What’s new in Microsoft Teams

On the 27th March, Microsoft Started rolling out the Public Preview of the new Microsoft Teams App for Windows.

What’s new with this version ?

Faster and optimised resources usage

As you might have experienced with the current Teams Desktop App (Mac or Windows). Sometimes Teams can be a bit slow to respond especially when switching between sections (Calendar, Chat …etc.)

The old version of Teams was built with Electron, which is a cross-platform development framework, using CSS, JS and HTML. It embeds Chromium and Node.js in its binaries, and ensures the same app renders in the same way across platforms (Windows, MacOs …etc.)

The new version of Teams in now built using WebView2 and React which showed a massive improvement in the overall performances of the Teams Client.

A benchmarking firm (GigaOm), tested side by side both old and new Teams and found out:

Install app up to 3X faster
Launch app up to 2X faster
Join meetings up to 2X faster
Switch chats/channels up to 1.7X faster
Consume up to 50% less memory
Consume up to 70% less disk space

Multi Accounts

The new version of Teams addresses a challenging issue that a lot of users were facing and submitted through the user-voices, which is

Managing multiple work accounts.

It is now simple and possible to add additional accounts and switch between different organisation’s accounts.

Improved Security

Adopting Trusted types and Content Security Policy, a solution was built to detect and prevent cyber attacks and improve users safety while using the new version of Teams.

Protection against XSS attacks (Cross-site scripting) is also in place, in addition to the introduction of MSIX packaging format to ensure that Teams is protected by Windows Security feature.

Simpler

The new look and feel of Teams provides a very simple and rich experience with allows the users the stay on top of notifications, search and manage messages and channels. With fewer clicks.

Motion-designed & Fluent

The overall UI looks fresher and more fluent. Introducing some fun animations and sequences of display, the overall users’ experience has been massively improved.