Microsoft Teams coming to U.S. Government Cloud users starting July 17

Microsoft Office 365 for U.S. Government Cloud customers are set to get Teams starting next month. Teams for other Microsoft U.S. Government Cloud users is 'coming soon.'

Microsoft will start rolling out Teams to its U.S. Government Cloud customers on July 17.

In a blog post on June 28, Microsoft provided an official (and awaited) date for Government Cloud Teams availability. The post says Teams should be available to all eligible Government Cloud users by the end of August 2018.

Teams will be available as part of Office 365 for U.S. Government G1, G3, G5 and F1 plans. It also will be available for Microsoft 365 for U.S. Government G3, G5, and F1 plans. Microsoft officials said they "are working to bring Microsoft Teams to the other U.S. government clouds soon."

There are some feature differences between Microsoft Teams for commercial customers and Teams for U.S. Government cloud users. Here's Microsoft's chart showing the commercial Teams features that will be unavailable, turned off by default and/or available at some point in the future:

Microsoft's Stream video service for business users still isn't available for U.S. Government cloud, which means call/meeting recording in Teams is not yet available either, as it uses Streams. Support for apps (Bots, Tabs, Connectors) is a work in progress, as are a unified presence and email notifications.

New features for Microsoft Teams will come to Government Cloud customers after they first go to commercial customers, going forward. Microsoft officials said this lag is "due to increased audit requirements and activities to meet the needs" of that environment.

Microsoft Teams security and compliance levels include ISO 27001, ISO 27018, EUMC, SOC 1 Type I & II, SOC 2 Type I and II, HIPAA and FedRAMP Moderate, Microsoft's blog post notes.

Microsoft originally began rolling out Teams, its group-chat service, in early 2017. There are rumors that Microsoft may at some point release a free version of Teams and not tie its usage to having an Office 365 subscription, but so far there's been no formal announcement of such a plan.

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