Since its inception in 2017, the company’s vision for Microsoft Teams has always been to bring together all communication and collaboration tools in one place, from chats to meetings, from apps to files, allowing the integration of many new by third-party ISVs, enterprise developers, and system integrators, resulting in more than 1,900 apps in the store and more than 100,000 custom apps integrated with the Teams platform.
After listening to user feedback, Microsoft has done a complete revamp of Teams. The new app is all about speed, flexibility and intelligence, delivering performance up to twice as fast e using 50% less memory, to help you save time and collaborate more efficiently. These improvements also form the foundation for new AI experiences like Copilot for Microsoft Teams, announced earlier this month.
While Microsoft has continuously and consistently improved the Teams app over time, the most important new features will only be available with the new Teams:
• Faster. The main focus of the new Teams is speed, to make it twice as fast while using half the system resources. To achieve this goal, Microsoft has made a critical investment to overhaul the platform and optimize the data, network, chat and video architecture for speed and performance. Microsoft worked with independent benchmarking firm GigaOm to quantify some of the performance benefits, showing in tests that launching the app and joining meetings are already twice as fast and memory consumption has decreased by half .
• Easier. Microsoft is always looking for new ways to offer users a simpler yet more feature-rich experience that is increasingly broad and diverse. Microsoft is excited to introduce improvements to the core Teams experience that will make it easier to track notifications, search for information, manage messages, and organize channels—all with just a few clicks.
• More flexible. To simplify the management of different tenants and accounts, Microsoft has improved its authentication model, synchronization and notification systems to offer a smooth and consistent experience. Thanks to the updates introduced, it will no longer be necessary to log in and out of different tenants and accounts, but it will be possible to keep access to everyone, receiving notifications regardless of the one you are using.
• Smarter. The new Teams will be the foundation for next-generation AI experiences, including previously announced ones like Intelligent Recap and Copilot for Microsoft Teams. Microsoft will leverage AI to streamline collaborative work, updating users on what happened before joining a meeting or chat and answering questions during the discussion.
General availability of the new Teams is planned for the end of the year, while commercial customers using Windows will already have access to the public preview.