Microsoft Teams adds a free communities feature to take on Facebook and Discord

Microsoft is launching a new communities feature for Microsoft Teams today, designed to let consumers use the best parts of Teams for free to create and organize groups. The new community feature will allow groups to use the calendar, meeting, and chat features of Teams.

Features like group chat, calling, and file/photo sharing are supported, and groups will also be able to use a shared calendar (including Google Calendar integration) to host community events.

This new community integration is really aimed at groups like sports clubs or even virtual community groups for small businesses and simple groups like a carpool for coworkers to arrange transportation. Facebook, Reddit, Discord, WhatsApp, Twitter, and many other services already provide a variety of ways to organize groups online, so Microsoft is entering a crowded market, but it thinks Teams has something different to offer.

“What we’ve learned so far as we’ve built this is that there’s a set of communities that are looking to get things done,” says Amit Fulay, Microsoft’s vice president of product, in an interview with the edge. “These are very different from pure fan communities or discussion communities, and where I think our strengths are as a company…is our ability to provide those productivity tools.”

Microsoft has created a set of templates for Teams users to quickly create communities, and these groups will be limited to the free consumer version of Teams at launch today. The Microsoft Teams apps on iOS and Android will support communities today, with desktop versions to follow in the coming weeks. You’ll also be able to easily find images and files shared within groups without having to pin them.

Communities in Teams also present Microsoft with new moderation challenges. While the company has experience managing Xbox Network, Skype, and other consumer services that require moderation, it plans to largely follow the Discord model of expecting communities to implement their own rules and admins to moderate their private groups.

“In fact, we have a centralized digital security team,” explains Fulay. “We have a lot of experience with Xbox and services like Flipgrid that have been working on moderation. The way things are dialed in and moderated, we have core teams for that.”

Microsoft Teams communities will require a Microsoft account, and groups can easily invite others to join with a link. If that link is accidentally shared or abused, admins can quickly change the invite link to manage who joins their community. Since the communities feature is based on Teams, any virtual meeting has features like lobbying to ensure that only community members join the calls.

The launch of communities in Microsoft Teams comes almost two years later Microsoft was in talks to acquire Discord. Microsoft also failed to acquire Tik Tok Y interest and has shown great interest in online communities and creators. Microsoft has been willing to spend big on these services because, outside of Xbox, it doesn’t have a large consumer-oriented community like its rivals Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple do.

Communities in Teams could help fill a big gap for Microsoft, but it’s way too early and the feature set seems pretty basic right now. Unlike Discord, you can’t just jump into a sticky call with your online group, and the communities feature in Teams seems to be more structured around a rigid form of organization.

“We’re just getting started,” says Manik Gupta, Teams consumer CVP at Microsoft, in an interview with the edge. “We will see where our users are arriving and how to further our roadmap. We’ll see how people are using the product and we’ll replicate that.”

Microsoft hired Gupta over a year ago to lead a new consumer apps effort within the company, and now he takes responsibility for the Teams client. That should mean we see some user experience improvements for Microsoft’s communications tool. Microsoft Teams users often complain about performance issues or confusing aspects of the consumer version of Teams built into Windows 11 and then have to launch a separate app to access the work/school version.

“One of the things I hope I can bring [to Teams] it’s the same level of simplicity and end-user-centric approach to building the entire product,” says Gupta. Microsoft has been gradually improving the performance of Teams over the past year, including some recent latency and frame improvements, but the promised application “Microsoft Teams 2.0” has not yet fully emerged. This will move Teams from Electron to WebView2 and should significantly improve performance for desktop users.