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Microsoft Media Software

Microsoft Says Its New Version of Teams Is Twice As Fast (cnbc.com) 86

Posted by BeauHD from the new-and-improved dept.
Microsoft said Monday it is starting to roll out a faster new version of its Teams communication app for Windows to commercial clients enrolled in a preview program. CNBC reports: The software will become available to all customers later this year, and Microsoft also promises new versions of Teams for Mac and the web. The new version also includes enhancements meant to simplify Teams, building on the more than 400 feature updates Microsoft delivered last year, some of them meant to help Microsoft catch up with rivals. Competition comes from the likes of Cisco, Google, Salesforce-owned Slack and Zoom. Instead of displaying a kind of ribbon of functions for a chat, Teams will hide several options behind a plus sign that people can click on. It's a concept people have become accustomed to on other messaging applications. For example, in Slack, users can upload documents or set reminders after clicking on a plus sign under the area where they type messages.

During Teams video calls, the software will show every participant on screen in a box of the same size, rather than giving more space to participants with their cameras on. Until now, Teams calls have sometimes resembled Piet Mondrian paintings characterized by their squares and rectangles of varying sizes and colors. Microsoft is also adjusting Teams so that people who belong to multiple organizations can more easily stay on top of what's going on. "Instead of logging in and out of different tenants and accounts, you can now stay signed in across them all -- receiving notifications no matter which one you are currently using," [Jeff Teper, president of collaborative apps and platforms at Microsoft] wrote in a blog post.
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Microsoft Says Its New Version of Teams Is Twice As Fast More

Microsoft Says Its New Version of Teams Is Twice As Fast

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  • How are they going to make it faster? (Score:5, Funny)

    by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Monday March 27, 2023 @04:12PM (#63404400)

    Don't tell me, let me guess. They'll have ChatGPT do predictive analysis of the meeting, then post people's responses to questions that haven't been asked yet! IT'S CHATPGT ALL THE WAY DOWN!

    • New Version of Teams Is Twice As Fast .... as what?

      2 times zero is still zero.

      • And the "400 feature updates last year" were what? New emoticons?

        The world only wants one feature from Teams and that's to log in to multiple teams simultaneously. I'm guessing they still didn't add that.

        • It would also make it even more of a mess and confusion to use.
          It's not an easy tool to use.

          • Depends which parts of it. For its primary purpose (chat and conf calls) it works just fine. Not as good as slack, but for the cost difference - teams is quite serviceable.

          • They could put tabs at the top, one for each team. It wouldn't be any more messy or confusing than before.

            As a freelancer the very worst thing a company can say to me right now is, "We've added you to our team, here's your login!"

            (usually said with a beaming smile)

          • Re: How are they going to make it faster? (Score:5, Informative)

            by wonkavader ( 605434 ) on Monday March 27, 2023 @10:37PM (#63405060)

            It's a pile of crap.

            Speed is in no way its issue. The problem is it's unreliable, confusing, displays information in a layout designed to reduce it's usefulness (lots of white space, rigid horizontal layout), has crap search (finds what you want but cannot show you that text in context, bad mouse location haptics (easy to accidentally edit or flag the wrong chat line), copies text for pasting in a haphazard and unreliable way (sometimes you get the time and sender and sometimes not -- usually you get it when you don't want it), doesn't allow mass actions, doesn't work well with SIP bounces from the web browser, etc.

            The team making it systematically works on stupid design decisions over functional ones. It's where productivity goes to die.

            Faster is not what it needs. Less obviously terrible is what it needs.

            • I'll agree. We use it a lot at work, and you have to memorize where things are--Heaven help you if you haven't used a particular "Team" recently, and you forget where s.t. is. Today someone posted a link to a wiki page that he had just posted. I immediately went there by following the link. But an hour later, when I wanted to go back without the explicit link (which was in a chat buried by a bunch of more recent posts), I couldn't find the wiki page. Search does nothing useful, so far as I can tell--wh

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Ksevio ( 865461 )

                Search is horrible in teams because it doesn't show the messages around what you search for. If I ask someone the hostname of a machine and they respond with just the name, there's no way to find that message. I can search for "hostname", but it just brings up the message of me asking what it is, not their reply.

              • To add to my own comment: today I was trying to type in "(Person)" (it was part of the title of a section of a report that I was commenting about). I couldn't do it, because every time I hit the close paren, it converted the string into an emoji. I didn't want an emoji, I wanted the exact string. In other Microsoft apps, you can do a ^Z or s.t. and get the original string, but that didn't work here. I finally had to insert spaces between the parens and the word.

                I also wanted to paste s.t. in, but when I

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Ed Avis ( 5917 )
              FWIW you can change the layout to a compact mode that doesn't waste as much screen space. The search function was famously crap but has improved recently -- you can click to see the message in context.

            • My wife is a sign language interpreter, and frequently has to work remotely over Teams/WebEx/Zoom.

              To properly interpret a remote meeting, it is necessary to pin two channels - the main presentation channel, and a channel between the interpreter and the deaf client(s).

              Nobody has found a decent way to do this in Teams. They routinely connect via Teams to the main presentation, and open up a separate Zoom session for the interpretation.

              If Microsoft has fixed this, I'll be genuinely impressesd.

            • While I agree, my computer does have many functional apps on them which are actively hindered thanks to the existence of Teams. I'm happy to write off Teams as a worthless piece of shit, but man would I be happy if it didn't resource hog in the process.

            • Not to mention an abject failure to process MarkDown

        • Actually. They did. I tried it out today.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I'd settle for it actually updating once in a while. Usually someone posts a message and there is no notification, nothing on screen. Then you switch back to Teams and it suddenly wakes up so you can see several questions someone asked you hours ago.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Entrope ( 68843 )

          I'd like to be able to log into zero teams at once, but the current version sure doesn't seem to let me (at least on MacOS). My employer doesn't do Microsoft accounts, so I'm a guest user on a couple of other organizations -- but now that Teams knows I can "log in" to those SharePoint spaces, it won't let me log in as a guest to their Teams calls. Thanks, Microsoft!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jeremi ( 14640 )

      They'll have ChatGPT do predictive analysis of the meeting, then post people's responses to questions that haven't been asked yet! IT'S CHATPGT ALL THE WAY DOWN!

      If this means we can have eight instances of ChatGPT attend the meeting, so that real humans don't have to, then I'm all for it!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 )
      "It looks like you're having a meeting. Would you like some help with that?" *everyone signs off*

      • Re your sig line: somewhere I have a photo of a store in Costa Rica, taken in the 1980s, with "UNIX" in big letters. It was a uni-sex hair dresser establishment.

    • ...increase needed

  • it BSODs twice as fast

    • it BSODs twice as fast

      Great thing about those stupid fast SSD drives these days. BSOD-to-reboot times so quick Clippy gets bent into a CD-ROM ejector. I heard even Microsoft Bob got whiplash.

      • Microsoft Bob is comfortably retired based upon earnings from his lawsuit against Microsoft.

        • Microsoft Bob is comfortably retired based upon earnings from his lawsuit against Microsoft.

          Fair point. Does he still go by "Microsoft" Bob though?

          Post-lawsuit, I think I'd have a more catchy name. Like Bob the Bill Basher.

  • Interesting way of saying half as shitty.

    • Nah, this is the Teams designers talking, here. "Twice as fast" doesn't mean "half as shitty", it means "twice as painful".

  • With all these billions poured into a subpar product, will they fix the only issue that matters for us Mac users by properly sending a freaking TAB to the shared screen!? Gawd damn is teams annoying when the tab dose nothing but changing local focus within the client.

    • I'm sure it's still crap, just, at best, half as crappy

      I'd rather be using mIRC

      • I'm sure it's still crap, just, at best, half as crappy

        I'd rather be using mIRC

        It won't even be that. All they did is roll the turd in glitter.

    • Don't hope for too much. The thing still hard locks my system for a solid 5-10 seconds each time it opens.
      • It works OK on my laptop, but during meetings regularly gobbles up 40% of the CPU and 8GB of RAM.
        I wouldn't want to use it on an older machine.

      • AND it insists on going full screen every time I start it up, even though I've reduced it each and every time. Does it really think it's more important than every other application on my computer?

    • This is also a problem for controlling someone else's shared screen in Windows.

  • If only (Score:5, Funny)

    by djgl ( 6202552 ) on Monday March 27, 2023 @04:30PM (#63404440)

    If only my Teams meeting would take half as much time...

  • I can't remember those 2 being slow, I can't say the same about teams (and 95% of my use is text chat).

  • Teams - now with more Zero Days built-in!

  • Literally worse than many Windows 95 applications as it can't even copy and paste and from other microsoft products.
  • ..fix the static noise when I use Teams with my comp/headset. Doesn't happen with Zoom/Discord.
  • Where's the Linux version? Maybe I missed it, but if Teams doesn't work on Linux, then what's the point? I don't know many IT Professionals / Developers that run Windows, and I know more that run Mac, but by far and away it's Linux that professions who need security, performance, and stability turn to. I've actually had Microsoft suggest that I run a VM of Windows, that runs Teams, and that was their honest method for getting around the fact Linux isn't and wasn't supported. There is a “preview

    • You missed it. Teams for Linux exists.

      But honestly it sucks, and I find it's better to just use the web client.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You missed it. Teams for Linux exists.

        But honestly it sucks, and I find it's better to just use the web client.

        Microsoft discontinued Teams for Linux in December 2022.

        • Ya, I thought so, and it was never any good when they had it. In 2023, I don't want to use web clients, and to be honest I don't even want Electron, because that's just a browser.

          • I've switched to the web version on Linux and I find it better. And I'm even running it in Chromium while Firefox is my main browser. The interface and copying and pasting images still sucks in both versions.

            • You all might be interested in this: an independent dev repackaged the web client with Electron and made a third-party client to replace the one Microsoft discontinued. It's on the snap store https://snapcraft.io/teams-for-linux . I have been using it in occasionally the past month and it seems to work ok.

              • Thanks for sharing, but I'm not going to touch it because it's a snap (yuck) and I already have Chromium as a backup browser anyway, I don't need to install yet another browser to run the same thing in the same way. The Chromium integration is actually pretty nice, it makes an application launcher and has it's Teams icon in the taskbar, it really operates just like the old standalone app which was also Electron.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Trogre ( 513942 )

                Nice. Is there a Flatpak for it?

    • haha they dropped the Linux version.

      Because fuck you that's why.

      You can always run it in-browser in Linux (no firefox of course also because fuck you that's why), so you can run it in edge so it's not just a turd but a turdception turd within a turd.

      • That's hilarious! Exactly, they screwed the Linux community, the one community who would have promoted them loudly if the program just worked. As for Firefox support, that's a MAJOR issue, because Chromium, and it's derivatives just suck.

    • Where's the Linux version? Maybe I missed it, but if Teams doesn't work on Linux, then what's the point? I don't know many IT Professionals / Developers that run Windows, and I know more that run Mac, but by far and away it's Linux that professions who need security, performance, and stability turn to. I've actually had Microsoft suggest that I run a VM of Windows, that runs Teams, and that was their honest method for getting around the fact Linux isn't and wasn't supported. There is a “preview” version of Teams for Linux, but it's a mess, and no self-respecting professional would use it. It's unstable, glitchy, slow, and crashes, in the standard and typical Microsoft fashion.

      So, it works the same as Teams for Windows?

      • To be fair, I haven't used the version for Windows in a very long time, so I'm not able to comment on it.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Luckily I'm the head of IT / DevOps / DevSecOp / InfoSec / Infrastructure and Development for the company, and my rule / approach is you can pick any OS you want, providing you can carry out your job on it. If you want to run Linux, run Linux, if you want Hurd, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, Dragon Fly BSD, etc run it! I would never lock someone into an OS they don't want to run, because it's going to cost productivity, efficiency, performance, and make them hate working on the computer.

        I know many Develope
  • Is this the revamp "The company is moving from Electron to an Edge Webview 2 and Angular to React.js, which is expected to bring numerous improvements" which was flagged in 2021?

  • Is this the reason why there was an outage yesterday?

    Why Teams was unstable and would drop every few minutes, or crash completely necessitating a reboot of the computer?

  • BRING BACK OUTLOOK EXPRESS! (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 27, 2023 @06:47PM (#63404746)

    That was the last good version of Outlook. Pair it with ICQ for a great instant messenger.

  • If the speed of your text messaging program is noticeable you've got it very wrong.

    Maybe the on-demand loading for scrolled history is now twice as fast, so when you're searching for the context around that message 6 months ago it only takes 20 minutes to get there?

    Seriously, having read a few links the speed improvement is in how they render the multiple incoming webcams during a meeting. Not a bad thing but something I'm unlikely to notice.

    • >If the speed of your text messaging program is noticeable you've got it very wrong.

      When your IM app requires 400-500 MB of cache space as soon as it is first launched, you have a problem.

      When the plugin you write for the office suite you also produce routinely crashes, and the primary solution is to remove and reinstall your IM app, you have a problem.

      When your IM app can get stuck 'signed in' with the wrong account and won't let you sign out, and deleting the entire thing and reinstalling doesn't fix i

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 )

      "is in how they render the multiple incoming webcams during a meeting"

      I don't know of anyone who uses webcams for meetings. Everyone turns this crap off. Nobody wants to give up or require people to give up working in their bathrobe or sit unable to scratch their butt for a meeting. Getting rid of these requirements is called 'progress' so why roll it back artificially?

    • If the speed of your text messaging program

      Text messaging program? I just got finished from a meeting where someone spent the entire time running Excel with a Teams window synced to Sharepoint while I had to put up with seeing their sorry unkempt face on video.

      If Teams were actually a text messaging program it may actually be fast. It's not. It tries to be fucking every fucking thing. And the only fucking thing missing is fucking itself since they haven't integrated a Pornhub tab yet (though I won't rule out they may one day do that).

  • The thing I'm loving the most about the update is that it no longer uses http-long polling for incoming messages, instead using websockets (using a reverse webhook system aka trouter) which means there isn't long delays sometimes for messages when the server stops responding to long-polls. You can see it sometimes when you're logged in to teams on two devices and one might get a message straight away and another one doesn't get it until a minute later. Looking forward to adding this in to the Pidgin plugin

  • ... the improvement needed

  • I have many complaints about the buggy platform and app which is Teams but speed isn't on my list or that of anyone I know.

  • It's amazing how through Modern technology People are offered to be less productive at least twice as fast :p

    Teams has some great features but a lot of them burry information inside teams and arguably make it less accessible

  • Last week, I attempted to log into Teams, but from a personal account, rather than a corporate account. Teams promptly informed me that personal accounts are not supported, so I was forced to logout and join my meeting "anonymously" from the web client instead. It's a nonsensical distinction, though... why would you be able to use Teams without actually logging in, but not with a personal account?

    So all I want to know about these new versions is this: Did they finally lift this nonsensical usage restriction

  • Iâ(TM)m SO oldâ¦. How OLD am I? I am old enough to remember When they said same thing About horse-drawn wagons vs. oxen-carts!

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