Microsoft Teams adds a free community feature to replace Facebook and Discord

Microsoft launches a new community feature for Microsoft Teams, designed to let users use the best parts of Teams for free to create and organize teams. The new community feature will allow teams to use Teams calendar, meeting, and chat features.

Features like group chat, calling, and file/photo sharing are all supported, and groups will also be able to use shared calendars (including Google Calendar integration) to organize community events.

This new community integration is really aimed at groups like sports clubs or even virtual community groups for small businesses. Facebook, Reddit, Discord, WhatsApp, Twitter and many other services already offer various ways to organize groups online, so Microsoft is entering a crowded market but it believes Teams has something to offer. difference to offer.

Amit Fulay, Vice President of Product at Microsoft, said: “What we've learned so far as we've built this is that there's a community team looking to get the job done. These are very different from pure fan communities or discussion communities, and I think our strength as a company... is our ability to deliver those productivity tools. we."

Microsoft has created a set of templates for Teams users to quickly create communities, and these groups will be limited to the free consumer version of Teams at launch. The Microsoft Teams apps on iOS and Android will support communities soon, with desktop versions coming in the coming weeks. You'll also be able to easily find shared images and files in groups without having to pin them.

Communities in Teams also present Microsoft with new moderation challenges. While the company has experience in managing networks of Xbox, Skype, and other consumer services that require moderation, the company is planning to primarily follow a Discord model that expects communities to enforce the rules. their own rules and let admins moderate their private groups.

“We really have a centralized digital safety team,” explains Fulay. We have a lot of experience on Xbox and services like Flipgrid have been working with content moderation. The way things are flagged and moderated, we have central teams for that.”

Microsoft Teams communities will require a Microsoft account, and groups can easily invite others to join with a link. If that link is accidentally shared or abused, admins can quickly change the invite link to manage who will join their community. Because communities are built on Teams, every virtual meeting includes features like a lobby to ensure only community members are on the call.

The launch of communities in Microsoft Teams comes nearly two years after Microsoft was in discussions to acquire Discord. Microsoft also failed to acquire TikTok and Pinterest and has shown a lot of interest in the online community and creators. Microsoft is willing to spend big on these services because, outside of Xbox, it doesn't have a huge consumer-oriented community like rivals Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple.

Communities in Teams can help bridge a big gap for Microsoft, but it's early days and the feature set seems pretty basic right now. Unlike Discord, you can't simply join an ongoing call with your online team, and the community feature in Teams seems to be more structured around a rigid organizational form.

Source: https://www.theverge.com