Welcome to The New Microsoft Teams: What This Update Means For You and Your Organization

Apr 4, 2024Cyber Security

As of Friday, March 29, all classic Microsoft Teams users have been automatically upgraded to the new Teams platform. New Teams offers a range of changes and improvements, aiming to streamline and enhance collaboration across the board. In this article, we’ll cover all the new Teams updates to help clarify how these changes will impact your organization moving forward as well as all the newly available features that will help improve your Teams experience.

What Does This Update Offer?

In early 2023, Microsoft unveiled the new and improved Teams app. The aim was to completely reimagine Teams, creating a more intuitive, intelligent, and adaptable application to elevate productivity and allow for seamless collaboration within (and across) organizations. The new Teams also boasts remarkable performance enhancements, clocking in speeds up to twice as fast while significantly reducing memory consumption by over 50%.

The new Teams also offers comprehensive feature parity, encompassing a wide array of functionalities that include but are not limited to support for custom line-of-business apps, integration with third-party applications, breakout rooms, expanded video capabilities with 7×7 video, call queues, PSTN calling, contextual search within chats and channels, and the ability to cross-post channel conversations. With the recent move to general availability, certain features and enhancements will only be accessible through the new Teams. Notably, Teams now extends support to multi-tenant organizations (MTO) and multi-tenant, multi-account (MTMA), facilitating seamless communication and collaboration across organizational boundaries, spanning multiple tenants and accounts which offers organizations new opportunities in cross-tenant collaboration and communication.

How is the User Experience Impacted?

New Teams introduces a much more refined and user-friendly interface, designed to streamline workflow, personalize your experience, and maximize productivity. The update offers both Windows and Mac users greater control over their Teams environment, like automatic light/dark mode based on system settings, to ensure a cohesive visual experience. Additionally, the new version of Teams enhances support for users with color sensitivity by incorporating Windows 11 contrast themes, allowing users to tailor their color palette to suit their unique preferences and needs. Managing your messages and notifications is also significantly improved. The introduction of features like “mark all as read” in activity, as well as the upcoming addition of the feature in chats or channels, enables efficient tracking and organization of your communication.

Microsoft has also considered the importance of optimizing the experience for all users, including those who rely on keyboard shortcuts or screen readers. Seamlessly navigating between list items such as activity feeds and chat threads with enhanced keyboard shortcut functionality, allows users to accomplish tasks with greater efficiency and ease. Additionally, usability improvements for screen readers enhance task interpretation and improve the organization of channel conversations, whether they’re original posts or responses.

How Does This Benefit My Organization?

Organizations frequently face the challenge of managing multiple tenants because of mergers/acquisitions and other expansion efforts. Recognizing this need, the introduction of MTO capability in Teams marks a significant step forward in seamless collaboration across organizational boundaries. MTO enhances collaboration by enabling effortless interaction and resource access within groups that provides a full-fidelity meeting experience. With MTO, users can now effortlessly connect and collaborate with the right individuals, facilitated by enhanced people search functionality that span multiple tenants, ensuring efficient collaboration efforts.

Additionally, the inclusion of features such as MTMA functionality in Teams enhances cross-organizational collaboration. By enabling users to stay signed into multiple accounts simultaneously and receive real-time notifications regardless of the active account, MTMA allows for seamless engagement across organizations. This means users can interact with colleagues, partners, or clients across different accounts and organizations without disruptions to their workflow.

New Teams also introduces the innovative cross-cloud authenticated meeting feature, which streamlines the meeting experience across Microsoft cloud environments, including commercial and government. This feature allows participants to seamlessly join meetings hosted in any Microsoft cloud without the need to sign out of their home tenant account. With robust identity verification mechanisms in place, hosts can rest assured that participants are securely authenticated, mitigating the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive information from the host tenant.

What Else You Should Know

The new iteration of Microsoft Teams marks a significant upgrade in collaboration and productivity for organizations and users now have access to a host of improvements aimed at streamlining collaboration processes and enhancing overall user experience. While these new features are great additions to the Teams platform, it can be a bit difficult to navigate, so if you have any questions regarding these changes, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us any time; we’re here to help!