New Microsoft Teams to launch next month; Will get a BIG boost in performance

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that the classic free version of the Microsoft Teams application will shut down on April 12, 2023, after which the legacy platform will not be available for use. Instead, users and small businesses using the app will have to shift to a different version of Microsoft Teams. Known as Microsoft Teams 2.0 or 2.1 internally, this new video conferencing app will have both a free version with limited features and a premium version with some extra features. It is expected to be launched next month. Now, reports are suggesting that the app will also see some major improvements in terms of performance. Take a look.

According to a report by The Verge, Microsoft has recently begun testing the new version of Teams within the company on a broad scale. The company intends to launch a preview to Microsoft Teams in March, with a full launch coming soon afterwards.

New Microsoft Teams to get performance boost

The report has also revealed that Microsoft is rebuilding its app from ground up, adding new capabilities and faster response times. This will enable the app to work with 50 percent less memory, be less taxing to the CPU and result in a better battery life on laptops.

To achieve this, Microsoft Teams will be moving away from Electron, a framework for creating desktop applications, to Microsoft’s Edge Webview2 technology. It will also leave Angular and move entirely to React, a javascript framework. This shift is also expected to give better user-interface (UI) improvements for Teams with future updates.

In 2021, head of Microsoft Teams engineering Rish Tandon said in a tweet, “this architecture will help us add support for multiple accounts, work life scenarios, release predictability, and scale up for the client”.

All these changes should lead to the app opening much faster than at present and the app itself should feel more responsive. Even older laptops will not face any lagging or power consumption related issues, as per the reports.

The preview is now expected to come in March and it will have a toggle feature that will let users switch to the classic version, if the need arises. This toggle will be removed once the official version is launched globally.