It's your walkie-talkie Teams mate, over. 'You don't have to say Over, over'. Copy that. Stop making the static noise, over and out Welcome to the final round-up of the Microsoft news you might have missed before a cheery engineer pulls the plug on the Windows 7 freebie security fix machine for the last time. Walkie Talkie Teams Microsoft has long been keen to "empower" (aka trouser some subscriptions) from the "more than 2 billion" first line workers it …
So we can now use smartphones to make direct voice "calls" indistinguishable from a rotary telephone - except for the initial 15minutes of "can you hear me?", "I can't hear you", "are you on mute?", "can everyone else mute, there is an echo" "I have to restart", "can you resend the invite", "I have updates", "you have to send me another invite I'm not in your group"
I can already have imo, whatsapp, skype and a few other apps on my phone that allow both audio and audio/video conversations via WiFi or cellular data. Fully duplex.
So what exactly is Microsoft adding to products that have been available for free for many years?
> So what exactly is Microsoft adding to products that have been available for free for many years?
Integration (for some value of the word) with the rest of Office, I imagine. There is a new bandwagon, MS must jump on it or risk losing some market.
Equally, is there really that much that could be added to existing Office products? They need to reinvent to keep market share, too
"So what exactly is Microsoft adding to products that have been available for free for many years?"
The ability to add random conversation snippets to the dystopian nightmare of the Graph API. The latest selling points for O365 that they're trying to drive home to businesses are "productivity enhancers." This surfaces all the connections between people in a workplace and, while useful, could easily be abused by micromanagers competing with each other for who has the highest "department engagement score" or whatever.
The main goal isn't selling you Office licenses; it's allowing companies to collect and mine basically every scrap of electronic information trails workers leave behind.
Exactly. Teams will record all of this, run speech-to-text (as it does for e.g. conference calls over Teams), and index all of it. Then if you're trying to, say, ask a question in a Teams channel, it will prompt you with rubbish dragged up out of random voice messages.
I can guarantee this is something which will never go on any device I own. And if it ends up on any of my company-owned equipment, I suspect it will routinely fail to work.
A corporate version that is (more) compliant with regulations.
WhatsApp is not GDPR compliant, so can't be used on business devices or devices with company data (BYOD) in Europe, for example, and Skype is not a business solution.
Teams takes care of things like logging and archiving etc. that are legal requirements in many business areas and ensures the data remains compliant with local laws (if you ignore the bit about it having to reside in Europe or under equivalent protection and the US are still dragging their feet with getting Privacy Shield off the ground, for European users).
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