Microsoft begins public preview of the new Teams for commercial customers

Microsoft said on Monday that it has begun rolling out a new, faster version of the Teams communications app for Windows for commercial customers enrolled in the preview program. The software will be available to all customers later this year, and Microsoft is promising new versions of Teams for Mac and the web.

Since its debut in 2017, Teams has become the jewel of Microsoft 365, the subscription-based productivity suite formerly known as Office 365. Companies have been quick to adopt Teams to keep workers 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 Teams each month, even though many workers are commuting back to offices.

Microsoft Teams experienced some performance issues in 2020, which the Hasmet company. In an interview with CNBC, Jeff Tepper, Microsoft’s president of applications and platforms, said that in 2021, as the use of Teams continues to grow, Microsoft has begun building a second generation of software with a focus on improving performance.

reports From a new version of Teams distributed earlier this year. Tepper said this generated “a lot of excitement” but that he did not want Microsoft to announce the update until the software had achieved an internal goal of being twice as fast as before while using half the memory as before.

The new version also includes improvements aimed at streamlining Teams, building on More than 400 Some of the feature updates Microsoft introduced last year, Tepper said, are intended to help Microsoft catch up with rivals. Competition comes from the likes of Cisco, Google, Slack, and Salesforce-owned Zoom.

Instead of showing a kind of function bar for the conversation, Teams will hide several options behind the plus sign that people can click. It’s a concept people are used to in other messaging apps, Tepper said. For example, in Slack, users can upload documents or set reminders after clicking the plus sign below the area where they’re writing messages.

During Teams video calls, the software will show each participant on screen in a box of the same size, rather than giving more space to participants with their cameras turned on. Until now, Teams calls sometimes resembled Piet Mondrian’s paintings featuring squares and rectangles of different sizes and colors, Tepper said.

Microsoft is also tweaking Teams so that people from multiple organizations can stay on top of what’s going on more easily.

“Instead of signing in and out of different tenants and accounts, you can now sign in across them all — receiving notifications no matter which one you’re currently on,” Tepper wrote in a blog post.

He wrote in the blog post that corporate workers who have access to the new version of Teams will see a switch at the top of the app window that will enable them to go back to what Microsoft calls the classic version.

He watches: Satya Nadella talks about his nine years at the helm of Microsoft