Started only two years ago, Microsoft Corp.’s workplace collaboration tool called Teams has experienced growing adoption. Teams is now being used by more than 500,000 organizations, including 91 percent of Fortune 100 firms, according to data released this week by the company.

“The phrase we’re coining is ‘intelligent workplace for everyone,’” said Jace Moreno (pictured), Microsoft Teams developer platform lead at Microsoft. “There’s multiple people out there, millions of people who are front-line workers interfacing with actual customers. We need to make sure we are developing tools that are for them.”

Moreno spoke with Lisa Martin and Stu Miniman, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Enterprise Connect event in Kissimmee, Florida. They discussed the different approach to collaboration offered by Teams and examples of how it is being deployed by Microsoft’s partners (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Broadcast for 10,000 people

This week, Microsoft announced a number of new features for Teams, including custom backgrounds in video chat, whiteboard capture using any USB camera, live captioning and Live Events, which will allow a user to arrange a broadcast to be viewed by 10,000 people in real time.

“It’s an entirely different way of working,” Moreno said. “It’s not just chat anymore; it’s collaboration.”

Microsoft has been leveraging its extensive partner network to deploy Teams in organizations that face challenges of scale. One partner — Dentsu Aegis Network Ltd. — had only a three-person change management group to meet the needs of more than 50,000 employees, according to Moreno.

Dentsu integrated Teams into the company’s internal portals and created a chatbot to help employees become more familiar with products and services.

“We’ve had some incredible integrations built recently,” Moreno said. “Now they’re taking that one step further, because they saw such great success, and they’re going to different centers of excellence inside the organization.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Enterprise Connect event. (* Disclosure: Five9 Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Five9 nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE