Teams gets performance boost and new features

Teams received a lot of improvements in October. We are not just talking about new features — the app itself is said to be given a boost in its performance in different sections. It includes join, response, and switching times.

“Our goal is to improve performance with every Teams update for our customers,” shared Jeff Chen, Principal PM Manager at Microsoft Teams. “The latest version of the Microsoft Teams desktop client now demonstrates further improvements in latency for key scenarios. The performance gain is mainly attributed to the upgrade of the framework, which we introduced this month.”

Chen noted that the app now has a faster HTML tree rendering alongside better JavaScript running. Among all the improved sections, the program manager highlighted that the app’s switching activity got the biggest performance increase.

“The most common action for a user in Teams is to switch between different chats, channels, and activity feeds,” Chen said. “Over the past two years, switching between chat threads is now 32% faster, switching between channels is 39% faster. This leads to a more fluid experience that will keep you in the flow.”

Chen added that join time on Teams is now 21% faster and said other areas of its responsiveness were also elevated. While he didn’t detail the list, he said it would be noticeable in the latency of raising the user’s hand, which has improved by 16%.

The news is just one of the biggest announcements related to Teams improvements. In October, the group also introduced a bunch of new features, including the ability of organizers and presenters to assign seats to participants in Together mode, the ability to pop out shared meeting content in a separate window, live translated captions (temporarily available while Teams Premium is not yet available), detailed call history, and more. Microsoft also presented newly certified devices for Teams in its October news update, including Crestron Flex, Sony YY2969 Earbuds, and Neat Frame.