Enterprise Chat News Roundup #8
Here are the top things we followed throughout the week:
Microsoft Teams to replace Skype for Business
Microsoft goes all-in on Teams
At the start of the week, Microsoft announced during #MSIgnite that they would be prompting their Microsoft Teams platform as the single hub for enterprise chat. Teams already covers most of Skype’s functionality and it seemed like only a matter of time before it set out to fully replace it.
With Microsoft’s push for Office 365 users to join the existing 125,000 user base on Teams, Microsoft should be opening up the door for more companies to transition away from Skype for Business and other enterprise platforms. This serves as Microsoft’s latest push to put pressure on Slack — Teams is also promising to bake in machine learning, cognitive services, and speech recognition to improve the meeting experience.
If you’re interested in giving Microsoft Teams a test run — they have a great interactive demo:
Walmart signs up for Workplace by Facebook
Building the next generation workforce
Workplace by Facebook has just managed to sign on Walmart, the largest employer in the world, with over 2 million employees. While they won’t all get instant access, the move to roll it out across departments, teams, and operations is the way that Walmart is planning to empower their employees by offering them a new communication tool.
For now, it looks like Walmart aims to utilize Workplace by Facebook as a place to share product layouts, to broadcast internal news announcements, and to manage team communication across different countries. As we’ve mentioned before, the biggest selling point for Workplace by Facebook is the lack of adoption training — most will be familiar with Facebook’s layout and they can expect a similar user experience.
Check out their announcement:
and some additional details:
Zoho officially announces Cliq
Like we’ve said — another week, another enterprise chat platform :)
Zoho, a large enterprise that offers a suite of tools from product marketing to CRM, has officially announced a new collaboration tool for teams. Known as Cliq, Zoho aims to automate mundane tasks, offering a load of features to facilitate communication with the ultimate goal of increasing productivity.
Aside from full integration with other Zoho Suite Apps, users can expect full support for real-time messaging, file sharing, voice and video chat. While it does offer a free plan for teams looking to give it a test run, Cliq is looking to charge $3/user/month for features like unlimited integrations and a searchable history — check out their pricing page for a breakdown of features.
Full announcement below:
Slack Introduces Dialogs
Do more within Slack
For developers, this new feature announcement is a nice surprise when it comes to building and collating feedback for an app. As of now, you can implement 3 different dialogs to extend your apps workflows:
- Text Inputs: Collecting single-line text
- Text Areas: Free-form text box
- Dropdown Menus: For predefined selections
Check out Slack’s documentation for implementing this new dialog feature:
