Microsoft Teams

What it does

Microsoft Teams is a collaboration app for chat, meetings, calling and shared work. Teams and channels hold the conversations, files and tools for a group. Meetings, calls and enterprise voice features sit in the same app.

It is sold in several ways. There is a free version for chat, files and meetings, a standalone Essentials plan, and Teams as part of Microsoft 365 plans such as Business Basic and Business Standard. Microsoft also sells Teams Phone and Teams Rooms as add-ons.

Why you would need it

Without one shared place, work lives in email threads and separate video links. The pain shows up when a project has five people, three tools and no single place that holds the latest file or the last decision.

Teams puts the chat, the meeting and the files in one place, next to Outlook, SharePoint and the other Microsoft apps. What changes is that fewer things get lost in an inbox.

Where it fits

Teams sits at the centre of the Microsoft 365 workday. Your calendar, your files and your identity feed it. It feeds your meetings, your notifications and the apps and bots you add. Other systems can post into it.

It replaces separate chat and video tools if you already pay for Microsoft 365. It competes with Slack on chat, and with Google Workspace as a whole.

What stands out

• It comes with Microsoft 365. If you pay for that suite, the app is already there.
• A free version exists, so you can start without a licence. Its meeting links work up to 60 minutes.
• A wide developer surface: Microsoft Graph APIs, bots, tabs and workflow automation through Power Automate.
• A Teams MCP server is documented, so AI agents can work with chats, channels and messages.

My take

I would pick Teams when the company already uses Microsoft 365. It is hard to argue for a separate chat tool when Teams is already paid for, signed in and connected to your calendar and files.

What I'd watch is noise. Chat, channels and meetings multiply quickly, so decide early what goes where. If your team is not on Microsoft, I would not adopt it just for chat. A tool built around chat, such as Slack, is simpler to use and has more third-party integrations.

Verdict

Pick Teams if you run on Microsoft 365 and want one place for chat, meetings and files. Skip it if your company is on Google Workspace, where Meet and chat are already included.