Celebrating Five Years of Microsoft Teams

March 14, 2017 – marked an exciting milestone for Microsoft's customers, partners, and employees with the general availability of Microsoft Teams. Starting with a unique point-of-view learning from Microsoft’s experience building communication and collaboration tools and from customer feedback on our products and those across the industry. 

Building Teams

Brian MacDonald and a small, passionate team started with an internal hackathon project and created a new application building on cloud services across Microsoft.

As the project evolved to where groups could use it all day long for their work, the team iterated quickly based on feedback – first from inside Microsoft and then with customers and partners in 2016.

Every hour around the world data and insights from customers of all sizes flowed into the product development team – all using channels, meetings, and documents in Teams of course – to help them drive to make the product better. And still does to this day. Teams transformed how Microsoft work's to help you transform how you work.

20 Million Users in 2 Years

Even in the first few months after release, it was clear the unique combination of async and sync collaboration in a single product was resonating.

Over twenty million people used Microsoft Teams daily in the first two years, which was unprecedented for business software at the time.

Microsofts development team worked to blend communications and content collaboration more seamlessly than ever before. Exposing an application model for partners to build workflows and solutions where users were spending time to simplify business processes.

Microsoft embraced the community who had come with them to the cloud in Microsoft 365 as Teams became the hero application connecting the Microsoft Cloud. 

Accelerating Digital Transformation

In March 2020, we all faced the crisis of a global pandemic. Across the world, we were humbled by the challenges and uncertainty.

Microsoft moved fast – scaling to millions of cores from Azure to support the Teams services, adding dozens of features to improve our meetings experiences, and iterating with numerous stakeholders on guidance for remote work.

In the first three months after COVID-19, the Teams product team met with over 900 customers to hear their experiences and feedback. The team worked tirelessly on security, reliability, scalability, performance, and functionality. It had been a privilege in an unexpected time for the world to deliver a solution that would help schools, hospitals, governments, businesses, and more continue their mission at a vital time.

During this time, Microsoft Teams grew 10X and recently announced they have reached 270 million monthly active users. Consistent with Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and organization on the planet, they recently introduced tailored versions of Microsoft Teams for personal use with Windows 11 and for very small businesses with Teams Essentials.