Today, at an event in New York City, Microsoft announced Teams - a new chat-based workspace in Office 365. Microsoft Teams is integrated with the Office applications and is built from the ground up on the Office 365 cloud. Starting today, Microsoft Teams is available in preview in 181 countries and in 18 languages to Microsoft's commercial customers with Office 365 Enterprise or Business plans, with general availability expected in the first quarter of 2017.

Microsoft Teams provides a conversation experience for today’s teams. It supports not only persistent but also threaded chats to keep everyone engaged. Team conversations are, by default, visible to the entire team, but there is of course the ability for private discussions. Skype is integrated, so teams can participate in voice and video conferences. And everyone can add personality to their digital workspace with emojis, stickers, GIFs and custom memes to make it their own.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, Planner, Power BI and Delve are all built into Microsoft Teams. Backed by the Microsoft Graph, intelligent services are surfaced throughout the workspace to help with information relevancy, discovery and sharing. Microsoft Teams is also built on Office 365 Groups - Microsoft's cross-application membership service that makes it easy for people to move naturally from one collaboration tool to another, preserve their sense of context and share with others.

Microsoft has also invested deeply in ways for people to customize their workspace, with extensibility and open APIs available at general availability. For example, Tabs provides quick access to frequently used documents and cloud services. Microsoft Teams also shares the same Connector model as Exchange, providing notifications and updates from third-party services like Twitter or GitHub. Further, Microsoft has includes full support for the Microsoft Bot Framework to bring intelligent first- and third-party services into your team environment.

Microsoft also announced the Microsoft Teams Developer Preview program, allowing developers to extend Microsoft Teams.

Finally, Microsoft Teams provides the security and compliance capabilities. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Microsoft Teams will support key compliance standards including EU Model Clauses, ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA and more. And, Microsoft Teams is served out of Microsoft's hyper-scale global network of data centers, automatically provisioned within Office 365 and managed centrally, just as any other Office 365 service.

Microsoft Teams runs on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and web platforms.

Microsoft's new team-chat service is obviously aiming to take on Slack Technologies Inc. and Atlassian's HipChat in a growing market.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft considered acquiring Slack, but the discussions never got serious enough to involve Nadella or the company’s board, and it opted instead to build its own similar software.