Microsoft Teams has been rebuilt from the ground up to deliver 2x faster performance

Microsoft announced Monday it plans to start rolling out a faster version of the Teams communication app for Windows to commercial clients who are enrolled in the company's preview program. In addition to the software becoming available to all customers later this year, Microsoft also promised to release new editions of Teams for the Mac and on the web.

Since its release in 2017, Teams has established itself as the crowning achievement of Microsoft 365, the subscription-based productivity suite formerly known as Office 365. During the Covid epidemic, businesses hurried to embrace Teams to keep employees engaged via text and video chats. Even while many employees are once again going to offices, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claimed in January that more than 280 million people use Teams every month.

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In 2020, Microsoft Teams experienced certain performance concerns, which the firm fixed. According to Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft's collaborative apps and platforms, in an interview with CNBC, Microsoft started developing a second generation of Teams in 2021 as usage of the program continued to rise.

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Earlier last year, rumors of a new edition of Teams spread. Teper acknowledged that this caused "a lot of angst," but he insisted that Microsoft hold off on announcing the upgrade until the application had met an internal benchmark of being twice as quick and utilizing half the memory.

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Building on the more than 400 feature changes Microsoft released last year, some of which were intended to help Microsoft catch up with competitors, the new version also includes improvements designed to make Teams simpler, according to Teper. Competitors include Cisco, Google, Slack, which is purchased by Salesforce, and Zoom.

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Teams will hide a number of choices behind a + symbol that users can click on rather than exposing a sort of ribbon of features for a discussion. It's an idea that people are used to from other texting services, according to Teper. For instance, after clicking on the + sign next to the message-writing space in Slack, users can upload documents or create reminders.

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Instead of offering participants with cameras in an additional room during Teams video calls, the software will display every participant on screen in a box that is the same size. Up until recently, Teper noted, such calls occasionally resembled Piet Mondrian artworks, which are distinguished by their squares and rectangles of various sizes and colors.

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Microsoft is also making changes to Teams so that individuals who are a part of different organizations can better keep up with what is happening.

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Teper noted in a blog post that users no longer need to log in and out of several tenants and accounts. This is because they can now stay signed in and receive notifications regardless of which one they are currently using.

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The switch to return to what Microsoft is referring to as the old version of Teams will be visible at the top of the program window for corporate employees who have access to it, he wrote in the blog post.