Microsoft is revising its Teams app today to make it faster and easier to use. Microsoft Teams has been rebuilt from the ground up, with a new preview available today for businesses to try out this radical overhaul that has been years in the making.
“The new Teams is faster, simpler, and more flexible than ever before,” says Sumi Singh, Microsoft Teams executive vice president of engineering, in an interview with the edge. “We have made tremendous advances in performance and ease of use. The new Teams is 2x faster and uses 50% fewer resources.”
Installing the new Microsoft Teams app should be 3 times faster and start or join meetings twice as fast. Microsoft says the new Microsoft Teams should also consume 50 percent less memory and 70 percent less disk space. These all sound like significant performance improvements, especially if you’re experiencing slowdowns in your current Teams app.
Microsoft has certainly been hearing feedback about Teams being slow or problematic. “[We hear] it’s extremely slow, it hogs my battery, the memory is huge…we go and read all these comments and internalize them,” explains Singh. Microsoft set out to improve this situation years ago, but it also had to scale the service to meet the huge demand of millions of more added daily active users during the pandemic.
“At that point, we had to scale what we had as video usage and demands for live meetings skyrocketed,” recalls Singh. “What we started to do is find places in the current customer where we could bring some of these fundamental advances and technologies.”
The existing Microsoft Teams client was moved to the React framework but not completely as it still used parts of Angular JS. That meant the app has been loading two JavaScript frameworks, making it a bit heavier than necessary.
Microsoft has now abandoned the Electron foundation of Teams and moved towards Microsoft’s Edge WebView2 technology along with a full move to the React JavaScript library and a broader focus on the Fluent design language for UI improvements.
“Key benefits observed from the transition from Electron to WebView2 include reduced memory usage and reduced disk footprint as resources are shared with Edge,” Microsoft Teams engineers explain. in a blog post today. “The decision to transition from AngularJS to React was primarily based on performance characteristics and benchmarking results specific to our use cases. We find that React has been a better fit for our scenarios and has been a beneficial move for the overall performance of the application.”
All of this has led to almost every major part of Microsoft Teams being overhauled in some way. “The data layer, the network layer, how we store the data, what we do in the foreground, what we do in the background, and the entire video architecture and rendering pipeline have all been overhauled,” says Singh. “When you use it, you will see it, you will feel it.”
Along with the performance improvements, Microsoft has also given Teams a visual upgrade to better match Windows 11. The new Teams app now uses native materials like Windows 11’s Mica translucency to feel more like a native Windows app. Microsoft has also changed the color of the canvas from gray to white and uses less Teams purple throughout. Microsoft Teams will automatically switch to dark mode now, and the app has group profile pictures and themes.
The new Microsoft Teams isn’t just about looks and performance, though. Microsoft is also adding some very useful enhancements. If you’ve ever had trouble switching between different Microsoft Teams accounts in your organization, the new client has an improved method that allows you to see all your accounts and notifications in a single dropdown menu. You won’t have to sign out of accounts and switch tenants to access different instances of Teams.
If you’re used to meetings with your hands raised even after someone has asked a question, Microsoft is now improving this experience by automatically lowering your hands after the person has spoken. Whiteboard also has the ability to paste loop components to make the canvas even more collaborative. AI-powered video filters are also coming to Microsoft Teams, with a number of animated frames and the ability to change the hue of your video in presentations.
Speaking of AI, the new Teams client is also positioning itself as the foundation for future work by Microsoft with its Copilot assistant and other AI-powered features for Teams. “All AI experiences require very rapid iteration and experimentation,” explains Singh. “It’s not going to make it perfect the first time, so there’s a lot of supervised learning, unsupervised learning, user learning, so this architecture really sets us up well to do that.”
Microsoft has already detailed its plans for Copilot in Microsoft Teams, where you’ll be able to invite the AI assistant into group chats to perform tasks like scheduling meetings or appear in meetings and chats in the sidebar to help with tasks like briefings. , summaries or general questions. Copilot’s business chat feature will also exist in Teams as a chatbot that you can use as a personal assistant to pull data and information from all Microsoft 365 apps and services.
Microsoft’s new Teams client will be available in preview mode today as the company gathers feedback before rolling it out more widely later this year. Companies must be part of the Microsoft Teams public preview to gain access, and a new “try new equipment” switch will appear in the top left corner of the existing app. You’ll be able to switch back to the classic Teams app if needed.
However, there are some gaps in functionality during preview. Businesses won’t be able to access third-party apps or line-of-business (LOB) apps in preview, a big part that’s missing from the new Teams experience for now. Some advanced calling features like call queues are also missing, along with advanced meeting features like breakout rooms not being available.
You’ll also need to be running Windows to get access to the new Teams client. Microsoft is working on an improved version for Mac, but it won’t be available in preview right away. The new Teams preview is only available to business users right now, and Microsoft says it’s working to bring it to Education, Government Clouds, and platforms like VDI and the web later this year.
