Microsoft Teams: Features, Adoption and What Users Need to Know

Introduction

Teams has become central to how organisations, schools and communities collaborate. Its importance lies in bringing chats, meetings, storage, tasks, calendars and community tools into a single app, helping people coordinate projects and events without switching between multiple services. For users and decision makers, understanding Teams’ capabilities, adoption and limitations is relevant for planning communication, training and procurement.

Main body

Integrated features

Microsoft Teams combines communities, events, chats, channels, meetings, cloud storage, tasks and calendars in one place. Users can keep conversations organised by topic with teams and channels, hold video or audio calls, and convert group chats into calls instantly. Shared documents are accessible via cloud storage, and communities can organise events, photos, links and files to reduce time spent searching for information. The mobile app descriptions note that some features require a paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscription or a trial subscription of Microsoft Teams for work, and the app may share certain data types with third parties.

Education and task management

Teams includes education-focused functionality. An assignments section allows students to see tasks, due dates and grading weight, and the platform has added assignments and grading features for education more broadly. These tools make Teams a common choice for schools and universities that need integrated class management alongside communication and meetings.

Events, broadcast and meeting tools

For larger broadcasts, Teams Live Events replaced Skype Meeting Broadcast and supports broadcasts to up to 10,000 participants via Teams, Yammer or Microsoft Stream. Additional meeting features such as breakout rooms are available to support workshops, seminars and complex meetings that require smaller group discussions inside a larger session.

Adoption and scale

Publicly reported user milestones show rapid growth over time: Teams reached millions of daily and monthly active users at several stages, with reported milestones including 13 million, 20 million, 75 million, 145 million daily active users at different points and later 250 million and 270 million monthly active users. These figures reflect broad adoption across workplaces and educational institutions.

Conclusion

Teams offers a comprehensive set of collaboration tools that suit business, education and community needs. Its feature set and large user base make it a major platform for communication and remote work. Organisations should weigh the benefits of integration against subscription requirements and data sharing considerations, and plan training and governance to get the most value from Teams as collaboration needs evolve.