Today, Microsoft is updating its Teams app to make it quicker and simpler to use. Microsoft Teams has undergone a complete redesign that has taken years to complete. A new preview of the product is now ready for organizations to test out.
According to Sumi Singh, CVP of engineering for Microsoft Teams, "The new Teams is quicker, easier. And more adaptable than ever before." "Our performance and usability have advanced significantly. The new Teams is 50% less resource-intensive while being 2x faster.
The new Microsoft Teams app should be three times quicker to install. And two times quicker to start or join meetings. These all sound like big performance upgrades. Especially if the existing Teams app is making you impatient.
Microsoft has undoubtedly taken complaints regarding Teams' lag time or other issues into consideration. We go and read all this stuff and internalize it, says Singh. "[We hear] it is really slow, it hogs my charge, the memory is vast. Years ago, Microsoft set out to change this. But it also had to scale the service to handle the enormous demand of millions of daily active users added over the course of the pandemic.
The demand for live meetings and video usage at that time forced Singh. And his team to scale back what they already had. We started by looking for areas within the present client where we could use some of these ground-breaking technologies.
Because it still made use of some Angular JS components, the existing Microsoft Teams client only partially switched to the React framework. As a result, the program was a little bit heavier than it needed to be because it had to load two JavaScript frameworks.
According to a blog post by Microsoft Teams engineers today, "the primary benefits noted from the switch from Electron to WebView2 include reduced memory utilization and a smaller disk footprint as resources are shared with Edge."
"Performance characteristics and benchmarking results unique to our use cases played a major role in the decision to switch from AngularJS to React. We discovered that React has been a better fit for our scenarios and that switching to it has improved the performance of the application as a whole.
Almost every significant component of Microsoft Teams has undergone some sort of redesign as a result of this. The entire video architecture and rendering pipeline have all been redesigned, according to Singh. This includes the data layer, the network layer, how we store data, what we do in the foreground and what we do in the background. "You will see it and feel it when you utilize it."
Yet, the new Microsoft Teams isn't just about appearance and functionality. Microsoft is also incorporating some excellent upgrades. The new client provides a better way to enable you view all of your accounts and notifications in a single drop-down menu if you've ever had trouble navigating between many Microsoft Teams accounts in your business. To access several Teams instances, you won't need to move tenants or log out of your accounts.
Microsoft is now enhancing this experience by automatically lowering hands after the person has spoken if you're used to meetings with raised hands even after a question has been asked. Moreover, Whiteboard will now support pasting Loop components to increase collaboration on the canvas. Microsoft Teams will soon get AI-powered video filters with a variety of animated frames and the option to alter the color of your video in presentations.
Speaking of AI, Microsoft plans to use the new Teams client as the basis for its Copilot assistant. And other Teams-specific AI features in the future. According to Singh, "The AI experiences all require very fast iteration and experimentation." This architecture really sets us up nicely to truly achieve that because you won't get it perfect the first time. So there is a lot of supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and learning from the users.
Copilot will be available in Microsoft Teams, where you can invite the AI assistant to help with activities like scheduling meetings or have it appear in meetings. Also have chats on the sidebar to aid with duties like summarizing, recapping. Copilot's business chat feature will also be available in Teams as a chat bot. You can use as your personal assistant to get data from various Microsoft 365 services and apps.
Today, Microsoft will make its new Teams client preview-only so that it can collect feedback before making it more widely available later this year. Access will only be available to companies who have signed up for the Microsoft Teams public preview. And a new "try the new Teams" toggle will be added to the top-left of the current app. If necessary, you can return to the original Teams app.
Although an upgraded Mac version is being developed by Microsoft, it won't be released in preview form right away. Microsoft says it is aiming to make the new Teams preview available to Education, Government Clouds. And platforms including VDI and the web later this year. Although it is currently only available to business users.
Visit CxO Global FORUM or CxO News Live for all the latest updates.