Top 10 Team Messaging platforms

Important news about Team Messaging platforms

2024. Slack adds AI-fueled search and summarization to the platform



As a leading enterprise communication platform, Slack has somehow managed to become the vast digital attic where all organizational knowledge is stuffed away—dusty, perhaps, but vital. Yet, like any attic, finding what you’re looking for amidst the clutter has proven... tricky. Naturally, Slack, being the sort of forward-thinking platform that wouldn't want you rifling through endless threads for the proverbial needle, has whipped out some shiny new features. Enter: an AI-driven search tool and the ability to magically shrink entire channels into bite-sized chunks of information. This delightful little innovation—channel summarization—means you can now get a pithy summary of your team's ramblings without wading knee-deep in conversation, perfect for those returning from holiday or just trying to make sense of the chaos. You simply ask and Slack’s AI will cheerfully summarize the lot, with a list of handy references to show how it arrived at its conclusions, which, according to Weiss, is a pretty big deal in the grand scheme of things.


2023. TeamSense helps manufacturers keep in touch with deskless workers



TeamSense, an app-free platform designed specifically for hourly employees in the manufacturing sector which lets them manage attendance, talk to managers and access company resources through SMS, has raised $4. TeamSense’s features include Absence Management, an employee call-out system the company says has a 100% adoption rate. It lets employees call out of work more easily and helps manufacturing companies get accurate employee numbers. The platform also has communication tools, engagement and pulse surveys, an employee portal with access to internal resources and a “text to apply” feature for job applicants.

2023. Microsoft’s AI-powered Designer tool comes to Teams



Microsoft, in its infinite and occasionally bewildering wisdom, has decided to bestow upon the free version of Teams a rather nifty contraption known as Designer, an AI-driven art wizard that can, with a slightly smug air, whip up everything from presentations to digital postcards in the blink of an algorithm. This tool, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Canva, allows hapless users of Microsoft Teams to churn out social media-ready designs using either the power of text prompts or images fed into DALL-E 2, OpenAI's slightly overenthusiastic text-to-image generator. Customization comes courtesy of delightfully fiddly drop-down menus and text boxes, because of course, you wouldn’t want the creative experience to be too simple. Designer now lurks in the web, clings to the sidebar of Microsoft’s Edge browser, and has recently infiltrated the free version of Teams. First announced in October, it has since acquired impressive new tricks, like automatic caption generation and animations, with promises of even more mind-boggling editing features to come.


2023. Microsoft rebuilt Teams from the ground up, promises 2x faster performance



In the vast and baffling universe of digital communications, Microsoft Teams has long waddled its way through the intergalactic office space with all the speed and grace of a slightly confused hippopotamus. This lumbering reputation, mostly explained by Microsoft’s initial, somewhat frantic efforts to catch up to the suspiciously slick and effortlessly nimble Slack, left many users questioning if they should simply resort to carrier pigeons instead. But lo and behold, in an act of cosmic engineering, Microsoft has now unveiled a dazzling new incarnation of Teams. This version, they say with great enthusiasm and no small amount of hope, has been "reimagined from the ground up," promising to zip through your workplace galaxy with double the speed while using only half the memory. You’ll be in meetings at warp speed, and hopping between chats and channels will feel 1.7 times faster—though how one measures 0.7 of a "times" remains delightfully mysterious. The user experience, too, has been thoroughly polished and reengineered, presumably in a manner that won’t require a master’s degree in transdimensional interface studies to comprehend.


2023. Discord updates its bot with ChatGPT-like features



Imagine, if you will, that Discord, that infamous digital gathering place for the chatty and the bold, has had an epiphany—an AI epiphany, no less. They've decided to unleash a newly enhanced version of their Clyde bot, now supercharged with OpenAI's ChatGPT wizardry, upon select servers. And what a Clyde it is! Simply mention @Clyde in any server, and voilà: it’s there, ready to natter on in any channel about whatever takes your fancy. Want Clyde to wrangle your mates into a cozy thread? Sorted. Want it to pull up a playlist that suits your current planetary alignment or shower you with GIFs and emojis as if it’s one of the gang? Clyde's got you covered. You can even challenge it to cough up five riveting cat facts (not one more, not one less). Discord, as one might imagine, is testing and tweaking this delightful AI chum, fully convinced it’ll soon become as essential to the Discord experience as... well, as Discord itself.


2023. ByteDance’s Slack-like tool generated $100M in 2022



Feishu, ByteDance’s workplace collaboration app, exceeded $100 million in annual recurring revenue last year. Feishu, which has an international version named Lark, is a comprehensive work communication platform with useful features such as automatic notetaking for video calls, shared calendars and collaborative documents. In late 2021, the workplace tool was established as one of the company’s six distinct business groups, granting it the same strategic significance as other business groups at ByteDance, which include TikTok, Douyin, Dali (the education group), BytePlus (B2B AI and data infrastructure) and Nuverse (video games).


2022. Microsoft Teams targets Facebook Groups with new Communities feature



Microsoft Teams introduced a new “Communities” feature on Android and iOS devices. Users can now create and manage groups for their sports teams, event planning committees, parent-teacher associations, or any other community group. This feature provides access to group calendars, event planning, meetings, document/photo sharing, video calls and messaging. The Communities feature in Teams includes a “new events experience” that lets users add events to their community calendar, invite guests, track attendance and communicate with attendees via direct messaging. Communities is currently being rolled out in the free version of Microsoft Teams. Initially, it is available only on mobile devices, but the company has indicated that it will be coming to desktop soon.


2022. Slack adds persistent information layer to channels called Canvas



Slack has thrived largely in the enterprise sector by enabling people to communicate in various ways while integrating with numerous common enterprise applications. However, what Slack has been missing until now was a method to share information about a project in a lasting manner. If you wanted to locate the content related to a project, you might create a channel to focus on it and share some documents, links and other information, but finding them again would require searching or extensive scrolling. Slack recognized this shortcoming and decided to merge Quip’s collaborative tools with Slack’s communication features in a new tool called Canvas. It resides alongside a channel’s conversation stream and provides users with access to information such as data and charts, text, tasks, internal and external links, training videos and more.


2022. Slack gains new automation features, including conditional logic for workflows



In a universe not entirely unlike our own, the team at Slack has unleashed a dazzling array of new automation features, ostensibly designed to make workflows not only easier to share but also less prone to getting lost in the dark and uncharted corners of collaborative chaos. These enhancements, an ambitious evolution of the Workflow Builder tool they first unveiled in the relatively ancient year of 2019, now allow the brave denizens of Slack to send workflows hither and thither while wielding the mystical power of “if-then” statements to conjure up astonishingly clever processes. Naturally, this all comes at a time when no-code tools—those ingenious contraptions enabling mere mortals to craft apps and automations without so much as whispering the arcane incantations of programming languages—are flourishing wildly. Indeed, a survey by 451 Research and FileMaker reveals that nearly 60% of custom apps (yes, including those delightfully handy automations) now emerge from outside the sacred halls of IT. And of those, a rather staggering 30% are fashioned by individuals whose technical skills could politely be described as "aspirational."


2022. Slack is increasing prices and changing the way its free plan works



Slack, the messaging platform that functions as an online gathering spot for many teams, is increasing its monthly cost and altering the terms of its free plan. If you subscribe to the “Pro” plan on a monthly basis, the price will rise from $8 per user per month to $8.75 per user per month. If you opt for the annual “Pro” plan, the cost will change from $6.67 per user per month to $7.25 per user per month. For those using the free plan, there will be changes in how long messages are retained. Previously, free Slack accounts would display the last 10,000 messages and 5 GB of uploads. Going forward, retention will be time-based rather than quantity-based, with Slack showing the last 90 days of messages/uploads regardless of volume.