• Microsoft Teams has had as many as 50 new features added as part of a preview.
• Among these features are a number of performance updates that draw on fewer hardware resources.
• Teams users can now also have an avatar replace them during video calls.

Despite being available since 2017, many people became well acquainted with Microsoft Teams (and other video conferencing platforms) in 2020. Since then however, video conference platform operators have been working hard to improve their software.

Case in point – Microsoft has just released a litany of updates to Teams that is testing in a preview.

The most notable update is to performance. The software giant says that Teams will now be twice as fast as it was previously while using half of the memory. This was accomplished by optimising the data, chat, network and video architecture for speed and performance.

The end result is that were the older version of Teams took 22.2 seconds to load, 9.1 seconds is all the newer version of Teams needs.

Furthermore, Microsoft brags that joining meetings will be twice as fast, switching chats and channels will be 1.7 times faster and the app itself will use 70 percent less storage space. Microsoft has also streamlined notifications, search, messages, and other areas of the user interface.

Microsoft has also improved how users interact with people across multiple organisations.

“We know that many of our customers have organizations that span multiple tenants and accounts. That’s why we have made a major investment in our support for these scenarios. We have improved our authentication model, synchronization, and notification systems to provide a seamless and consistent experience. For example, many customers need to collaborate with people across organizational boundaries, which sometimes means they use Teams across multiple tenants or 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,” president of collaborative apps and platforms, Jeff Teper wrote in a blog post.

These are just a few – and we mean a tiny sample – of the new features coming to Teams. Other features include adding avatars to the platform so that users can turn their video off but still participate in a call. In fact, there are over 50 new features being added to Teams.

You can read more about all of the new features coming to Teams here.

As mentioned, these improvements to Teams are only a preview for now. The firm is targeting general availability later this year.

“In the meantime, we encourage our commercial customers using Windows to try the public preview, which is rolling out starting today. We intend to extend the preview release to a broader set of customers, including those using Macs later this year. While users in our Public Preview program will have access to new Teams right away, our broader set of commercial customers will need an admin to first opt-in, after which users will see a simple toggle to switch to the new Teams. You’ll also be able to switch back to classic Teams at any time,” concluded Teper.