Nvidia has launched an edge computing platform to give businesses a greater swathe of tools to perform heavier processing workloads from data derived from Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

By establishing a multitude of edge servers across the world, the chip manufacturer is hoping that firms in industries like healthcare and manufacturing can process their data instantaneously to improve business operations.

This is in light of an expected explosion in IoT devices within the next few years, and the data the monumental amount of data the ecosystem will produce.

Nvidia’s EGX platform is touted as being able to perceive, understand and act in real-time on continuous data streaming between 5G base stations, warehouses, retail stores, factories, and other locations.

«Enterprises demand more powerful computing at the edge to process their oceans of raw data – streaming in from countless interactions with customers and facilities – to make rapid, AI-enhanced decisions that can drive their business,» said Bob Pette, vice president and general manager of Enterprise and Edge Computing at NVIDIA.

«A scalable platform like NVIDIA EGX allows them to easily deploy systems to meet their needs on premises, in the cloud or both.»

The device at the heart of Nvidia’s new edge servers is the company’s Jetson Nano, a small module that can enable the development of low-power AI systems. Nvidia says this device can provide 500 billion operations per second using just a few watts of power, for tasks like image recognition.

As part of the project, Nvidia has also teamed up with Red Hat to integrate and optimise its Edge Stack software with OpenShift, a container application platform. Mellanox and Cisco’s security, networking and storage technologies have also fed into the edge platform.

It will also be offered through major public cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft’s Azure platform, with users able to remotely manage their Nvidia Edge Stack service.

Nvidia’s AI research has spanned a number of industries, including healthcare, with the firm previously announcing a partnership with King’s College London to build an AI platform to automate radiology.

Nvidia’s EGX platform has already been at the heart of developing a number of healthcare-related software packages, the company says, as well as applications suitable for large retail chains and organisations involved in smart city development.

Cyber security professionals in the UK are struggling to hold back the ever-increasing wave of threats with limited resources, leading many to consider quitting their jobs.

These are the findings of a survey of 300 specialists working in large UK organisations with 500 employees or more.

Some 79% of respondents said they were facing a lack of resources – both technological and human – despite the increasing number of security threats faced by all businesses. The problem is so bad that nearly three quarters (72%) said they had considered leaving their jobs over it.

Half of those surveyed said a lack of cyber security specialists was their greatest problem, with ineffective technology taking second place (47%). Human error and insufficient budget were also found to be concerns, coming in at 40% and 41% respectively.

Despite 57% saying they were suffering from alert overload – with an average of 33 pieces of software in use per organisation – 65% said they thought more technology would help lift some of their burden.

Increased automation, in particular, is considered to be one of the most attractive solutions, with 86% saying their organisation would benefit from using this type of technology.

Ed Macnair, CEO of cloud security company Censornet, which commissioned the survey, said: «It’s no secret that companies of all sizes have been having a hard time finding qualified personnel to manage their often-overwhelmed security operations.»

«Until now, humans have been limited by their inability to see across multiple point products and correlate information – without huge amounts of manual work.

«Automating activity such as repetitive low-level tasks usually undertaken by a human can free up limited analyst resources to focus on more advanced tasks, helping to close staffing and expertise gaps and also help stave off cyber fatigue. It is taking the security industry beyond events and alerts and into 24×7 automated attack prevention.»

«Enterprise software sucks today, and we’ve really failed our employees»; these are the words of Sapho co-founder Fouad ElNaggar, parroted by Citrix’s CEO David Henshall during the company’s main keynote address on day one of Synergy 2019.

When Citrix bought out the six-year-old micro-apps platform for $200 million in 2018, the significance hadn’t been fully realised. But in Atlanta, we learned more than anything that ElNaggar’s vision for a massively heightened ‘employee experience’ has been injected directly into the heart of the virtualisation company.

The previous 12 months for Citrix have been at times uncertain and at worst torrid. The spectre of a monster 6TB data breach hung over the company throughout Synergy 2019 because executives left it unaddressed. A blog was published the day before but added little to what we already knew. It was only through conversations with the firm’s chief digital risk officer Peter Lefkowitz Cloud Pro was able to gain a sense for how Citrix has tried to learn and move on.

While Citrix didn’t so much dazzle, the company did put forward a defined vision that borrows from elements of its past while, by-and-large, feeling fresh enough from its executives’ perspective, to get excited about.

A major problem business faces today is that the majority of workers are disengaged. Henshall cited research claiming this figure is as high as 85% The reason? Well, enterprise software ‘sucks’. It can be functional but frankly looks like it should belong in a CRT monitor.

The company has pivoted towards improving the user experience (UX) for employees and slashing the time they spend on tasks like filling out expense claims. This chiefly manifests as a host of ‘intelligent experience’ improvements to its flagship Workspace platform, with the ultimate goal being to return one day per week to workers.

To get there, Citrix is stealing user interface (UI) ideas from social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, which the firm concedes is pulling well ahead of the enterprise space. Never-ending newsfeeds, notifications that demand your attention, and single-click buttons are making their way into business software to keep employees switched on in their work lives. This element of consumerisation, according to Chris Marsh, research director at 451 research, is not novel but a much-needed idea that hasn’t yet caught on.

«Enterprise software has been woefully bad at engaging its users,» Marsh told Cloud Pro. «What Citrix is trying to counter is the fragmentation of work across the multiple apps employees are using and all the context switching and productivity losses that result in.

«It’s of course in its interest to have users spend more time in its Workspace but it has a decent rationale as to why a single plane centralising otherwise diffuse and siloed information is necessary and could provide a good experience.»

But assuming there’s truth to this «disengagement epidemic», to what extent would revitalising clunky UIs make up for other workplace bugbears? I’m thinking along the lines of bad colleague relations, a nasty commute, or the nature of the work itself? Even on the software front, this model can’t solve everything.

«Lightweight, task-based actions it’s pitching its micro-apps as solving are just a fragment of the kinds of work the typical employee has to do,» Marsh continued. «It might be problematic if that’s all Workspace natively enables, i.e. you’d be having to go to its micro-apps for some things, yet everything else still happens within other apps.

«I suspect however that through partners and it’s micro-app builder strategy it’ll widen out what can be intelligently surfaced from other apps into the cards.»

Citrix has shifted through several guises in previous years, and ironically even pitched itself as a «new breed of security company» just two years ago. But, with a great dose of inspiration from the startup it acquired last year, the Citrix of 2019 appears to have finally stumbled upon what it believes is a roadmap for building the ‘future of work’. Time will tell whether it gets lost on the way.

Most companies, at some stage throughout their existence, undergo a major relocation of their headquarters. This can happen for a variety of reasons. While this is rarely a simple process, for firm Schroders this was being plotted alongside a monumental digital transformation project.

The “slightly adventurous task”, as the company’s global head of communications IT Paul Baird describes it, involved moving approximately 2,500 people over several weeks last summer, while aiming to keep up with its ambition to reinvent itself with the times.

The now 205-year-old firm pitches itself as a technology company that sells financial services, Baird tells Cloud Pro, and keeping up with this characterisation required the company to keep up-to-date with the latest workplace technologies.

“It’s quite a big change for somebody who’s been sat at the same desk for five or ten years,” he continues, “all of a sudden to have to move into another building, to present them with a whole array of blistering new tech, at the same time, may have just gone a step too far.”

The solution, therefore, was to start the first wave of transformation some 18 months before the move was scheduled to take place in September last year. The key motivations were to drive technological change both by ridding the firm of obsolescence and also to innovate on day-to-day workplace operations.

This was all overseen by a strategy that demanded employees have access to their work data anytime, from any place and from any device. Meanwhile, Baird’s team “tried enormously” to meet the demands made by human resources (HR) leaders, who themselves wanted to really push for a flexible work strategy. The overall aim was to reduce the physical barriers to work.

Baird says he and his team decided to start the process so early in order to “de-risk it, make people more comfortable, and also just avoid that horrible kind of unsettling feeling, because people ultimately just don’t like change”.

The project involved rolling out new technology like video conferencing systems to mobile services, as well as new services from Microsoft, such as Office 365. For the provisioning of the virtual desktop fundamentals that everything else would sit atop of, including the dedicated networks, dedicated storage and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), the company turned to Citrix.

The main roadblock to moving the tech, however, came in the form of the company’s data centre, which sat in its previous head office. Nothing could be done without first moving this.

“It was difficult and we were a new team by-and-large. It was a process of discovery and what we were trying to do as well with that data centre move was not move legacy, but move and transform at the same time.”

This was exciting, Baird says, because the company had everything from new storage services, to new switching infrastructure, to new server platforms. There was a “whole big set of transformation changes” that was done as part of that, and it finished up in a virtual desktop environment.

Naturally, this invited a lot of pressure. “The actual move itself was nerve-wracking as a global technology department because everything is riding on you,» he says.

“All the facilities people and all the programme managers involved in all the building and everything else sat back. And we built the networks before we even completed the building. So everything had been tested.” Nevertheless, Baird couldn’t help as the migration was going ahead but constantly think: “What have I missed?”

Another major challenge was introducing this technology in an accessible way that didn’t alienate and frustrate staff, all while ensuring the principles of flexible working were being adhered to. Working in financial services and in the City of London, Baird says, is “by its very nature quite old-school” so his company really had to break the mould

The changes now encompass employees working from home one or two days per week, job-sharing, people working three days per week, among other practices, and Baird feels the company has truly met these needs. Now he hopes that by 2020 the entire global estate will model itself on what he has done with the new London offices, with locations in 27 countries all clamouring to get in on the action.

“When I started we had just less than 30 video conference rooms globally and now we have 230. And they’re used all the time,” he says.

“Now people will do a video call instead of a telephone call and will ask everyone to switch on their cameras, and that’s going to become more prevalent. As we expand globally as well, there’ll be a far greater amount of global working that we’ll be able to do through the technology. That’s ultimately the biggest thing that I see in two or three years.”

Salesforce has unveiled a range of improvements to its AppExchange marketplace, each designed to help its ecosystem of customers and partners make data-driven, informed decisions much more efficiently. 

There are two key tenets to the changes, one focused on consultant acquisition and the other designed to provide better insight for partners. 

The first, dubbed Consultants on AppExchange, is essentially an enhanced search functionality that matches customer requirements with the appropriate results – whether that be location, expertise, rating and so on.

This search element is live as of now on the AppExchange and was delivered in response to growing demand from customers wanting the information it now presents – previously, the data was only easily located internally, meaning customers had to contact their Salesforce account managers. Now, however, it is very much self-service, Woodson Martin, general manager, of the Salesforce AppExchange told Cloud Pro today during an interview at Salesforce World Tour London. 

The second element, called AppExchange Partner Intelligence, provides higher levels of insight into how customers and potential customers are interacting and consuming what the app marketplace has to offer. For example, partners can see if someone has downloaded a trial version but not used it.

Martin, who has been with Salesforce for 14 years but was appointed to his current role in March, told Cloud Pro: «One of my early observations in the role is that the ecosystem is vast and incredibly rich. One of the questions I’ve been asking is ‘What can we do to open up and make visible more of the richness of the ecosystem to make it easier to do the job of TrailBlazing. 

«Our customers are trying to solve problems in their business and we just need to make it easier for them to do that. So, everything that we’re announcing today is aimed at that objective. Customers are very excited about it and the partners are also excited because in an ecosystem as rich as this one, how do you find your way? And how do you stand out? This is a great opportunity for all players.»

Given that there have been 6.5 million installations from the AppExchange thus far, the ability to derive greater insight into what happens post download will be of great value to many. The app-specific analytical element will be made generally available – with security approved apps – from June, while wider marketplace analytics will arrive this summer. 

«Magnet360 has long been dedicated to ensuring our customers can succeed on the Salesforce Platform, and as the Salesforce economy grows, so has the demand for implementation expertise,» said Matt Meents, CEO and Founder of Salesforce Platinum consulting partner Magnet360. 

«With nearly 90% of Salesforce customers using at least one AppExchange app, making our consulting services available and easily searchable through AppExchange opens the door for us to help more companies with their Salesforce needs.»

While the 6.5 million download figure was – correctly – quoted at the time of Salesforce’s AppExchange announcement, during Martin’s interview with Cloud Pro he said that the firm had celebrated the 6.8 million mark this week. The next milestone? Seven million downloads, which is fast-approaching, according to Martin. 

«If you go to the homepage of the AppExchange – down at the bottom – it will tell you exactly how many people have installed applications. You can actually see, in real time, what’s happening in the ecosystem,» he said.

«It’s pretty exciting because last night it crossed 6.8 million. That’s a milestone and we’re excited about getting to seven pretty soon.»

With more than 5,000 listings – ranging from apps to solutions, components, templates and more – the AppExchange has evolved considerably in its decade-plus life so far. There are more than 65,000 Salesforce-accredited consulting professionals providing guidance to the Salesforce ecosystem via the AppExchange and other routes and the cloud giant is hoping to swell this figure to 250,000 by 2022 – the continued evolution of the AppExchange will play a critical role here, according to Martin. 

If you deal with networking technology, there’s one trend that you’ll almost certainly have heard more about than any other, and that’s SD-WAN. It’s been labelled as ‘the next big thing’ for a few years now, with everyone from IT admins to vendors and providers extolling its virtues.

Short for software-defined wide-area network, SD-WAN technology is used to simplify the management of wide-area networks which connect remote locations like data centres or regional offices across large geographic distances. It does this by abstracting the control and management from the network and hardware layer onto a separate layer of software.

This abstraction means that various elements of WAN management can be centralised. For example, MPLS, standard broadband and 4G LTE services can all be bundled together as part of an SD-WAN to provide an overall pool of network capacity to be portioned out. Hardware management can also be policy-based, allowing for zero-touch provisioning and remote configuration. Network virtualisation is employed too, as is a flexible approach to traffic routing.

These capabilities – many of which were previously not available to businesses – are what make SD-WAN so transformative when compared to traditional WANs. Standard WAN deployments are usually very rigid in terms of how they’re configured, and any changes or updates often need to be made locally. They’re expensive too, and often require the installation of specialised hardware throughout the network.

SD-WAN solutions, by contrast, are far more versatile in how they’re configured. Because the control plane is abstracted from the data plane, changes to the network architecture can be made remotely through software, rather than having to reconfigure on-site hardware or invest in additional capacity.

Benefits of SD-WAN

This introduces a number of attendant benefits; because the control of the networking hardware is abstracted, companies aren’t required to make sure all of their equipment is from the same vendor in the interests of compatibility, but can instead invest in more cost-effective generic equipment. Pooling network connections also increases resiliency. If the MPLS connection goes down, for example, 4G or broadband links can automatically pick up the slack without outages.

Remote provisioning and management of equipment also means that network engineers and administrators don’t need to have an on-site presence in every location in order to carry out maintenance and upgrades, thereby saving on travel time and staffing costs. Scaling is easier and cheaper, too; networking equipment for new branches can be shipped directly from the factory to the new location, plugged in and then rapidly and remotely configured based on predefined policies.

This makes it particularly relevant for fast-growing businesses who need to expand without IT concerns causing a bottleneck. Rather than having to ensure every location has in-house networking staff to handle troubleshooting, most problems can be dealt with remotely. SD-WAN also enables a much greater level of network automation, which allows companies to scale the size of their network without vastly increasing the management and administration overheads for the network team. This, in turn, allows small teams to manage a large SD-WAN network which would normally require a much larger headcount to cope with if it were a traditional WAN.

Potential barriers

However, SD-WAN is not without its challenges, and while managing an SD-WAN system is often simpler and less time-intensive than managing a normal WAN, the same is not always true of setting one up. There are barriers to rolling out an SD-WAN infrastructure that can place it out of the reach of smaller and mid-sized organisations.

Cost is often a key factor here; SD-WAN solutions from large blue-chip vendors are often charged at a high premium, and when combined with existing software licenses and rental fees for the MPLS, broadband and LTE connections that make up the core of the networking stack, this can lead to a high cost-of-entry for companies looking to start their SD-WAN journey.

On top of that, deploying and managing an SD-WAN requires specialised knowledge. Certifications and courses in how to operate SD-WAN systems can cost thousands, and IT professionals who possess said certifications are in high demand and can command significant salaries.

The time investment required for an SD-WAN rollout should not be underestimated, either. Aside from the training necessary to set up and operate it, SD-WAN systems should be thoroughly planned out before deployment. Not only that, but the actual switch-over from regular WAN to SD-WAN takes time – and for over-stretched, time-poor IT teams (who are often the ones who stand to gain the most from SD-WAN) this is time that they’re already spending on the day-to-day needs of their existing network.

Managed SD-WAN solutions

Growing companies can overcome these challenges, however, and the best way of doing so is by working with a partner to deploy a managed SD-WAN solution. Partnering with an experienced, battle-tested SD-WAN provider bypasses the need for investing time and money in up-skilling existing employees, as they already have a team of qualified technicians at their disposal. And, because these technicians will also work with you on designing the architecture, as well as taking on the heavy lifting when it comes to rolling out the network, your staff can focus on the business-critical tasks of maintaining your network without taking time to handle the migration.

Managed SD-WAN services have advantages beyond the initial rollout, though. In this model, the partner is responsible for operating and maintaining the network, rather than the customer. This allows internal IT staff to focus on extracting value from their SD-WAN deployments without having to worry about managing the network as a whole. In practice, this means IT teams can spend their time working on using the enhanced visibility and granular control offered by SD-WAN to improve the stability, performance and optimisation of their networks rather than getting bogged down in tasks that don’t deliver value, offering all of the advantages of SD-WAN with none of the complexity.

Moreover, choosing Zen Internet as their managed SD-WAN provider allows businesses to reduce the cost of their SD-WAN deployments by bundling all of the costs together into a single package from a single provider. This includes not only the software-based control platform, SD-WAN networking hardware, associated licenses and circuits that make up an SD-WAN network, but also the underlying MPLS, broadband and 4G LTE connectivity that powers it. These technologies are bundled into a single managed service, allowing you to consume SD-WAN on a cloud-style as-a-service basis.

Zen has a rich and proven heritage in business and carrier-grade networking, including large-scale WAN estates, making Zen an ideal partner to both deploy and manage large, complex SD-WAN projects. Zen customers also benefit from award-winning service and support, with a plethora of experienced technical engineers on standby to ensure that problems are resolved rapidly.

SD-WAN can be a daunting prospect for growing businesses, but it doesn’t have to be. Partnering with Zen allows companies to offload the work of setting up and managing a complex, highly-sophisticated SD-WAN model to a company with a strong background in the intricacies of business networking, as well as a broad portfolio of network and connectivity technologies. Supported by Zen, companies are empowered to get the maximum value from their SD-WAN solutions, transforming and future-proofing their organisations without the added headaches and cost that SD-WAN often entails.

To learn more about how an SD-WAN can revolutionise your business, download Zen’s free buyers guide.

Microsoft Teams is a relative newcomer to the world of online business communications, but although the client interface is all-new, the underlying protocols and technology are really the latest evolution in Microsoft’s long legacy of communication suites.

It’s likely because of this that Teams provides far more comprehensive VoIP telephony support than most business chat clients. It even has internationally available direct phone number support: a feature that’s vanishingly rare among its rivals. Calling plans and integration options with a limited range of local VoIP telephony hardware and systems are available, but there are typically extra costs involved.

Teams is the replacement to Skype for Business, which itself replaced Lync in 2015. Existing Office 365 customers are being gradually moved from Skype for Business to Teams, with staggered automatic transitions having begun in 2018. Skype for Business Server 2019 will continue in parallel as Microsoft’s on-premises communications solution.

This surprisingly short life cycle of Microsoft’s unified communications products is actually one of the strongest points against using them: at this point it’s hard to be sure that you won’t have to retrain your users on yet another new system in three years’ time. However, it’s a core Microsoft Office product, which means that, if you already use Office 365, it won’t cost you anything extra.

Microsoft Teams review: Pricing and features

In the UK, you can sign up to Teams and create a workspace using its standalone free service, but its paid-for tiers are only available as part of a Microsoft Office 365 Business Premium, Business Essentials or enterprise E3 subscription. The positive side of this is that an entire Office 365 suite – and especially the service-only Essentials subscription – costs less per user than a Slack subscription and puts up reasonable competition against Google’s G Suite and its Hangouts communication service.

Office 365 Business Essentials costs £3.80 per user, per ​month (exc VAT) and provides Microsoft’s core online services – Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams – for businesses that don’t need a subscription to its Office software suite. Office 365 Business Premium adds desktop licences for Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access on top of that service package and costs £9.40 per user, per month (exc VAT). Both of these are charged monthly with annual subscription commitment.

Free users get 2GB of file storage per user and 10GB shared, unlimited message history searching, screen sharing, one-to-one and up to 250-person group video calling, and up to 300 members. Upgrading to Office 365 from the free version of Teams gets you extra administration features including the ability to add more admins, 1TB of storage per user, scheduling and recording of video meetings, extra security features including multi-factor authentication, integration with Microsoft’s VoIP telephony calling plans if you subscribe to them, and one year’s free domain hosting.

If you upgrade to a paid tier, you’ll never again be able to downgrade. You also can’t merge Teams free into an existing Office 365 paid subscription, and you can’t have any free users in your paid-for organisation.

Both free and paid versions store your data in your local region, so UK businesses’ data will not be stored in the US.

Microsoft Teams review: Clients

Teams clients are available for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS and web browsers. Unlike rivals Slack, Google Hangouts, and Mattermost, Teams does not have a Linux desktop client. While that’s unlikely to concern most businesses, those in some development and industrial sectors may want to look elsewhere.

Web browser support is also limited. In contrast to its rivals, Teams’ web interface doesn’t work very well in Firefox. There’s no support for Meetings – group video, audio or screensharing sessions – and font and whitespace rendering is unflattering and a little difficult to view.

Its appearance in Edge and Chrome – as well as the desktop clients – is significantly better. We particularly appreciated the inclusion of dark and high-contrast modes, which Slack has yet to implement on web and desktop platforms.

The general layout of Teams is rather Slack-inspired, with a large message and content pane on the right that by default loads your team’s general group chat and a narrow left-hand pane with tabs that let you view your files, teams, private messages and notifications.

Between them is an index pane that lists your teams, files, message contacts or notifications, depending on which tab you’re in. This felt a little too broad on our 1,920 x 1,080 display, both at full screen and windowed modes. While the client interface feels like it could do with more polish and extra features such as topic hashtags, it does everything it’s supposed to – as long as you stick to fully supported browsers.

We’re fans of the ability to open up an advanced composition field that lets you add subject headers, use enter for carriage returns, add HTML formatting and insert code, lists, tables and other custom text features in a manner that’s reminiscent of Microsoft OneNote.

In this context, the decision to give each chat message its own box in the main pane, rather than have contiguous IRC-style discussions, suddenly makes sense. You can also share animated GIFs via Giphy and use a limited set of custom Microsoft emoji and stickers including a rather old-school DIY meme creator, because that’s absolutely what modern business users require from their communications tools. (These options can be disabled in the paid versions.)

Microsoft Teams review: Configuration

For both free and paid-for versions of Teams, you’ll have to create an organisation for your users to join. However, you’ll use different administration interfaces to configure them.

The free version of Teams has extremely limited management capabilities, accessible from the Manage org option in the pulldown that appears when you click on your own profile as the workspace’s sole administrator. You can see all your members, remove them if you want to and control whether or not they’re allowed to invite others. That’s it: you can’t even add an extra admin.

For that, and much more, you’ll have to upgrade to Office 365 Business Premium or Business Essentials. All your users will need a paid-for Office 365 email address and sign-in profile, but your existing data and conversation archives will be ported across seamlessly.

If you’re starting from an Office 365 subscription, you’ll similarly have to create a team for members of your organisation to join, and you can easily add individuals, groups or every member of your organisation to your team. Larger companies can have dedicated teams for every department.

Administration is carried out via the new dedicated Teams admin portal, although legacy settings for both Teams and Skype for Business can still be found via the main Office 365 admin pages. If you’re familiar with Office 365, Microsoft Server or Microsoft Azure interfaces, you’ll feel right at home with the Teams admin interface. For everyone else, it may take a bit of getting used to.

In stark contrast to the free tier, there are huge numbers of highly granular options here, allowing you to create policies controlling which features and apps users and teams can have access to, how meetings are handled down to email invitations and QoS traffic shaping for video, call handling for Microsoft Phone System integration, analytics and device management for webcams and IP phones registered to your users.

For both free and paying users, there’s a surprisingly wide range of extensions available in the Teams Store, allowing you to integrate third party services including GitHub, Trello, Google Analytics, Zendesk and Zoom. As you’d expect, there’s also an API that you can use to develop bespoke extensions for internal use.

Microsoft Teams review: Verdict

Teams is obviously going to be widely used, simply because it’s what you get bundled with Office 365 and provides an easy way to connect everyone in your organisation for instant group and one-to-one communication.

It does what it’s supposed to and shares the familiar user interface styling of other Office products. It has better telephony support than its rivals, stores data in your local region, includes some genuinely innovative message formatting tools and provides very useful meeting recording features.

The fact that its overall interface lacks polish is rather secondary to all that. It’s not the nicest or most comfortable business communications tool to use, but its interface does the job well enough and will hopefully be given the opportunity to improve to meet its full potential in the coming years.

If you subscribe to Office 365, Teams is the best and most obvious communications choice for your business. If you don’t need any of Microsoft’s other services, however, Teams isn’t worth getting into the Office 365 ecosystem for in its own right unless you specifically need a cloud-based, archiving communications system with UK data centres.