Slack’s CEO Stewart Butterfield has revealed the comms platform is working on a call integration with its fierce rival Microsoft Teams.

The plan was announced during an investor webcast with RBC analyst Alex Zukin on Thursday.

Butterfield’s view is that the number of users for both services will dramatically grow over the next five years and it’s pointless fighting over what they have now. Teams has the edge currently, largely due to it coming bundled into Office 365, but Slack has become a popular choice for companies that use multiple cloud-based communication platforms.

The two companies have recently reported spikes in daily active users during the current COVID-19 pandemic, with Teams reporting 12 million more since the start of March.

“There are a lot of people who use both, and we’re working on a Teams integration for calling features,” Butterfield said. “I’m pretty sure that in 18 to 24 months time when we look back, that more people use Teams is not going to be relevant to us as a company.”

“95% of people who are going to be using this stuff five years from now have not started, so there is no point fighting over the relatively small percentage of customers we have.”

Slack has often been used in tandem with other services, particularly video calling software such as Google Hangouts and Zoom. Recently, Microsoft singled Zoom out as a potential business threat because of this.

However, Butterfield’s comments suggest a less feisty competition from the two companies. Since Teams was launched the two have traded blows over user numbers, features and even marketing strategies.

In November, Slack accused Microsoft of copying its Adverts, referring to the company as a “boomer”. A few months prior, Microsoft banned its employee from using Slack, suggesting it was “not secure”.

Google has cancelled development of version 82 of Chrome and will instead skip ahead to Chrome 83.

Chrome 81, which was due for release on 17 March, is currently still in a beta channel and will stay there until 83 is ready to be promoted.

On Friday, the tech giant announced it had paused all work on new Chrome and Chrome OS releases as work schedules were delayed by the outbreak of COVID-19. On Monday, Jason Kersey, the director of technical program management at Google, announced that the schedule for 82 had to be dropped altogether to maintain stability.

“This is an update on our earlier decision to pause our branch and release schedule,” he wrote in a Chrome discussion group for developers. “As we adapt our future milestone schedules to the current change in schedule, we have decided to skip the M82 release to ensure we keep users safe and focus all efforts on maintaining stability.”

As a result, Chrome 82 is effectively dead, as Google will not be pushing its release to developers. It will no longer be tested or merged into branches or even be placed in beta. Instead, all efforts will go to moving the development channel onto Chrome 83.

Kersey added that there will be a further update later in the week with more information about future changes, which could be a regular update as the coronavirus continues to cause disruption.

Similar disruption has been felt at Microsoft, which has also paused the release of new versions of its Edge browser to remain consistent with Chrome. Version 81 was due to be released to developers on Tuesday, but that has also been paused due to COVID-19.

Both Google and Microsoft have had to force staff to work remotely, which may have limited their abilities to respond to bugs in new versions.

Google has said that security updates have been unaffected by the disruption and will still go through for Chrome OS as planned.

Microsoft Teams gained 12 million users in just one week following a surge of remote working to combat the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

The communications platform reported 44 million users as of 18 March, up from 32 million on 11 March.

The figures came as the conferencing service celebrated its third birthday, but also just a few days after it suffered a two-hour outage – likely linked to the sudden influx of users.

Microsoft’s corporate VP for 365, Jared Spataro, said that the service had seen an “unprecedented” spike in usage in just seven days. He also suggested that the numbers might not drop when the coronavirus pandemic is under control.

“It’s very clear that enabling remote work is more important than ever, and that it will continue to have lasting value beyond the COVID-19 outbreak,” Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s corporate VP for 365 wrote in a blog post. “We are committed to building the tools that help organisations, teams, and individuals stay productive and connected even when they need to work apart.”

For its third birthday, Microsoft added some new features to Teams. The first is a function that uses AI to reduce background noise – which will certainly be welcome following the government’s decision to close all schools. There is also a button allows users to read messages while offline and a ‘raise hand’ feature to help get their questions across during busy video meetings.

Although Teams is now far ahead of the competition, a leaked Microsoft partner video suggested the company is keen to thwart rival video conferencing service Zoom. An alleged internal company video, posted to Twitter on Thursday, suggests Microsoft sees Zoom as an ’emerging threat’ to Teams as it is often used by businesses in tandem with Google’s G Suite and fierce rival Slack.

This week, Slack also unveiled a host of new functions and reported a spike in users due to the coronavirus. The smaller platform saw over 7,000 new users in just 47 days, according to TechCrunch. For context, it only recorded 5,000 new users in its last quarter report.

Slack has made a host of changes to its platform easier to navigate, with new customisable functions for sidebars and shortcuts.

The first, most notable change, is in the navigation bar, which has a function to search between recent conversations without the need for too much input. This comes with easier ways to see information with mentions, reactions to your messages, files, people and apps all in the one place, ready for reference.

Inside the bar is a new compose button, oddly similar to what you would have in an email. This is a more convenient way to draft messages before choosing whether to send to the relevant person or channel, according to Slack. If you stop midway through, a draft will be saved for you – which, again, sound very much like email. Another change will deal with all those Slack channels that become a bit of a headache. Currently, these are displayed as a single long list that can become unwieldy for the many users who have a lot of vital channels that need regular check-ins. To simplify this, the platform is adding customisable sections that are collapsable.

The feature, which is restricted to paid plans, will allow users to organise those messy channels, direct messages and apps into sections within the sidebar. Channels can be dragged and dropped, ordered into sections and organised any way you like and the sections can be named with emojis too.

The many tools available on Slack will also be easier to discover and use without the need to switch between windows and tabs. This will be via new shortcuts in the shape of a lightning bolt icon next to the message input field. The example above is called ‘Simple Poll’. In the coming weeks, more apps will be made available through these shortcuts.

Rollout of the updates begins today and will continue “over the next several weeks”, the company said, with updates to the mobile versions of the app coming at an unspecified future date. 

Microsoft Teams went down across Europe for two hours on Monday, causing mass frustration for the many remote workers now increasingly dependent on the service.

Users experienced issues signing into the service and also trouble sending messages. 

Although Microsoft managed to fix the problem within two hours, the timing could not be worse as millions of people across the country began remote working amind the outbreak of COVID-19. 

As users from various European countries began reporting issues, Microsoft tweeted that it was looking into the problem.

“We’re investigating messaging-related functionality problems within Microsoft Teams. Please refer to TM206544 in your admin centre for further details,” the company said. 

This is the second major outage to hit Microsoft in as many years after Office 365 went offline in 2018. There is a suggestion that Monday’s faults could be due to more people using the services as businesses encourage workers to stay home.

Just a week ago, Microsoft offered a six-month free trial for Teams, according to Businesses Insider, to help those soon to be self-isolating. Google has also offered up parts of its remote working services in a bid to work around the coronavirus outbreak. 

Microsoft’s outage is a poor start to what could be a big opportunity for cloud computing.

With mass remote working and many business events going “virtual”, video linkups, VR and other similar technologies will become a crucial element of everyday life. 

Outages and service disruptions are common occurrences with new technologies, but as the world begins what looks like a prolonged period of self-isolation, it’s these kinds of services that will keep many industries ticking along.

Add to that, the need for us all to stay connected to one another during a pandemic and Microsoft Team’s and services like it have suddenly become vital. 

Google’s G Suite service, which includes Gmails, Google Docs, Hangouts and more, surpassed two billion monthly active users at the end of last year, according to its general manager.

Javier Soltero, who is also the vice president of G Suite, made the announcement to Axios on Wednesday.

He declined to give a detailed breakdown of the numbers, according to Axios, so there is little information on what products are used most or how many pay for the service compared with free users.

G Suite has long been seen as the challenger to Microsoft’s Office services, and Soltero knows both extremely well having left the latter for Google last year.

But with many companies around the world either entering a period of remote working or are well into self-isolation, Google’s suite of productivity services is already raking in healthy numbers.

“That’s a staggering number… These products have incredible reach,” he said. “Changing the way people work is something we are uniquely positioned to do.”

At the start of the month, Google announced parts of its enterprise service would be free, for a limited time, to help mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on businesses entering periods of mass remote working. This mainly focused on Hangouts Meet, its video conferencing service.

Likewise, Microsoft is offering a free six-month trial for Teams, according to Business Insider, which was originally just for schools and businesses in China, but has now been expanded globally – this will also come with an update that lifts the restrictions on the number of users per team.

According to Vox, Team’s saw a 500% increase for meetings, calls and conference usage in China towards the end of January, with those numbers to be likely mirrored in Europe in the coming weeks and, possibly, months.

The US Department of Defence (DoD) has requested permission to reconsider parts of its decision to award its $10 billion cloud migration contract to Microsoft, court filings have revealed.

These concern parts of Microsoft’s bid that detail price scenarios and online marketplaces which have been deemed not “technically feasible” by the US Federal Court of Claims.

Work on the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) project was halted in February after AWS launched a legal appeal that the evaluation of the bidding process was flawed; the tech firm also suggested it was subject to unfair political influence.

Federal Claims Judge Patricia Cambell-Smith, who ordered the suspension of Microsoft’s work on JEDI, said that AWS was “likely to succeed” in its legal challenge as the DoD had improperly evaluated a Microsoft storage price scenario.

Now lawyers for the US government have asked for “120 days to reconsider certain aspects of the challenged agency decision”, according to court filings made late on Thursday.

“DoD does not intend to conduct discussions with offerors or to accept proposal revisions with respect to any aspect of the solicitation other than price scenario,” the filing said, according to Reuters.

There are no exact details on what the issue is with the pricing proposed by Microsoft but the company feels it is an easy problem to solve. A spokesman said in a statement to Bloomberg that it supports the decision to reconsider a small number of factors “as it is likely the fastest way to resolve all issues and quickly provide the needed modern technology to people across our armed forces”.

Political influence, namely from President Donald Trump, is also a significant part of AWS’ legal challenge, but as yet, the courts have not mentioned any action on that element of the case.

“We are pleased that the DoD has acknowledged ‘substantial and legitimate’ issues that affected the JEDI award decision, and that corrective action is necessary,” a spokesman for AWS said to Reuters.

Lloyds Banking Group has agreed on a five-year partnership with Google Cloud to further push its digital transformation work.

The deal comes under Lloyd’s £3 billion internal investment to upgrade its IT systems to compete in the increasingly digitised world of finance.

The UK-based bank, which serves 26 million customers, will collaborate with Google Cloud to help drive its overall cloud transformation programme and streamline its operations. The five-year “strategic collaboration” will see Lloyds use a number of Google Cloud services to help modernise and improve its customer experience.

This will also include Google Cloud experts on-site to enhance engineering processes, all in an effort to boost efficiency and offer innovative new services to the bank’s retail and commercial customers.

“Banking customers today expect secure access to their funds, without downtime, and delivered through the modern experiences they receive in other aspects of their lives,” says Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud’s CEO.

“We are proud to work with such a storied institution as Lloyds, which helped to create – and continues to redefine – the next generation of financial services.”

In 2018, Lloyds announced a partnership with Thought Machine, investing £11 million in upgrading its IT infrastructure. That came with announcements of 6,000 jobs cuts with a promise to create 8,000 more digital ones in the near future.

“As the UK’s largest digital bank we have made strong progress in transforming not only our systems but also how we work,” said Zaka Mian, group transformation director, Lloyds Banking Group.

“The size of our digital transformation is huge and Google Cloud’s capabilities will help drive this forward, increasing the pace of innovation, as well as bringing new services to our customers quickly and at scale.”

The Department of Defence (DoD) improperly evaluated a Microsoft storage price scenario, the US judge that halted work on the JEDI contract has said.

Federal Claims Judge Patricia Cambell-Smith added that because of this AWS is “likely to succeed” in its court challenge, according to Reuters.

The Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure project, awarded to Microsoft in October, is a $10 billion project to migrate the DoD’s computer systems. It has been marred in controversy from the start, with companies like IBM and Oracle attempting legal action over its single-vendor nature.

A large part of AWS’ complaint was that the bidding process was unfairly influenced by US President Donald Trump, but that was not mentioned in the Judge’s opinion.

Campbell-Smith wrote that Amazon “is likely to succeed on the merits of its argument that the DoD improperly evaluated” a Microsoft price scenario. She added that the scenario assessed by the Pentagon was not “technically feasible”.

In response, Microsoft dismissed the decision as it focused on a “lone technical finding” of data storage under one price scenario out of six, according to Reuters. The company is confident it would eventually be able to move on with the project.

“The government makes clear that in their view Microsoft’s solution met the technical standards and performed as needed,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.

This could be seen as the first real tech-related argument of the JEDI saga, with large sections of the lawsuit focusing on the alleged interference of US President Donald Trump, who reportedly became concerned with the bidding when other cloud providers complained of being unfairly excluded.

Trump also has a long-running feud with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, which is seen as a possible reason for his alleged involvement. Former Pentagon Secretary James Mattis is thought to have said that Trump directed him to “screw Amazon” out of a chance to bid on the contract.

Microsoft has integrated Outlook with its Teams platform, along with a host of changes to make the communications platform more efficient to businesses.

The new features are available from March and are a strategic push from the tech giant to make Teams the ultimate enterprise communications platform.

Users can now move an email conversation directly from Outlook into a Teams chat, simply by clicking a button, and also move the conversations the other way into emails.

There are also options for tagging members of an organisation, so users can target messages (similar to Slack). For example, a manager can @mention their entire department in a given channel and get their message out to the relevant people at once.

What’s more, there’s also a feature to create an “org-wide” (organisation-wide) conversation. This is mostly for small and medium-sized businesses, which have less than 5,000 employees.

Calls and meetings have also seen changes as Microsoft has added live captions. This can be turned on during a call and will subtitle what the parties are saying in real-time. This, the company said, will help when calls are made from busy places, where words can be lost in the background noise.

The feature is only available in English at the moment, but there are plans to offer more languages in the near future.

Security has also been given a boost with new measures that let administrators monitor the content shared on the platform. This is a new feature where private channel chats can be placed on hold in a stored mailbox, should it be necessary for a message on a certain topic to be saved.

This also includes a communication compliance feature that both minimises HR risks to the business and helps administrators detect, capture and take remediation actions for inappropriate messages.