Microsoft has improved and improved the performance of its collaborative products.
Microsoft believes that other internal changes it has made to its Teams desktop client have reduced latency for important cases.
In a recent blog post, Microsoft’s Jeff Chen says that the most recent reductions in latency can be “primarily related to the upgrading of the framework, which we introduced this month.”
Users using the Teams app on Windows and Mac should be able to see the upgrade.
According to Chen, “the improved Teams foundation brings technological benefits including quicker HTML tree rendering, JavaScript execution, and more effective array serialization.”
What should consumers take note of then? The most frequent action for users, according to Microsoft, is to switch between various chats, channels, and activity feeds. Switching between chats is 32% quicker than it was in June 2020, and switching between channels is 39% quicker. The June 2022 update made toggling between chat threads 20% faster and switching between channel threads 28% faster.
Join time has increased by 21% since the framework change, yet meeting responsiveness has “improved”. As an illustration, the latency for raising hands in a conference has decreased by 16% since the previous build.
Given how essential Teams has become for its developer story, these are respectable increases that are significant.
Microsoft adds new AI-related capabilities to Teams each month and will introduce Teams premium in February 2023 for a monthly fee of $10 per user. Teams currently has roughly 270 million users. Teams is now part of Office 365/Microsoft 365, and various enterprise subscriptions will have access to the Premium add-on. Since the licensing system is based on the meeting organizer, participants who do not have Teams Premium can still utilize the premium features (apart from Intelligent recap), provided that the meeting is arranged by a Teams Premium licensed user.
In response to comments left on Chen’s post, Microsoft’s Mark Langton acknowledged that there was more work to be done to lower CPU usage.
Resource utilization is a priority concern for us as well, and we will keep investing in order to do better, Langton stated.
Longton acknowledged that the Teams architecture still uses Electron, but he did not completely rule out the possibility of a change away from Electron in the future.
Longton commented, “This is not unveiling any new design. All of these improvements are on the current app architecture that does employ Electron.”
“We will definitely publish all the information we have as soon as fresh developments are made public or have a close team line of site. I can confirm that we take performance and resource use very seriously, and significant ongoing investment is being made in these areas.”
The desktop client was created using Electron, which renders using the Chromium rendering engine, which powers both Chrome and Edge. A framework for creating desktop applications is called Electron.
In order to improve performance, Microsoft has reportedly been working on “Teams 2.0,” which will supposedly move the desktop software off of Electron. The significant backend changes, as Longton clarified in June when noting Teams performance improvements, included switching from the Angular JavaScript framework to React and “upgrading Electron” as opposed to abandoning it.
