Microsoft Teams is becoming increasingly popular and Microsoft wants the service to cover many bases for users. Part of that strategy involves making Teams as usable as possible. In it’s latest tweak towards that goal, Microsoft is removing irrelevant Channel System Messages from the platform.
According to the company, this means Microsoft Teams users will be less distracted by pointless messages. For example, notifications like “users was removed from the Team” or “user was added to the Team” will no longer surface in the Channel.
Microsoft says the change will be available to normal Teams users during this month. Government users of Microsoft Teams will have to wait until Mid-August to see the change.
Teams has been on of the big benefactors from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, Microsoft confirmed the platform’s daily active users jumped from around 20 million to over 80 million in two months. However, while the current stay-at-home measures have boosted teams, the service has been growing since launching in 2018.
Growing Teams
Teams was thriving anyway behind a slew of features that have seen Microsoft overtake Slack in the workplace collaboration realm. It also seems like the company is positioning Teams to become a more direct competitor to video communication company Zoom.
Microsoft is working on a feature for Microsoft Teams that will allow 49 users to take part in a video call, matching Zoom’s limit. Zoom increased its userbase from 10 million users to over 300 million in the space of six weeks. The company was the biggest tech winner during the global lockdown.
Microsoft wants Teams to be a complete workplace collaboration tool like Slack and a complete video communication platform like Zoom, rolled into one package that also handily taps directly into Office 365.