Microsoft Teams adds new Communities feature
Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic caused lockdowns around the world, the digital transformation of our everyday lives has been picking up the pace. One of the most recognizable aspects of this is that many workers are now able to work from home much more often than was acceptable in the past. Understandably products like Slack and Microsoft Teams have been at the forefront of this, facilitating teamwork from distance with easy to use voice and video chat. This is an increasingly competitive market, which is why we see new features being pushed out to these apps regularly such as the new Microsoft Teams Communities feature we’re reporting on today.
The Communities feature will offer users a way to pull together various groups, teams, and collectives into a single virtual community hub. The blog post announcing the new move explains the new Communities features like this:
“With this new community experience, you’ll be able to:
- Easily post messages to everyone in the group.
- Organize events and add them to the community calendar for everyone to see.
- Share and store documents dedicated to group activity.
- Filter content to quickly access photos, videos, events, and links.”
The features sound interesting and make some sort of sense in a working environment, but Microsoft also claims that the Communities on Teams are also aimed at groups like “recreational sports teams, event planning committees, parent-teacher associations, or even a small businesses”. In this case then, it has to be said that Microsoft is entering a crowded field with many virtual communities features already existing such as Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Telegram, and Twitter. WhatsApp has even launched a communities feature too recently and being the most popular communications app on the planet, most people will likely just use the added functionality there rather than searching on an extra app to do something they didn’t really know they needed anyway.
However, another thing to consider here is that Microsoft Teams is actually being investigated at the moment by EU Regulators due to an Antitrust complaint made by Slack. The competing messaging app claims that by packaging Teams with the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity apps, Microsoft is squeezing out the little guys from the market by forcing users to pay for a messaging app when instead they just want a couple of apps like Microsoft Word or Excel. Slack wants Microsoft to offer Teams separately, or at least let users know how much of their subscription fees are going on Microsoft Teams, so that Slack is able to compete more fairly. I’m not sure Facebook or Reddit would be able to level similar complaints in this instance, but there is scope for single purpose apps like Discord and Telegram having something to say here too.
Are these articles AI generated?
Now the duplicates are more obvious.
This is below AI generated crap. It is copy of Microsoft Help website article without any relevant supporting text. Anyway you can find this information on many pages.
Yes, but why post the exact same article under a different title twice on the same day (19 march 2023), by two different writers?
1.) Excel Keyboard Shortcuts by Trevor Monteiro.
2.) 70+ Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows by Priyanka Monteiro
Why oh why?
Yeah. Tell me more about “Priyanka Monteiro”. I’m dying to know. Indian-Portuguese bot ?
Probably they will announce that the taskbar will be placed at top, right or left, at your will.
Special event by they is a special crap for us.
If it’s Microsoft, don’t buy it.
Better brands at better prices elsewhere.
All new articles have zero count comments. :S
WTF? So, If I add one photo to 5 albums, will it count 5x on my storage?
It does not make any sense… on google photos, we can add photo to multiple albums, and it does not generate any additional space usage
I have O365 until end of this year, mostly for onedrive and probably will jump into google one
Photo storage must be kept free because customers chose gadgets just for photos and photos only.
What a nonsense. Does it mean that albums are de facto folders with copies of our pictures?
Sounds exactly like the poor coding Microsoft is known for in non-critical areas i.e. non Windows Core/Office Core.
I imagine a manager gave an employee the task to create the album feature with hardly any time so they just copied the folder feature with some cosmetic changes.
And now that they discovered what poor management results in do they go back and do the album feature properly?
Nope, just charge the customer twice.
Sounds like a go-getter that needs to be promoted for increasing sales and managing underlings “efficiently”, said the next layer of middle management.
When will those comments get fixed? Was every editor here replaced by AI and no one even works on this site?
Instead of a software company, Microsoft is now a fraud company.
For me this is proof that Microsoft has a back-door option into all accounts in their cloud.
quote “…… as the MSA key allowed the hacker group access to virtually any cloud account at Microsoft…..”
unquote
so this MSA key which is available to MS officers can give access to all accounts in MS cloud.This is the backdoor that MS has into the cloud accounts. Lucky I never got any relevant files of mine in their (MS) cloud.
>”Now You: what is your theory?”
That someone handed an employee a briefcase full of cash and the employee allowed them access to all their accounts and systems.
Anything that requires 5-10 different coincidences to happen is highly unlikely. Occam’s razor.
Good reason to never login to your precious machine with a Microsoft a/c a.k.a. as the cloud.
The GAFAM are always very careless about our software automatically sending to them telemetry and crash dumps in our backs. It’s a reminder not to send them anything when it’s possible to opt out, and not to opt in, considering what they may contain. And there is irony in this carelessness biting them back, even if in that case they show that they are much more cautious when it’s their own data that is at stake.