Microsoft launches Teams in a bid to kill off Slack

Integration of Teams with Office intended to remove the oxygen supply from Slack

Microsoft has launched Teams, a collaboration tool intended to take on the popularity of Slack, and integrated it with its Office 365 suite in a bid to remove Slack's oxygen supply.

Microsoft Teams is available immediately as a rival to Slack, which has cornered the market in many digital-first businesses.

Slack got its defence in early, taking out a full-page newspaper advert summarising its latest blog post, writing an open letter to Microsoft welcoming the competition and slyly taking a dig at the company for playing catch-up with a little touch of 'told you so'.

The new software is an extension of Office 365 Groups, combining subject-threaded chat (where did they get that idea?), Skype, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, SharePoint and a whole bunch of other Microsoft products integrated with options for plug-ins from third parties, such as Twitter and Dropbox.

Microsoft Graph is aboard to help intelligently find the data you need in context-aware situations. There's Bots too, including Who Bot, which enables users to search the graph to find more information about its collaborators.

Most important of all, perhaps - it supports emojis and GIFs. Skype is integrated, too, but there was some expectation beforehand that Teams would be an extension in Skype rather than Microsoft Office.

"We built Microsoft Teams because we see both tremendous opportunity and tremendous change in how people and teams get work done," Microsoft said. "Teams are now more agile and organisational structures more flat to keep communications and information flowing.

"With Microsoft Teams, we aspire to create a more open, digital environment that makes work visible, integrated and accessible - across the team - so everyone can stay in the know."

The service is available in 181 countries as a preview, with general availability in the first quarter of 2017 to Enterprise users of the Office suite. Companion apps for iOS, Android and Kevin are also available.

A developer preview programme is open for people who want to start creating plug-ins. Many big names, such as Zendesk and ToDoIst, already have plug-ins prepared.