Microsoft Teams adds guest access and support for more developer tools

Microsoft today announced that 125,000 organizations in 181 markets now use Teams, its Slack competitor for Office 365 subscribers. That’s up from the 30,000 organizations in 145 markets that had adopted the service by the end of January.

In addition to this momentum update, the company also announced a number of feature updates to the service. Starting today, you can add anyone with an Azure Active Directory account as a guest to a team. Microsoft says there are currently 870 million Active Directory user accounts across its own commercial services and third-party Azure Active Directory apps. That still means there’s a bit of a barrier to entry here for guest access and Microsoft plans to lower than barrier in the near future by also allowing Teams users to add anybody with a basic Microsoft Account to Teams.

Given that this is meant to be an enterprise tool, it doesn’t come as a surprise that IT admins will be able to control guest access — and revoke it when necessary.

Also new in Teams is support for Botkit, one of the more popular bot-building tools, and new integrations with GitHub, as well as Atlassian’s JIRA Service Desk, Core and Software, in addition to Bitbucket Cloud. That’s an interesting move, given that Atlassian launched its own Slack and Teams competitor last week, but given that many enterprise developers use a mix of Atlassian and Microsoft tools, it makes sense for both companies to be present on each others’ platforms.