Microsoft’s new Teams app for Windows is in public preview
Following Microsoft’s announcement earlier in March 2023 that it’s bringing artificial intelligence and GPT-4 to Microsoft 365 at some point in the future in the form of Microsoft 365 Copilot, it just announced an overhaul to Microsoft Teams, its video conferencing software, to support it.
Ahead of the company’s Enterprise Connect event, a new Teams app for Windows is now available in public preview, with the tech giant claiming that it’s two times as fast and half as memory intensive.
In addition, it’s promised an intuitive visual overhaul (so you aren’t spending the whole day staring at the virtual equivalent of a dentist’s waiting room) that’ll make notifications, messages, and channels available in fewer clicks.
Smarter, Better, Faster, Stronger?
Microsoft has brought Teams into the twenty-first century by offering a feature Google Workspace has had for a good while: the ability to switch accounts without logging in and out.
However, it’s gone one better than Google. Rather than just remembering all of your accounts, Teams will give you notifications for all of them, “no matter which one you are currently using.”
Though Microsoft ultimately had nothing new to say about Copilot, it did describe the new app as a “foundation” for that feature, and mention that the preview release would be expanded to Mac users, as well as business organizations who have explicitly opted into the new app down the line.
All being well, “New Teams” will be generally available later this year. Who can say if it’ll taste worse and just be there to drum up nostalgia for the old one?
