platforms and is a preference in some business platforms.
Competition
There’s a Microsoft Teams (mac) for Microsoft Teams as online platforms for conferencing grow in popularity. Adobe Connect, Skype, and Zoom all are alternatives to Microsoft Teams.
Adobe Connect offers much of the same as Microsoft Teams but at a monthly or annual cost. Alongside this, the app also offers co-browsing and breakout rooms. Despite this, there’s a smaller limit to how many individuals can connect at one time to Adobe Connect.
Skype, specifically Skype for Business, is a conference, telephone, and chatting app available on multiple devices. The app has both a free and licensed version that allows users to take full advantage of its features.
Lastly, despite being smaller than the others, Zoom offers massive versatility while remaining at a lower price than others, despite not being entirely free.
Our take
Microsoft Teams is a simple but massive conference, chat, and meetings app. The app is free and offers an extremely large amount of connectivity.
Should you download it?
Yes, if you need a massive amount of user connectivity.
