In this first episode, Stephen talks to Microsoft’s Anupam Pattnaik, Product Lead for Teams. In this inaugural show, Stephen and Anupam discuss how IT can control access to the new Teams experience for end users, when Teams 2.0 will become the default experience for everyone, when the new client will reach feature parity with classic Teams, and when Teams 2.0 will be available for other platforms, like MacOS and web. And more!
Transcript
Stephen Rose
Hey everybody, I’m Stephen Rose, and thank you for joining this brand new show, Unplug IT here on Petri. We’re going to be sitting down, taking a look at what topics are important to IT Pros, digging into really what you need to know to be successful as you pilot, deploy, secure, manage, and drive adoption within your own organizations. One of the top products that’s out right now that so many of you are asking questions on is the new Teams or Teams. 2.0. So I thought there’s nobody better to answer those questions than my friend, Anupam Pattnaik. Hey, Anupam, how are you?
Anupam Pattnaik
I’m doing great, Stephen. How are you?
Stephen Rose
I’m good. You are the senior product marketing manager for Teams 2.0 at Microsoft, and take a moment, explain your role, and then we’ll dig in and start talking about the new product and what that means for folks.
Anupam Pattnaik
Sure. So, my name is Anupam Pattnaik and I’m actually driving the product marketing work for Teams desktop and mobile clients. And today, I want to take my time and speak to you about the exciting news we just announced on March 27th about the new Microsoft Teams. I’m excited to chat with you, Stephen, on that.
Stephen Rose
Awesome. So, the new Teams is something that our TAP (Technology Adoption Program) customers, and TAP is an internal private program at Microsoft that, you know, that their largest customers are invited to to start to play with. So, this is something they’ve had for a little while, they’ve been playing with it, giving feedback, and on March 27th, you turned that into a public preview. And what that means is if it was allowed, companies could turn it on and allow end users to see a button that says “Try the new Teams.” Is that that correct? Is that the understanding of what happened on the 27th?
Anupam Pattnaik
Yeah. So basically, late last year we actually announced the private preview of the new Microsoft Teams, so within the Technology Adoption Program, within the TAP program, the customers were able to privately preview the new Microsoft Teams late last year. Then on March 27th this year, we actually announced the public preview of the new Microsoft Teams. So, we basically made the preview version of the new Microsoft Teams available to the general public. So basically, with the March 27th announcement, the preview of new Teams is available to the commercial Windows users. It’s not yet available to our users on Mac, VDI, the web, and…
Stephen Rose
We’ll get into that. So now, with this, there’s now a button that shows up that says “Hey, try the new Teams.” What if an IT pro does not want their end users yet… They want to test it, they want to play with it, but they don’t want their end users yet because there is some functionality missing, we’ll talk about that. How do they… Can they turn that off? Is that something that they can wait on right now and not let people try just yet?
Anupam Pattnaik
Yeah, so with the public preview announcement on March 27, basically, there are two sets of audiences. One set of audience is our customers who are in the public preview program. We have a public preview program where around 1,000,000 users are there, and we have a targeted release program where around 15 to 20 million users are there. So, our customers that are in the public preview program and in the targeted release program, they are the end users who can directly see the toggle. These end users, without admins doing anything, they can see, they can try the new Teams. But for rest of our commercial Windows users that are not in targeted release or in the public preview program, the admins need to select users in their organization. So once the admins opt in, go select their users in their organization, then these end users can see the toggle and try the new Teams. Then, end users use the switch to experience the new Teams. And keep in mind there will be a coexistence of the new and classic Teams for quite some time. So, that’s basically the lay of the land, yeah.
Stephen Rose
OK. And of course, end users can always switch back to the previous version of Teams at any time, they can move back and forth. It’s literally a toggle and a bit of a reboot of the app, it takes a few seconds, but they can go back if there’s something they’re trying to do because there is some functionality that’s missing, like the ability to create a team, third-party apps, and things like that that will come, and we’ll talk about that. But some folks may find it’s still missing some things that keep them from being able to do. So, it’s very easy to move back and forth. Now, is there a time when there will be no choice, that toggle is going to be there for everybody, whether IT wants it there or not… Is that going to become an issue, or will they always have control over that?
Anupam Pattnaik
Yeah, so we want to make it a really smooth transition for our customers, because we want to make sure that we are enabling our customers’ success. So, sometime later this year, later this calendar year, we will make the new Teams to be the default Teams product. Right now, the classic Teams is the default because we do not have all the features that we support in classic Teams in the new Teams. That’s the reason we have right now classic Teams as the default option, but sometime later this calendar year, we’ll make the new Teams the default option when we have feature parity, and when we feel confident that users can switch to the new Teams. That’s the time when we’ll make the new Teams the default option, and that’s something we are planning to do later this calendar year. That’s the tentative timeline, yeah.
Stephen Rose
So, it won’t require a new rollout or new deployment, it will just naturally become Teams, it’s what it’s going to be? Not the new Teams, but the new Teams will just become Teams and that will be it, and IT pros will be good in doing that, correct?
Anupam Pattnaik
Yeah, so, unlike some of our other product transitions, for example, if you look at Skype for Business to Teams, that was like a very complex migration. But this one won’t be like that. So, this will be like, at a certain point later this calendar year and also this transition will go over next year as well. So, this will not be a complex migration process. This will be like all the users of classic Teams should be able to easily port all of their chats and everything, even custom apps, their apps that they have created onto the new Teams. They won’t need to manually migrate those custom apps. Once they’re in the new Teams, they will all be reappearing in the new Teams.
Stephen Rose
Got it. So, the new Teams is different from the core app. I know when I was working on OneDrive, that was really important that we rebuilt the app from the bottom up so that we got rid of the groove.exe client and a lot of that legacy code and really created something that was smart and fast, and it’s very much the same here. One of the biggest shifts was moving from Electron to Reactive. Now, what does that mean for folks that aren’t familiar with either of those platforms or what that means? What is the Reactive platform and what does that mean for, you know, for Teams?
Anupam Pattnaik
Yeah, so that’s a great question so thanks, Stephen. So, to give you some background, the classic client of Microsoft Teams, actually with the classic client, we actually used some open source software like Electron. We use Electron as the host, and we use AngularJS as the web development framework. So, along with these two, we also used a variety of custom controls. Those are like constructed using various web technologies like HTML and CSS. So, the reason we opted for these technologies like Electron and AngularJS with the classic Teams is because these choices actually enabled the rapid delivery of cross-platform web clients. Because we we support Microsoft Tems. on Windows, Mac, with various differences across platforms, these technology choices with classic Teams such as Electron and AngularJS helped us enable rapid delivery of the app.
But, as you know, the capabilities and innovation of Teams expanded significantly over time. And it actually placed a lot of strain on the devices’ resources. So, recognizing this change, we actually began analyzing the available technologies. We performed a few benchmarks internally, we built some prototypes, and that’s when we actually redefined the new architecture. And some of the key decisions that we have made during this transition was to transition from Electron and leveraging Web View 2 as the host. We also decided to transition from Angular to a React platform to build user interfaces. And as you know, the consumer version of Microsoft Teams, it already began this transition before. And obviously, it makes sense that we bring this next phase of technology with Web View 2 and the React platform to the commercial version, and that’s why we are calling it the new Microsoft Teams.
Stephen Rose
Right. It becomes more of a “code it once and that’s it” rather than coding for every platform. Now, the other thing about Reactive, and it’s important to remember that Teams is still built on top of SharePoint, and every time you create a new Teams space, you’re creating a SharePoint space etc., was that it was really slow and memory intensive. Logging into Teams and launching it the first time you do it just takes forever. If you have to switch tenants, it got better, but it still was slow. This is one of the biggest reasons for moving to Reactive, and I know you have a demo you want to show, so let’s have you, you know, let’s take a look at the demo and let’s talk about performance both in CPU, memory, etc. inside of Teams.
Anupam Pattnaik
Yeah, so the reason we decided to redesign the Teams app from the ground up and rearchitect the entire Teams app is because we wanted to… We heard it from our customers that the Teams app can be very resource- hungry, and we wanted to improve the speed as well as the performance of Teams.
At a high level, the new Microsoft Teams is up to 2x faster, and it can consume less than 50% computer resources compared to classic Teams. So, the reason we need a new Teams is that when we were rearchitecting, redesigning the Teams app, the North Star reason we set ourselves for was that the new Teams will be twice as fast as classic Teams, and it will consume less than 50% resources as classic Teams. And we plan to improve our performance of the new Teams throughout this calendar year. We did a performance benchmark with a third-party research vendor called GigaOm, and we were delighted to see the performance of the new Teams that we rolled out as part of our public preview announcement on March 27. So, the initial public preview build of the new Teams, that actually was very close to our performance goals. So, it was actually twice as fast. For example, starting from the Teams app installation to the launch of the app, as well as helping users to join meetings or switching chats was twice as fast compared to classic Teams. Also, in terms of resource consumption, the new Teams was consuming less than 50% memory, and also it was consuming less than 70% disk space compared to the classic Teams. And this is what we saw with our benchmarking project with a third-party research vendor called GigaOm.
Stephen Rose
Teams 2.0: faster, thinner, that’s great. Is there any functionality, though, that we’re going to lose? Because I know that when the new Teams came out, although it’s not feature complete, I couldn’t do things like present in Teams. And now I can and that functionality is rolling out, but is there any functionality that we’re going to lose altogether with the new Teams that we currently have today?
Anupam Pattnaik
So that’s a great question, Stephen. So, with the new Teams, there are certain features and capabilities that are actually going to be chased a bit. But we actually try to ensure that it’s a very smooth experience for the customers. So basically, what I’m trying to say is that with the new Teams, customers are going to achieve the goals that they were achieving with classic Teams, but certain things have changed.
For an example, I’ll give you a quick example here. With classic Teams, our customers can actually add a third party cloud storage service from the Files app in the classic Teams. So, by third-party cloud services, think of something like Box. But, with the new Teams, they can no longer see the “Add cloud storage” in the Files app on Teams’ left navigation bar, but they can still achieve the same objective, same goal. And how they can add a third party cloud storage now was changed.
So, with the new teams, what they can do is they can add third-party cloud storage apps such as Box directly from the Teams App Store. So, they can directly download the app from the Teams App Store versus adding it from the Files app in classic Teams. So, we have published some of those features that are changing from the classic to new Teams in our learn.microsoft.com pages. I’m happy to share the link with you so that users can go through that to see what are the experiences that are being changed in the new Teams.
Stephen Rose
Got it. So, we’re not losing any functionality, but some functionality in how we use it or how we access it may change, and there’s some new functionality that’s coming. One of the things that made me crazy and my Slack friend, Hyatt Horley, would constantly bang on my door about, is I hate the fact that I have to keep changing tenants and can’t get messages from other tenants without being in it, and that is making me a little crazy. And that’s something that is… I don’t want to say “fixed” because it was not really broken, it just worked differently, but we’ve made it work better. You know that Teams has made it work better in the new version, so let’s talk about multiple accounts support. And I know you have a video, but I want you to take a moment and tell us what we’re going to see, and then we’ll run the video to show some of the new functionality that’s part of that.
Anupam Pattnaik
Yeah, absolutely. So, we actually understand how challenging it is for our users to collaborate across organizations and to manage multiple work or school accounts. So, with the new Teams, we are actually offering a few new features such as multiple tenants and multiple accounts. So, with these two features, we are going to enable our users to collaborate more effectively across the organizational boundaries, which means that with the new Teams, the users can stay signed into multiple accounts, work and school simultaneously, and they can receive real time notifications no matter which one is currently in use. And also, they can seamlessly engage with users across multiple accounts and organizations without having to drop out of a call or a meeting. That really ensures that there is no disruption to their workflow. So, I would love to play a video to showcase that.
Stephen Rose
OK, good to know. Now on Mac, you know Microsoft released a M1 and M2 client, I believe it was last year. When will we see a new Teams for Mac? And then while I’m at it, let’s talk about VDI and even web. When will we see a new version for those platforms?
Anupam Pattnaik
Yeah, so basically, we will see the preview of the new Teams available for our Mac, VDI, and web customers sometime later this calendar year. So, similar to what we did with our March announcement, we made the preview of the new Teams available to our commercial Windows users. Similarly, we plan to make the preview of the new Teams available to our Mac, VDI, and web users later this calendar year. We also do plan to roll it out to our other customer segments like EDU, and Government cloud later this calendar year.
Stephen Rose
So, does that mean everybody can see it? What if I’m not seeing that functionality or not all of it? Does it mean it just hasn’t gotten to me yet? Or maybe I’m not in first release? So, I want to make sure people see that, that they can go do it, and if they can’t, understand what they need to do to be able to.
Anupam Pattnaik
Yeah, so when we announced the public preview of the new Microsoft Teams, some of the anchor features, those were missing in the public preview of the new Teams in March. When we’ll announce this, like third-party and LOB apps and certain advanced meeting capabilities like breakout rooms, those that are missing, our team is continuously working on making sure that those features are available as soon as possible so that it makes it easier for customers to basically adopt the new Teams platform. So, the good news is that we have been making really good progress, and we plan to support some of those features such as third party and LOB apps, as well as breakout rooms in the next few months, so we will definitely send out a message, send a post, or publish a blog whenever we make those big anchor features available in the app. So, I would say stay tuned for more updates, yeah.
Stephen Rose
So, maybe sometime this summer, before fall… maybe?
Anupam Pattnaik
Yeah. So, I would say that at this point like the next few months, but yeah, it could be available, yeah.
Stephen Rose
But you’re not going to release it obviously before it’s tested and working good and all that. But you know it it’s going to come and it will happen, and then we’ll see feature parity later this calendar year, maybe around Ignite time frame, maybe when we release the Mac version, etc. But the goal is before the end of the year that it will be on par.
So, great that the new Teams is faster, it’s using less RAM, it’s thinner, but are we losing anything? You know, my understanding is, you know, that some of the commands are going to be more streamlined. It’s going to be easier to add third-party apps, and even the way that you share and things like that are going to be simplified. So, is this the correct understanding that it’s going to be simplified and easier, that we’re not losing anything, but there may be easier ways to do the things that we’re already doing.
Anupam Pattnaik
Yeah, I agree. So, certain end-user experiences are being enhanced with the new Teams for a better experience. So, the goal behind the new teams is that we are simplifying the UX. So, our goal is that our end users could be able to achieve their goals in less number of clicks and the UX will be less complex than before. And one of those changes that I’m talking about, also, I’ll give you an example. For example, with classic Teams, our end users they can actually add a third-party cloud storage service such as Box from the Files app in the Teams left navigation bar on classic Teams. But that experience is changing with the new Teams. Our users will no longer see the option to add cloud storage in the Files app on the Teams left navigation bar. Instead, they can add the third-party cloud storage app directly from the Teams app store. So, this is just one example, there are some of these changes that will be coming to the new Teams with the goal that we’ll simplify the end-user experience, and we have published some of this information on our website.
Stephen Rose
Great, all right. And we’re showing a few of the slides showing off some of the new navigation stuff as well. That’s awesome. All right, so let’s wrap things up here. What do you want to say to the audience on why they should, if they’re not already playing with the new Teams, why they should turn it on today?
Anupam Pattnaik
Yeah, so that’s a great question. So, I would highly encourage our end users and admins of Teams to turn on and experience the new Teams. It’s twice as fast in terms of loading the app, switching chats. Also, it will it put less strain on your computer resources. For example, if you are video conferencing and you are trying to share your screen, it will push less drain on your memory and disk space and battery. So, I’m sure you are going to love the new Teams experience, and this will help you achieve more in less time and help you being more productive. And we would encourage you to be the first to preview the new Teams experience and share your thoughts with us. And as you said, there are certain features that are not available on the new Teams, but we will be adding those features and functionalities as they continue to be released. And we are excited to hear from you and help us shape the future of Teams!
Stephen Rose
Awesome.
Anupam Pattnaik
So, thank you for being such a valued user.
Stephen Rose
I know a lot of the UX like some of the sharing dialogue is much easier to take a look at and figure out. But you’re right, the key thing is if you have thoughts, things you like, don’t like, etc., now’s the time to share that. There are easy ways to share and to get that out. And again, we’ve talked about the different websites to go to where to learn more. So, that is great. And Anupam, I’d love to have you back on a little later on this year when we release more of this functionality and we’re on parity to talk about what’s next and how IT pros can prepare to switch over to the new version, if that’s good with you.
Anupam Pattnaik
Yeah, that sounds great. And we have a ton of work to do and like a long journey ahead of us and I’m happy to be back on your show. And we will have some exciting news to share, not only for our users on Windows, but also on Mac, VDI and Web, so yeah, excited to be back.
Stephen Rose
All right, that sounds great. All right, for petri.com and for Unplug IT, I want to thank all of you for joining me on this pilot, on this inaugural first show. And I look forward to seeing you all again in two weeks with my next show. We’ll see you soon, take care everybody, bye bye.