Microsoft starts public preview of new Teams for commercial clients

Microsoft announced Monday that it’s starting to roll out a new, faster version of its Teams communications app for Windows to commercial clients enrolled in its preview program. The software will be available to all customers later this year, and Microsoft has also promised new versions of Teams for Mac and web.

Since its debut in 2017, Teams has become the jewel of Microsoft 365, the subscription-based productivity software bundle formerly known as Office 365. Businesses rushed to adopt Teams to keep employees connected through video calls and text chats during the Covid pandemic. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in January that more than 280 million people use his Teams every month, even though many employees are commuting to the office again. rice field.

Microsoft Teams had some performance issues in 2020, but the company has resolved them. In 2021, with Teams usage still on the rise, Microsoft will begin building its second-generation software to boost performance, said Jeff Teper, Microsoft’s president of collaboration apps and platforms. said in an interview with CNBC.

Reports of a new version of Teams were circulating earlier this year. Teper said this caused “a lot of upheaval,” but that Microsoft won’t announce an update until the program hits its internal goal of being twice as fast as before while using half the memory. I don’t want

The new version also includes enhancements aimed at simplifying Teams, building on the 400+ feature updates Microsoft delivered last year, some of which will help Microsoft keep up with its rivals. That’s what we’re aiming for, Teper said. Competitors include his Slack, Zoom, owned by Cisco, Google and Salesforce.

Instead of showing something like a ribbon of features for chat, Teams hides some options behind a plus sign that users can click. It’s a concept people are familiar with from other messaging applications, Teper said. For example, in Slack, users can upload documents or set reminders by clicking the plus sign below the message entry area.

During a team video call, the software displays all participants on the screen in equal-sized boxes instead of giving more space to participants with their cameras on. Until now, Teams calls have sometimes resembled Piet Mondrian’s paintings, which feature squares and rectangles of varying sizes and colors, Teper said.

Microsoft is also tweaking Teams to make it easier for people in multiple organizations to keep track of what’s going on.

“Instead of logging in and out of different tenants and accounts, you can now stay logged in to all tenants and accounts. ,” Teper wrote in a blog post.

Employees at companies with access to the new version of Teams will see a switch at the top of the application window that will allow them to switch back to what Microsoft calls the legacy version, he wrote in a blog post. increase.

clock: Satya Nadella looks back on nine years leading Microsoft.