We're excited about yesterday's global launch of Microsoft Teams. I'm Karuana and work in the engineering team. Part of my job is to manage technical readiness for our product. I want to make sure you have all the information you need to truly get more productivity from using Microsoft Teams. I have a long history in the collaboration space designing solutions with SharePoint and Office 365. Having spent part of my career in Microsoft IT deploying and managing collaboration & communication services for our own employees I have a special place in my heart for user communities that provide a hub for learning, sharing and creating the comradery that comes from taking this journey together.
We've worked hard on bringing over 100 new features to the product since our preview launch in November of 2016. We hope that you watch the webcast to gain key information about our future vision and hear from customers successfully using the product today. We're going to be posting here a series of blogs from myself and guest authors to ensure you have great examples of how to use the product. Feel free to post topics you'd like us to write about or reach out to me on Twitter with your comments.
Our commitment to the full Office 365 stack remains strong as does our desire to get feedback from you, our user community. Make sure you are posting any feature suggestions directly into our UserVoice feedback tool. We are all intently reviewing that information to understand your needs and requests. Suphatra manages user feedback for the product and we always want to make sure that your voice is heard. For now, we hope you are testing Teams in your company to start thinking about the use cases that will make sense for your business.
Here are a few answers to common questions I see here in the community to get us started:
Q. Is Microsoft Teams available for EDU customers?
A. Our product is currently in preview for EDU customers. We will make announcements about its general availability soon. You can stay up to date on these announcements here or at our Office Blog.
Q. Microsoft Teams is now on by default in Office 365 tenants. Can I turn it off in my organization until I'm ready to deploy it?
A. Yes. We understand you want to thoughtfully deliver this capability to your users. While we encourage people to quickly try the product hands on you can follow the instructions here, if you are a tenant administrator of your Office 365 instance, to turn the feature off.
Q. When will you allow me to invite an external guest into Microsoft Teams?
A. We've seen you vote this feature request up on UserVoice and we've committed to deliver it by June of 2017 (Q2/FY17).
Next week we'll be hosting an "Ask me Anything" event here online. We hope you join us and bring all your other questions! I'll see you all in the community, at this event or on Twitter.
Thanx & Talk to you Soon,
Karuana Gatimu
Microsoft Teams
Community Manager
