Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday announced its latest updates and features for its enterprise collaboration tool, Microsoft Teams, which the company launched last month following a four-month beta.

The latest updates follow the announcement earlier this week of Trello Inc.’s integration with Microsoft Teams. Users will be able to access all their Trello boards directly from the Microsoft Teams app or on the web.

The latest updates for Microsoft Teams aren’t anything major, but they do move the platform a step further in the competitive team collaboration market. Microsoft Teams is competing with Slack, Hipchat, Google Inc.’s new Hangouts Chat, Workplace by Facebook and others.

According to a survey conducted in January by Spiceworks Inc., the number of Microsoft Teams users will surpass Slack’s numbers within two years. Slack’s number of daily users as of October sat at 4 million, 1.25 million of whom were paying users.

HipChat, Atlassian Corp. PLC’s group chat platform, suffered a setback this weekend when it was hacked. Hackers were able to obtain a significant amount of data, including group chat logs.

Since launching in October, Workplace by Facebook is now used by more than 14,000 organizations, including Starbucks Corp., Viacom Inc. and Discovery Communications Inc.

Here’s a look at the latest updates for Microsoft Teams:

Link to channels and teams

Microsoft Teams now makes it easier to link to a channel or team. Users will be able to get a shareable link to a channel or team by clicking the “More” icon and pasting the link into an email or message. This will allow users to easily share a link to all the files in a team or channel.

While this isn’t a significant update now, it will be, come June, when Microsoft is set to launch guest access for Teams. Guest access will provide the ability to invite external users outside the organization into a team on the collaboration platform as a fully-fledged member.

Microsoft plans to launch the first stage of the functionality by the end of Q2.

Support for Markdown in Wiki

Microsoft Teams now supports Markdown in Wiki, allowing users to to use the same syntax that applies to chats and messaging to format Wiki sections.

Microsoft Teams launched support for Markdown in February.

Supported Markdown actions include: *bold* (bold text); _italic_ (italic text); ~strikethough~ (strikethrough); <number> (numbered list); *,- (unordered list); [Text](URL) (hyperlink); ”’ (multi-line code block); ‘[text]’ (inline block of code); ## (header).  

With Markdown, users will get a live preview of the formatted text inside the compose box as they type.

Refresh to find new files

A new refresh button at the top corner of the Files tab in each channel, allows users to refresh the channel to check whether there are any new changes or files since the last time they looked.

New upload indicator

When users upload a file to the Files view or OneDrive in a channel, they will see the new upload indicator that will allow them to track the progress of the upload. Users would also be able to use the upload indicator to cancel uploads for multiple files at a time.

Better viewing experience

The final update for Microsoft Teams is a better viewing experience, which includes performance improvements to the Files view in channels.

Image: Microsoft