Microsoft Teams reaches 115 million daily active users

A new way to work and learn for a new digital age 

When the pandemic first instigated a global shift to remote work, videoconferencing emerged as an immediate solution to work-from-home restrictions. But as the initial era of “remote everything” has given way to durable, hybrid models of work and learning, we’ve entered a new digital age that is completely transforming how we work and learn—today and for the next decade. To connect, collaborate, and create in this new world of work—whether that be at home or school, in the office or in firstline industries like healthcare and manufacturing—we need an experience that goes so far beyond video meetings or chat alone.

The key to productivity is to move beyond transactional meetings and focus on the flow of work. People don’t just open Teams to join a meeting and then close it when the meeting is over; they work in Teams all day.  It’s a place to exchange ideas, share information, and create human connections. It’s where people work before, during, and after a meeting, and it supports all the different ways people engage and collaborate together.

Teams brings together meetings, chat, calls, collaboration, third-party apps, and business processes into a single experience, and we are seeing increased usage intensity in Teams as people communicate, collaborate, and co-author content across work, life, and learning.

Powered by Microsoft 365

As much as Teams has transformed work for our customers, it’s really the tip of the iceberg. Because as people work all day in Teams, they also get the full breadth and depth of Microsoft 365, the integrated suite of graph-connected productivity apps and experiences behind the familiar tools we all rely on every day to connect, collaborate, and get work done.

For that reason, daily active usage only tells a portion of the collaboration story; a broader collaboration metric is needed to understand the changing ways in which we work and collaborate. What’s needed now is a metric that demonstrates the breadth of services people use and the new rich and varied ways in which collaboration happens across hybrid work environments. The true measure of collaboration transcends simple videoconferencing or chat-based communications. Our more holistic view takes into account the many ways people and teams engage in the flow of work. In Teams we see meetings, but also small group huddles, chats, calls, document collab, and individual work. And enabling all of it digitally is our vision for collaboration in the new digital age.

So today we’re also sharing a new Microsoft 365 daily collaboration minutes (DCM) metric** defined as the sum of all minutes people spent in Microsoft 365 apps like Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, SharePoint, OneDrive, and more. This quarter, Microsoft 365 users around the world generated more than 30 billion collaboration minutes in a single day as people communicated, collaborated, and co-authored content across work, life, and learning. This new metric combines both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration and reflects the changing nature of work. With Teams as a hub, Microsoft 365 brings the power of the cloud to every person, providing them with a secure, integrated experience designed for a new world of work.

Here’s what some of our customers have to say about Teams and Microsoft 365:

“Everybody was depending on Microsoft Teams as our way of continuing business—both in the classroom and throughout the university community. A product that is responsive to our current and our future needs.”- Dr. Cynthia DeLuca, Associate VP for Innovative Education, University of South Florida (Read more here.) 

“Microsoft technology has been an integral part of NFL operations for several years,” says Michelle McKenna, CIO, NFL. “And with the new challenges ahead of us this season, Microsoft will be instrumental in helping us innovate the best possible experiences for our players, coaches, officials, and fans, through activation like the Fan Mosaic and the Bud Light Showtime cam.” (Read more here.)

“When you move everybody home and you’ve built your network to handle 300 global offices and now you’ve got 20,000 home offices, that broke a lot of stuff—but what it also did was make Microsoft Teams shine.” – Bruce Kurkiewicz, Advanced Technology Account Executive, CDW + Rockwell Automation (Read more here.)

“Understanding where our customers are headed is a big part of how we’re shaping our future. We couldn’t do that without a corresponding digital, agile, and mobile workplace built on Microsoft 365.” – Tom McKee, Chief Information Officer, Kennametal (Read more here.)

“No matter what part of the business we support or where we are located, we use Teams and the rest of the Microsoft 365 platform to best communicate with customers and engage with our associates.” –  Denise Owens, Senior Director of Information Technology for End User Computing at Office Depot (Read more here.)

It’s clear the people need rich tools for all the ways they want to collaborate and communicate in the new world of work—tools that transcend siloed videoconferencing or chat and enable people to stay in the flow of work. Microsoft provides a platform for work, life, and learning that delivers the best collaboration experience to our customers over the long term.  And we are committed to using this unique ability to help unlock human potential for people and organizations everywhere. There’s no doubt that we live in challenging times, and that more challenges lie ahead. But when we provide people with the ability to connect, collaborate, and create from anywhere, there’s no limit to what they can achieve together.