Microsoft has announced the public preview of the new Microsoft Teams app for Windows, marking the next chapter in the Teams story. Teams was launched in 2017 with the vision to bring together all communication and collaboration tools in one place, and today over 280 million people rely on Teams every month to stay connected with colleagues, partners, customers, friends, and family.
With the new app, Microsoft has reimagined Teams from the ground up, listening to feedback from users, and culminating in a redesign built on a foundation of speed, performance, flexibility, and intelligence. The new app is designed to deliver up to two times faster performance while using 50 percent less memory, providing a simpler and more feature-rich experience for Teams’ diverse and growing user base.
One of the most significant areas of improvement in the new Microsoft Teams is its speed. Microsoft has made a ground-up investment to overhaul the platform and optimise the data, network, chat, and video architecture for speed and performance. The company has set a North Star for the new Teams to make it twice as fast while using half the system resources. Users can already see the benefits in the public preview build, with app launch and join meetings already twice as fast, and memory consumption decreasing by half when testing the new Teams preview compared with classic Teams.
The new Teams also provides a simpler user experience with fewer clicks, making it easier for users to stay on top of their notifications, search for information, manage their messages, and organise their channels. Microsoft has enhanced the core Teams experience to provide a feature-rich experience while also simplifying the user interface.
Additionally, the new Teams is designed to be more flexible, with improved support for organisations that span multiple tenants and accounts. Microsoft has improved the authentication model, synchronisation, and notification systems to provide a seamless and consistent experience, allowing users to collaborate with people across organisational boundaries and use Teams across multiple tenants or accounts.
Moreover, the new Teams will be the foundation for next-generation AI experiences, including intelligent recap and Copilot for Microsoft Teams. AI will take the work out of working together by getting users up to speed on what happened before they joined a meeting or chat and answering their questions all in the flow of the discussion.
Microsoft is targeting the general availability of new Teams later this year in 2023. In the meantime, commercial customers using Windows can try the public preview, which is rolling out starting today. Microsoft intends to extend the preview release to a broader set of customers, including those using Macs later this year.