There’s supposedly a new Microsoft Teams incoming next month that is built entirely from scratch, featuring new infrastructure that optimises CPU usage and improved UI. In turn this allows for wholly-improved performance across all platforms.
Microsoft Teams is a notorious resource hog on PC and Mac, often tanking CPU performance, and draining battery life when using mobile devices and laptops. A frustrating endeavour when multiple tasks are running in the background.
According to The Verge, this is all set to change with Teams 2.0. The source goes on to mention that Teams will ditch its current Electron framework in lieu of Microsoft’s Edge-based, Webview2 technology, as well as the React JavaScript library that features a list of UI improvements and optimisations. This directly translates to 50 percent less memory usage, optimised CPU usage, and in turn, decreased battery usage on mobile devices. Neat.
These improvements could also directly result in a much faster and snappier user experience, as well as a few quality-of-life improvements that include the app opening faster, and reduced lag issues, heightening responsiveness when replying to messages, or video and voice calls in meetings.
Known as Teams 2.0 or 2.1 internally, it’s worth a mention that we’ve already experienced some of these changes being slowly drip-fed into the current Teams client. One such example being the new chat app feature for Windows 11 that’s powered by the “Teams for consumers” experience.
Looking at the past, the same sentiments were echoed back in 2021 by former Microsoft Teams head engineer, Rishi Tandon, who tweeted, “This architecture will help us add support for multiple accounts, work life scenarios, release predictability, and scale up for the client,” further adding “It will be a journey but with Windows 11 we have taken key first steps.”
In other news, Microsoft also announced Teams Premium that incorporates AI features within the app to generate meeting notes, recommended tasks and personalised highlights among other things, all powered by OpenAI and GPT-3.5 technologies.
The Premium service will go live in June and will initially cost $7 and increase to $10 in July. An enticing prospect, indeed.
