Microsoft was one of the pioneers in the corporate video conferencing market with Skype, but the rapid growth of Zoom and other video tools led the US firm to innovate. Teams is now replacing Skype for Business, which until recently was Microsoft's corporate video conferencing service.
So we investigated, and found out that Teams now includes a lot of interesting features that Zoom doesn't offer. We're going to talk about real-time subtitles, built-in meeting notes... and even a feature that allows you to pretend you're in the same room as your colleagues.
Microsoft Teams' biggest victory is its tight integration of Office 365 applications (Sharepoint, Outlook, Flow, Onedrive, Stream...). But on top of that, there are more than 70 integrations for Microsoft Teams that include options for ticket management, questionnaires, weather, news, etc.
Here are a few examples of some of the most popular applications offered by Microsoft or third party vendors:
Zoom's customizable backgrounds are very handy, but what if you don't know how to customize but still want to hide the clutter in your home? Teams has the solution: blurry backgrounds.
Microsoft Teams was the first to offer blurred backgrounds for meetings. This feature is becoming more and more popular, and is now available on Google Meet as well.
Just click on a box, and the background behind you will be hidden, but not replaced. Zoom does not offer this feature natively.
And that's not all: since a recent update, with the "Together mode" you can even pretend that your interlocutors are all in the same room, in a virtual environment that you choose.
Zoom is free, but the free version limits team meetings to only 40 minutes. Beyond that, users are logged out without warning. The free version of Microsoft Teams has no such restrictions for video meetings.
There is also a good chance that you are already paying for the full version.Microsoft Teams is included in all versions of Microsoft 365 for businesses, including the cheapest version. This means that if your company pays for a subscription to Microsoft Office, you already have access to Teams. You should probably give it a chance and consider not paying for Zoom and/or Slack on top of that.
Zoom chat is extremely simple: you can quickly type simple text and, if you click on someone's name, you will accidentally only send messages to that person. Microsoft Team Chat for Meetings provides true rich text formatting.
Microsoft Teams also offers to keep track of the chat of each meeting and publishes all comments in the channel.
This makes chatting in Microsoft team meetings much less ephemeral than Zoom chat, which more or less disappears after the call (unless you manually record it). With Teams, you can review the comments after the meeting, and any points raised in them can be found using the search next to the rest of your messages.
When you take on board your team for a new product, you want to be sure of its long-term future. Microsoft has extensive experience both in software to install on your servers or workstations, and in cloud products to help teams.
An ambitious schedule has been planned for the new features of Teams. This roadmap includes new technologies such as the removal of background noise by artificial intelligence, as well as improvements to existing features such as pop-up windows. With Teams, you can be sure that your video tool will continue to evolve to meet the expectations of more and more demanding customers.
Microsoft Teams offers real-time subtitles, which means that you can follow the meeting even if you can't hear the accompanying sound. Just turn on the feature and you'll see the captions at the bottom of the screen.
Zoom offers a subtitle function, but someone has to type them in manually. Microsoft's system automatically recognizes speech. This is not perfect: some sentences were distorted in our tests, and are displayed more slowly than the real-time subtitles offered by Google Meet. But this is a feature that Teams has and Zoom doesn't, so it's important to mention it.
Whatever your choice, our point of view is neutral: our team mainly uses Google Meet, but we appreciate Teams more and more for all the reasons mentioned. And Zoom is also on board: broadly speaking, we adapt to our contacts and their tools, and some of our team members have their own preferences!
But here's on piece of information that may be useful to you: the Outmind search is also available directly in Teams.
We will indeed soon release an add-on Teams , which makes your multi-tool search accessible without leaving your Microsoft environment. This can come in very handy when your tool ecosystem is not limited to Microsoft: you can finally stop switching from one tab to another, and save precious time.
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