Microsoft's effort to reclaim its glory from $3.8 billion startup Slack begins today

Over the last few years, a red-hot startup named Slack skyrocketed to a $3.8 billion valuation by making it easy and (depending on who you ask) almost kind of fun to chat with your coworkers.

Slack even created kind of a rising tide in tech, accelerating interest in competitors like Atlassian HipChat, and opening the way for big companies like Facebook and Cisco to release their own work chat products. Google even introduced a new version of its Hangouts for work just last week.

Enter Microsoft Teams, Microsoft's take on the market that's now synonymous with Slack, announced late last year and officially available today.

Microsoft Teams, available for Mac, PC, Android, and iPhone, is a bundled part of the Microsoft Office 365 productivity suite for businesses. In other words, if your company subscribes to Office 365, you're getting access to Teams very soon, if you don't have it already. That's an advantage that Slack and most others will have trouble matching, though it's not going down without a fight.

Indeed, Microsoft itself has positioned Teams as a Slack-killer. But we got to try Microsoft Teams a little bit ahead of this official launch. And it's a little bit more than that, and simultaneously a little less. Here's the skinny.