Is MS Teams the New Productivity OS?

Welcome to Day 5 of PixelMill’s ’12 Days of Microsoft Teams’ series! Faster than a cheetah, easier to find than a snow leopard, and more fun to visit than Catalina. Welcome to your new standard in productivity. Enjoy!

We’ve heard Microsoft Teams (Teams) described as many things, but the description that truly resonates with us is “The Productivity OS.” Back in October, at an International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners event, keynote speaker Gavriella Schuster proclaimed, “Teams is the new operating system, essentially, for a customer. It is where they will do everything that they need to do,” and we must say we agree whole-heartedly. Here at PixelMill, our Teams use is so embedded in our daily culture and workflows that no one in our organization could possibly disagree.  

Of course, there will always be the exception to a blanketed statement that includes terms like “everything.” Still, in general, Microsoft Teams is poised to deliver what we’d expect out of a productivity operating system.  

According to Webster: 
Definition of operating system
: software that controls the operation of a computer and directs the processing of programs (as by assigning storage space in memory and controlling input and output functions) 

It’s hard to argue that Teams isn’t already delivering based on that definition. However, there are some hard to ignore gaps that limit Teams’ ability to be fully recognized as an OS.  

The most significant gap of them all 

One of the world’s most used and well-known operating systems of all time’s name should give you a hint… Windows! The greatest bottleneck is undeniably the inability to pop-out multiple windows in Teams to do more than one thing at once. This is a daily heartache for many Teams users. In fact, we have a swear-jar dedicated simply to pop-out related frustrations (not really, but it probably could have paid for a pretty sweet holiday party this year if we did). The good news is, Microsoft heard our frustrations and will be delivering this functionality early next year!  

We’ll admit that once we started thinking of Teams this way, it was hard—if not impossible—to see it as anything BUT an OS. Teams’ entire goal is to provide your organization with a collaboration platform that integrates the resources and tools you need to get your job done. With their continued investment in third-party integration and certain tell-tale architecture choices, it’s clear the Teams team wants to keep you in Teams. And there’s enormous value in this. For one, integrations help you leverage tools, resources, and team members in more productive and effective ways. The most significant benefit of all is time savings. By empowering your team to access what they need in one space, we’re saving them a ton of time by not having to bounce back and forth between tools.  

Do you think Teams is the new productivity OS? Are you ready to empower your team to do more? Let’s chat today!