‘Reimagined’ Microsoft Teams launches with Windows preview, Mac version on the way

Microsoft launched early access to its major update for its Slack competitor today. Microsoft Teams 2 has been “reimagined” based on user feedback with speed and simplicity as two of the update’s priorities. The all-new experience is available in preview for Windows with the company saying an early version for Mac is coming too.

Microsoft announced the overhaul for Teams in a blog post today. Since debuting in 2017, the company says the goal for “Teams has always been to bring together all your communication and collaboration tools in one place” and that now it’s delivering an all-new experience built from “the ground up.”

We have been listening to your feedback which has culminated in a reimagining of Teams from the ground up. The new app is built on a foundation of speed, performance, flexibility, and intelligence—delivering up to two times faster performance while using 50 percent less memory so you can save time and collaborate more efficiently. We have also streamlined the user experience so that it is simpler to use and easier to find everything in one place. These enhancements also provide the foundation for game-changing new AI-powered experiences, such as Copilot for Microsoft Teams, announced earlier this month.

The primary improvements to Teams are around making it:

• Faster
• Simpler
• More Flexible
• Smarter

Faster

Microsoft says its guiding light for Teams 2 has been to “make it twice as fast while using half the system resources.” To accomplish that major goal, it had to make “a ground-up investment to overhaul the platform to optimize the data, network, chat, and video architecture for speed and performance.”

While it says the optimization work isn’t over, it has achieved big progress with the new Teams app seeing the launch time and joining a meeting both already 2x faster for the public preview.

Simpler

For this goal, the company says it’s always exploring how to offer “a simpler yet feature-rich experience for our diverse and growing user base.” With the updated Teams, everything from composing a message, notifications, search, organization, and more has been streamlined.

More Flexible

For improved flexibility, Microsoft says it has upgraded “our authentication model, synchronization, and notification systems to provide a seamless and consistent experience.” And it’s making it easier to work across multiple tenants and accounts. “Instead of logging in and out of different tenants and accounts, you can now stay signed in across them all—receiving notifications no matter which one you are currently using.”

Smarter

As Microsoft previously announced its Copliot AI feature that will come to its Office apps and Teams, the company highlights that Teams 2 will be “the foundation for next-generation AI experiences, including those we’ve previously announced.”

It sees the latest AI as speeding up workflows, helping to answer questions in discussions, and much more.

Availability

Microsoft started rolling out the Teams 2 preview for Windows today with admin resources here to enable it. The company says it plans to release the all-new Teams preview for Macs “later this year” and that the public launch for version 2 will also be “later this year.”