Microsoft Corp. is offering companies a chance to “test drive” its new collaboration platform Microsoft Teams as it steps up its bid to take on Slack Inc.

Microsoft announced the platform in November following rumors that it had seriously considered a bid to acquire Slack, which has taken the world of enterprise collaboration by storm. Microsoft Teams, which was born out of Skype Teams, lets users carry out group conversations and animate them with GIFs, among other features.

One of Teams’ differentiating features is threaded conversations, which let users reply directly to an individual message. That contrasts to Slack, where all conversations except for private messages are a group affair. Teams is also tightly integrated with Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity suite.

The new test drive Microsoft announced last week is part of its Customer Immersion Experience, and supports up to 12 attendees, the company said. They’re basically training sessions for companies, where users will be taught the basics of how Microsoft Teams works and how to configure channels, tabs, bots and connectors to create customized chat experiences. The test drives will also explore Teams’ threaded persistent chat feature and teach users to animate their conversations with emojis, stickers and GIFs.

“Each 90-minute session starts with an online business roundtable discussing your biggest business challenges with a trained facilitator, and then it transitions into a live environment in the cloud,” Microsoft’s Office 365 team wrote in a blog post. “You will receive a link to connect your own device to a remote desktop loaded with our latest and greatest technology, so you can experience firsthand how Microsoft tools can solve your biggest challenges.”

The sessions will also teach users about Office 365’s real-time co-authoring capabilities and its business analytics features and provide tips on how to remain productive while staying in compliance with their companies policies and regulations.

U.S. companies interested in taking Microsoft Teams out for a test drive can register here. Non-U.S. firms can apply via this link. SiliconANGLE provided its own in-depth look at Teams shortly after it was announced.

Image courtesy of Microsoft