Microsoft said on Thursday that video calls and educational use of its productivity service through its Microsoft Teams program have risen to a huge number in recent weeks as employees go to work remotely, and some American schools have canceled classroom lessons for the rest of the academic year.
The American technology giant said that video calls via the Teams service – which competes with applications such as Slack and Zoom – rose by 1,000% last March, but it did not provide an absolute figure. The company said: The percentage of meetings and calls that included video more than doubled to 43% from 21% last month. Microsoft also said: 183,000 educational institutions, each of which may include more than one school, in 175 countries are using the Teams for Education service.
The company added that the total number of minutes spent by all Teams users in meetings reached 2.7 billion minutes on March 31 alone, three times the number of minutes on March 19, which was estimated at about 900 million. Distance work and learning services and tools have witnessed rapid growth over the past weeks, in light of measures to prevent and limit the outbreak of the new coronavirus (COVID-19), which forced many countries to close schools, and many facilities and institutions.
Joel Wallenstrom, CEO of end-to-end encrypted messaging service Wickr, said: Sales of the service more than doubled every week for a month. The Wicker service is characterized by providing fully encrypted video calls with up to 50 participants. Wicker usually serves executives or security teams within large companies looking for a service that provides them with encryption to discuss financial or government secrets.
Slack said last month that simultaneous connected users increased to 12.5 million on March 25 from 10 million on March 10.
Participants in daily Zoom meetings rose to more than 200 million in March from the previous maximum of 10 million. But the rise of (Zoom) sparked a global reaction regarding security and privacy concerns, as Google banned the use of the application by employees, and SpaceX, which is affiliated with the famous entrepreneur (Elon Musk), recently prevented its employees from using (Zoom), while Taiwan asked government agencies to stop using the application.
