Microsoft Teams reportedly will preview big app resource improvements and overhaul in March

Microsoft Teams has become one of the most important software products for the company in the past several years. Now, it looks like Teams is going to get a major app internal revamp that should make it easier to use. The Verge is reporting, via unnamed sources, that this new version, which has been called Teams 2.0 or 2.1 internally at Microsoft, will be released to the public in a preview edition in late March 2023.

While the Teams development team have released updates to the current client that contain smaller performance increases, including one in late 2022, this new Teams app will allegedly have some big improvements in terms of the hardware resources it will take up on PCs. The story reports that it will use 50 percent less memory, and will also have better CPU performance, although it's unclear how big of an improvement Teams will get in that area. The new client will also reportedly give laptops an unnamed boost in battery life when in use. In short, the new Teams will reportedly launch faster, and work better, especially on older desktops and laptops.

All of these big increases in performance is reportedly due to moving Teams from the old Electron platform to the more recent Microsoft Edge WebView2. The story adds that the new Teams will also use the Javascript-based library React, which will allow Microsoft developers to put in UI improvements in the client. Those improvements will be added sometime in the coming months.

If, for some reason, the upcoming preview version of Teams doesn't work, the story says there will be a toggle that will allow users to switch between the current and new versions. There's no word on how long Microsoft plans to wait until Teams 2.0 becomes the default version.