The growth of Microsoft Teams has been one of the major success stories of the last few years, as the video conferencing platform saw a huge explosion in users during the pandemic.
But juggling all the various tools and services within the online collaboration offering can often be a hassle, with the sheer amount of help on offer sometimes overwhelming.
Fortunately, super-smart bots are set to soon arrive to help out some Microsoft Teams users. However, the bad news is that you almost certainly won't be one of them.
Microsoft Teams bots
That's because the company has revealed that bots are coming to Microsoft Teams environments for what it calls "GCC-High customers".
These users are typically found within government IT teams, most often the US government (with GCC standing for Government Community Cloud) and the Department of Defense, where they have to abide by stricter compliance rules and regulations. Such users have to go through stricter validation and security processing to be able to use their software, with Microsoft designing and offering customized tools to address issues that these customers may face.
It's a bit of a shame, as the new bots sound like they would be a great help to many everyday Microsoft Teams users.
The update allows users to build and deploy customized bots within their own Microsoft Teams environment, tackling potential roadblocks or common issues that could be easily automated.
The bots can also address line-of-business issues, boosting not just collaboration and communication, but also efficiency and productivity when using Teams - something we'd all no doubt appreciate.
The feature is listed on the Microsoft 365 roadmap as rolling out now, with GCC-High Microsoft Teams users on Desktop, Android, iOS, Mac and Web all able to update.
If the launch is a success and Microsoft Teams sees good engagement with the bots from GCC-High customers, we may see a more general launch sometime in the future. For now, we'll just have to wait and see.
