After a successful public preview earlier in the year, the new Microsoft Teams has now reached general availability and is being rolled out across the world to business and government customers on Windows and Mac.
There are some big architectural changes in the new version of Teams which has the benefits of being up to 2x times faster while using 50% less memory.
While the initial preview releases lacked the same features as the legacy release, the New Teams now has full feature parity for virtually all features including custom line-of-business apps, third-party apps, breakout rooms, 7×7 video, call queues, PSTN calling, contextual search in chats and channels, cross-post a channel conversation, and more.
The updated Microsoft Teams (Work or School) offers an updated user experience. While the main UI looks familiar, Microsoft now shows more apps on the left, a big part of the extensibility of the platform.
When starting a new chat, it launches in a new window which Microsoft says is to allow you to focus on what you’re writing. This is configurable in the updated settings screen that offers a much better structure to the growing number of settings inside Teams.
There’s now far better control and access to notifications, including updating the handling of notifications from multiple Organisations and switching between orgs is also much easier.
New Teams will automatically pick light or dark mode and switch based on your system settings, helping Teams better blend into your workspace.
You can efficiently keep track of your messages and notification activity, with features like “mark all as read” in activity, rolling out now; and “mark all as read” in chats or channels, coming soon to new Teams.
As is with everything in 2023, AI is also now in Teams. Copilot in Teams works alongside you to help you stay on top of your tasks by enabling you to get up to speed on conversations, run more effective meetings, and bring everything together in one place.
Copilot in Teams chat helps you get up to speed on conversations by quickly reviewing the main points, action items, and decisions without having to scroll through long threads. You can unlock your meeting productivity by using Copilot in Teams meetings to summarize key discussion points—including who said what and where people are aligned or disagree—and suggest action items, all in real-time during a meeting.
Using the power of Microsoft Graph, Copilot can find and use info that’s buried in documents, presentations, emails, calendar invites, notes, and contacts and bring everything together in your Teams app.
If you’re not able to enable the new Teams Preview, you may need to reach out to your IT department for help. If you’re the IT Admin and wondering how to enable it for your users, then check out this guide for enabling New Teams using policies from the Teams Admin centre.
If you’d like to know more Microsoft is holidng an AMA on the new Microsoft Teams app on October 26th.
