Announced alongside Microsoft’s Q1 2021 earnings, Microsoft Teams now has 115 million daily active users, up 40 million from 75 million in April 2020.
Microsoft defines daily active users (DAU) as the count of unique users performing an intentional action in a 24-hour period in any of the Teams clients—desktop, mobile, or web. Intentional actions include sending or replying to a chat, joining a meeting, or opening a file in Teams. They don’t count passive actions like auto boot, minimizing a screen, or closing the app.
No doubt the pandemic has had a big influence on usage. Microsoft doesn’t publish usage figures on a fixed schedule, but here are the public figures. Pretty impressive growth in just over a year from 13 million users in July 2019!
- October 2020: 115 million DAU
- April 2020: 75 million DAU
- March 2020: 44 million users
- November 2019: 20 million users
- Jul 2019: 13 million users (first public numbers since public preview in 2016 and GA in 2017)
Microsoft 365 daily collaboration minutes (DCM)
Microsoft push in their blog that Microsoft Teams is more than just meetings; “People don’t just open Teams to join a meeting and then close it when the meeting is over; they work in Teams all day”. Microsoft is pushing the use of a new Microsoft 365 daily collaboration minutes (DCM) metric.
Microsoft 365 Daily Collaboration Minutes (DCM) is defined as the sum of all user minutes spent in a 24-hour period across meetings, chat, calls, document collaboration, and co-authoring, and other activities across Microsoft 365 apps during the last quarter. It includes active usage in Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, SharePoint, OneDrive, Stream, and Yammer. Teams and Stream usage is calculated across platforms. All other active app usage is calculated for Windows 10 only.
This quarter, Microsoft 365 users around the world generated more than 30 billion collaboration minutes in a single day.
We’ll see if this metric sticks around in the future or if it’s just a one-off.
Microsoft blog: Microsoft Teams reaches 115 million DAU—plus, a new daily collaboration minutes metric for Microsoft 365
