Microsoft Teams: your next Operating System

In certain circles I’ve heard people reference that Teams could be the next enterprise operating system from Microsoft. It’s kind of an unusual statement, enough to catch you off-guard and make you think for a moment.

Windows 10 isn’t going anywhere, but it’s been touted as the last version of Windows, from here on it’s biannual updates will keep up with what’s new, and it has astrong future in helping to cloudify it’s deployment and management in even the biggest enterprises. There’s a pretty static but vocal minority of Apple Macs, and OSX has the same model of annual updates already. Mobile devices are either iOS or Android, the only choice you get is defined by which hardware you buy. While there’s also some desktop linux, some Chromebooks etc. these numbers are insignificantly low.

Teams isn’t really going to be an operating system, but the thought is that it can become a unifying layer these different platforms to provide a common user environment. If I create and publish all my companies tools through Teams I should have relatively high confidence that they will work for my users whichever device they are using. As an app environment Teams provides the authentication and user session management, common activity feeds, consistent file access, chat and calling capabilities. I can develop my app using normal web development with a good idea that it’ll most likely be rendered in Chromium, or I can use the SPFX framework which now has native access to MSGraph. If my business is moving toward CDS as a unified repository of business data (and don’t forget SAP and Adobe are joining that club too) I can build simple PowerApps and present them through Teams.

The trigger for these conversations is the new Teams App Setup Policies you can see me demo in this episode of /WhatsNew in Microsoft Teams.

It’s really a progression of what Teams has been from the start, I used to hear Microsoft refer to Teams as ‘the scaffolding of Office 365’, this is an evolution of that story. Unifying how apps are accessed isn’t a new idea, most ERP vendors spent years trying to be the one place, and many organisations adopting VDI type solutions to fully abstract the corporate OS from local OS. None of these really addressed mobile in a convincing way, and didn’t neatly integrate with the collaboration tools that make up more that 50% of most people’s day.

Would this really offer a company an advantage of pure web development? That would seem to assume there is such a things, web development these days is built from pre-existing components, React, MSAL, Fabric, etc. Adding Teams to that isn’t really a change.

So in a few years will we all just live entirely within our Teams client, I think there’s some way to go but it’ll be interesting to see how far it gets. Let me know @stevenc365