While Microsoft Teams is free, or rather bundled, for Office 365 Business Premium and Enterprise customers, there's no way for smaller businesses or individuals collaborating with larger businesses to access the company's collaboration tools for free. But that might be changing. Some observant folks have spotted pointers to a new freemium option.

Microsoft continues to add new features to Teams, their collaboration tool, and upping the ante on established platforms such as Slack. Their recent acquisition of ChalkUp and new chat history feature further refine this product.

Microsoft is continuing to play their game of catchup/leapfrog with Slack, Hipchat and other collaboration tools. The company has announced a slew of integrations with applications that will allow users to include information from apps in conversations, a new store for accessing apps that work in Teams as well as the ability to launch queries and other actions straight from the command box.

After a three month delay, Microsoft has delivered on its promise to enable guest access in Microsoft Teams. Although Teams was released earlier this year, it boasts over 125,000 users across 181 countries. Now, anyone with an Active Directory account across Microsoft commercial cloud services and third-party Azure AD integrated apps can be added as a guest in Teams.

Atlassian has announced Stride - their new collaboration platform. While Hipchat has been around for a while they say Stride will be Atlassian's core communications and collaboration platform. The company says it will offer a zero-click upgrade path - part of what Atlassian's head of communication products Steve Goldsmith calls their guiding principle: "Don't F**k the Customer".

Skype for Business is joining the Microsoft Teams family, as the company marches forth on their quest to crack the enterprise collaboration nut. While Skype may have started life as a way to disrupt the traditional telco business, it's become a key tool for businesses wanting to connect distributed teams.

Teams is Microsoft's play in the competitive collaboration business. Like Slack and HipChat, it's a chat-based system. But as well as chat, Teams is about allowing coworkers to work together. Of course, that means being able to access content easily.

As part of Microsoft's increased openness to working with third parties, a new integration with Dropbox has been announced, so people can work together on files stored in Dropbox.

Team messaging application Slack is upping the ante in the battle of the collaboration platforms. With Slack, HipChat and Microsoft Teams all battling it out to master the collaboration game, Slack has added the ability to time limit guest access to chats and adding some extra information so you know more about guests.

Microsoft's new chat-based workspace and collaboration tool, Microsoft Teams, is now available for all Office 365 users. Dubbed the digital equivalent of an open plan office, it provides the functionality of a chat client with additional features, including full Office 365 integration, enterprise-level security and a host of compatible third-party apps. Here's what you need to know.

Slack is a team communications tool that has suited smaller working groups. But in bigger organisations where a number of individuals may be using Slack to communicate within their own teams, they can become disconnected from each other. Slack has now introduced a new offering called Enterprise Grid which aims to facilitate communication between teams in large organisations and give administrators more control.