Microsoft Teams updates are about to become less of a total pain

The process of manually installing a new version of Microsoft Teams is about to become a little less laborious, courtesy of an update coming to the collaboration platform.

As described in a new entry in Microsoft’s product roadmap, the company is readying a series of changes that promise to make updating the various Teams clients more straightforward.

“Users will only need to approve an update once per app, and the new version will take effect seamlessly in all their chats, channels and meetings,” explained Microsoft.

Microsoft Teams updates

Over the course of the year, Microsoft pushes out hundreds of updates across its portfolio of office software and productivity tools. Some deliver only incremental improvements, but others come bundled with major new features or patches for dangerous security vulnerabilities.

For this reason, it’s important that businesses are able to update employees to the latest version of Microsoft Teams and other software as efficiently as possible. 

In the majority of instances, Microsoft Teams will update itself to the latest version automatically. According to Microsoft documentation, the clients are designed to scan for new updates every few hours.

However, if for whatever reason an update fails to register, individual users are required to perform a manual installation, because there is no mechanism for IT professionals to roll out an update to a full fleet of devices.

Historically, this manual process has been unnecessarily finicky and not particularly intuitive, requiring users to navigate to their profile menu in order to check whether a new version is available. But with the upcoming update, Microsoft is hoping to rectify this issue.

The specifics of the new process remain unclear, but the suggestion is that users will have fewer menus to navigate through to install an update for Microsoft Teams, which will then be applied automatically across all channels and chats.

The update is still currently under development, but should take effect for all users by the end of the month.

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