27th May, 2021
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 first-line industries like healthcare and manufacturing—we need an experience that goes so far beyond video meetings or chats 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.
Teams bring 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.
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.
