Product · Team chat & collaboration
Team chat and channels,
on an open standard.
Direct messages, group chats, channels and team workspaces with presence, threads, file sharing and guest access — built on Matrix, an open messaging standard, rather than a proprietary protocol.
Project status Chat and collaboration are planned for the collaboration phase. Matrix and Element are candidates under evaluation; nothing on this page is available yet.
What it replaces
The chat, channels and team workspaces of Microsoft Teams, and Google Chat.
For many organizations, Teams has become the place where work is coordinated: a channel per project or department, quick questions in direct messages, files dropped into conversations, and a call started with one click when typing is too slow. Replacing it means replacing that whole pattern, not just providing a messaging app.
Office Unbound’s collaboration service is designed to cover the major parts of it: individual and group chat, channels grouped into team workspaces, threaded discussions, presence, notifications, search, file sharing into the platform’s storage, guest collaboration with outside organizations, meetings started from a conversation, and the retention and audit controls an organization needs to treat chat as a business record.
It does not try to reproduce everything Teams has become. The Teams app store, its bots and connectors, and Microsoft-specific integrations such as Loop components or Planner tabs are outside the scope described here.
Intended capabilities
What the collaboration service is being designed to provide. Each line shows its current status; none is available yet.
- Available Available and verified in a release
- In development Being built now
- Planned In the roadmap, not yet started
- Under evaluation Being assessed; not yet selected
| Capability | What it means | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Individual chat | One-to-one conversations between colleagues, with history kept on the organization’s server. | Planned |
| Group chat | Ad hoc conversations among several people, outside any channel. | Planned |
| Channels | Named, persistent conversations for a topic, project or department. | Planned |
| Team workspaces | Channels grouped into a team with shared membership, files and settings. | Planned |
| Threaded discussions | Replies grouped under a message so a channel stays readable. | Planned |
| Presence | Online, away and busy status, informed by calendar where possible. | Planned |
| Notifications | Mentions, keywords and per-channel settings across desktop and mobile. | Planned |
| File sharing | Files shared into a conversation stored in the team’s file workspace. | Planned |
| Search | Search across conversations the user is a member of. | Planned |
| Guest collaboration | People from outside the organization invited into specific rooms. | Planned |
| Integrated meetings | Calls and video meetings started from a room or scheduled from the calendar. | Planned |
| Organization-level policies | Who may create teams, invite guests, federate or delete messages. | Planned |
| Retention and auditing | Message retention policies and administrative audit records. | Planned |
| Desktop and mobile access | Desktop and mobile applications in addition to the browser. | Planned |
| Federation with other Matrix servers | Optional conversations with organizations running their own Matrix servers. | Under evaluation |
| Bridges to other chat networks | Connections to non-Matrix networks; maturity varies widely by bridge. | Under evaluation |
Why Matrix
Matrix is an open standard for real-time communication: a published specification, maintained through an open process, with several independent server and client implementations. A Matrix homeserver stores an organization’s conversations; clients connect to it over a documented API; and homeservers can, if their operators allow it, exchange messages with each other.
Building on a standard rather than a product means the chat data is held in a documented form, alternative clients can connect to the same server, and an organization is not tied to a single vendor’s client or server to keep its history readable. It is the same reason mail runs on SMTP and IMAP rather than one company’s protocol.
The leading candidates are a Matrix homeserver implementation with Element as the basis for the client experience, and MatrixRTC with LiveKit for calls. Which homeserver, how the client is branded and integrated, and how all of it is licensed are open questions in the current evaluation.
Open specification
The protocol is documented publicly, not reverse-engineered.
Many implementations
More than one server and client exists, so no single codebase is a dependency forever.
Federation by choice
Servers can talk to other organizations’ servers, or be kept entirely private.
End-to-end encryption
Available in the protocol, with governance trade-offs described below.
Under evaluation Matrix, Element, MatrixRTC and LiveKit
How communication fits together
Chat is the center of the collaboration layer, but it is only useful because it connects to identity, files, calendars, meetings and, where an organization wants it, the phone network.
Federation and interoperability, honestly
Open standards make interoperability possible. They do not make it automatic.
- Other Matrix servers
- Matrix federation lets users on one organization’s server join rooms with users on another’s, much as two companies’ mail servers exchange email. It is intended to be off or restricted to an allowlist unless an administrator decides otherwise, because federation also means message copies held on servers the organization does not control.
- Other Matrix clients
- Because the client API is documented, standards-compliant Matrix clients can in principle connect to the same server. Office Unbound will state which clients it tests and supports rather than claim all of them work.
- Microsoft Teams
- There is no claim of interoperability with Teams. Organizations that need to keep talking to partners on Teams should expect to use guest access in each other’s systems, meetings by link, or email.
- Bridges to other networks
- The Matrix ecosystem includes bridges to other chat networks. Their maturity, maintenance and terms of use vary, and they depend on the other network’s APIs. They are not part of the planned core and would be evaluated individually.
- Data in a documented form
- Conversation history lives in the organization’s homeserver in a structure defined by an open specification, which is what makes export and a later move between operators practical.
Encryption and governance
Matrix supports end-to-end encryption, in which only the participants’ devices can read messages. That is valuable for private conversations, and it has consequences an organization has to choose deliberately: the server cannot index encrypted messages for organization-wide search, apply content-based retention review, or produce message content for an investigation, and users who lose all their devices and recovery keys can lose access to their history.
The intended approach is to make this a policy decision rather than a fixed default — for example, transport encryption with server-side retention for business channels, and end-to-end encryption where the organization decides confidentiality outweighs central oversight. Exactly what the policy controls look like is part of the design work.
Administration
- Who may create teams and channels, and who may invite guests
- Federation off, on, or limited to named servers
- Retention periods for messages and files, per organization or per team
- Audit records of administrative actions and membership changes
- Removal of a departing user from every room when their account is disabled
- Moderation tools for channel owners and administrators
All planned. Membership and sign-in come from the platform directory; see Identity and administration.
What we are not claiming
Office Unbound does not claim complete feature parity with Microsoft Teams. The intent is to cover the major collaboration functions — chat, channels, team workspaces, meetings, files and administration — well. The Teams app ecosystem, Microsoft 365 integrations, and many specialized features will not have equivalents.
Teams history. Moving existing Teams conversations depends on what Microsoft’s APIs expose to an authorized migration tool and on how well that content maps into Matrix rooms. The planned migration tooling is designed to inventory teams, channels and membership and to move associated files from SharePoint; chat and channel message history is treated as compatibility-dependent, not promised. Google Chat history is in the same position.
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