New Year, New Teams - An Overview Of Gamechanging Features (2024)

Earlier in 2023, Microsoft announced a new era of Microsoft Teams with a public preview of the new app. The goal was to rebuild Teams fully and completely reimagine it to deliver an even better experience – faster, smarter, and more flexible. According to Microsoft, even the preview version itself was up to two times faster than the old Teams, while using 50% less memory.

Since the public preview version was launched, new Teams has made strides and includes a bunch of new features, such as custom line-of-business apps, third-party apps, breakout rooms, 7x7 video, call queues, PSTN calling, contextual search in chats and channels, cross-post a channel conversation, and more. The idea is to enhance the basics for security, reliability and more to make sure Teams adapts to businesses’ growth.

These new features are exclusively available on new Teams, considering it’s becoming available to everyone. New Teams also includes support for multi-tenant organisations, so that you can communicate with employees without any issues on a cross-tenant environment.

The best part of new Teams is that it doesn’t require any kind of migration – the update will automatically be rolled out to all users over the next few months.

Optimised Performance and a Faster App

The new Teams is built in React framework to improve the speed and performance on Windows, and hosted in Edge WebView2 to reduce memory usage as that’s always been one of the pain points for the Teams app. As we have mentioned already, this approach has resulted in a 50% less consumption of memory and disk space than classic Teams.

Mac users can also rejoice as the performance improvements are not exclusive to Windows. Switching between chats and channels is now faster, you can access information more quickly and have a faster scrolling experience too. Teams works natively on Mac too, and Mac users can now have a performance boost in an optimised Teams app. Security for Macs has also been improved through simplified updates and web security enhancements.

New Teams also enables a more efficient use of system resources in a VDI environment. Microsoft states that they have observed latency improvements in scenarios such as app launch, switch chat and join meetings on the preview version, compared with classic Teams.

Do More With Less

One of the key features of new Teams is a simplified and streamlined user experience. You can now personalise your own experiences and stay on top of your notifications much easier and in a much more convenient way than with classic Teams. Windows and Mac users will have more control over the user interface – the new app will automatically pick the theme based on your system preferences, ensuring a consistent look across all your apps. There is improved support for users with colour sensitivity using Windows contrast themes. There are also new features such as “mark all as read” for notifications in an activity, and for chats and messages.

New Teams is also bringing an optimised experience for users who frequently use keyboard shortcuts and screen readers to make sure everyone is included in these quality of life changes. The keyboard shortcuts in new Teams will allow you to easily navigate between list items such as activity feed and chat threads, so you can get more done with less. As for screen reader enhancements, they are supposed to make your life easier and minimise repeated information, interpret common tasks more easily, and more.

Cross-Tenant Barrier Breakthrough

Big organisations usually might have multiple tenants through mergers and acquisitions, or just globally available tenants. New Teams introduces a multi-tenant organisations (MTO) capability to provide everyone a more seamless experience when collaborating with coworkers in another tenant and accessing their resources. Therefore, MTO has the great purpose of enriching collaboration and bringing users together across previously uncrossed boundaries. It also offers an improved people search across multiple tenants.

Then there are also features such as multi-tenant and multi-account (MTMA), in which new Teams lets you stay signed in into multiple accounts simultaneously and receive real-time notifications for all of them. Your flow doesn’t need to be disrupted anymore; you can easily connect with your colleagues across multiple accounts. Never drop out of a meeting again!

If a meeting is hosted in any Microsoft cloud, you can use the cross-cloud authenticated meeting feature in new Teams to join regardless of the cloud type. You don’t even have to sign out of your account in your home tenant! The host verifies the participant identities at the start of the meeting, and no one else can see your information.

Faster, Better - Smarter

The future is bright with new Teams, but that’s not all; it will also lay down the foundation for next-gen AI experiences, such as Microsoft Copilot. Copilot in Teams enables you to get up to speed on conversations and have more effective meetings: summarise key points from meetings -including the details of who said what – and suggest action items. And together with Microsoft Graph, it can find any info buried anywhere in your Microsoft environment such as documents, emails, presentations etc; all presented together in your new Teams app.

Don’t miss out on these amazing features and start using the new Teams app today! If you don’t yet have a Microsoft license but you’d love to have one, reach out to our experts and we’ll help you set up.