Microsoft starts rolling out revamped Teams app
Microsoft started rolling out a new preview for businesses to try its overhauled Teams app on Monday, 27 March 2023.
The tech giant has reworked the video conferencing app from the ground up, with Microsoft’s corporate vice president of engineering for Teams Sumi Singh telling The Verge it has made it “faster, simpler, and more flexible than ever before”.
“The classic client of Microsoft Teams used open-source software such as Electron as the host, AngularJS as the web development framework, and a variety of custom controls constructed using HTML and CSS,” Singh said.
However, the revamped version uses Fluent UI, the React JavaScript library, and Microsoft’s Edge WebView2 technology to improve performance.
“The key benefits observed from the transition from Electron to WebView2 include reduced memory usage and a lowered disk footprint as resources are shared with Edge,” Microsoft said.
“The decision to transition from AngularJS to React was primarily based on performance characteristics and benchmarking results specific to our use cases.”
“We observed that React has been a better fit for our scenarios and it has been a beneficial move for the application’s overall performance,” it added.
According to Singh, the shifting of technology led to almost every major part of Microsoft Teams being overhauled in some way.
“The data layer, the network layer, how we store the data, what we do in the foreground, what we do in the background, and the entire video architecture and rendering pipeline have all been overhauled,” she said.
Microsoft says the installation process for Teams should be around three times faster, while joining meetings is twice as fast.
The new app uses 50% less RAM and takes up 70% less space on users’ hard drives. The tech giant also revamped Microsoft Teams’ user interface to match Windows 11 better.
The Teams overhaul sees the addition of new features, including an improved method to switch between your organisation’s accounts, automatic hand lowering after the relevant person has spoken, and the implementation of its AI Copilot.
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