Microsoft Teams is a communications platform for workgroups that competes with Slack, Zoom, and Webex, however it comes with the added advantage of fully integrating with the Microsoft Office ecosystem. Teams lets you organize chats with teammates, participate in video conferences, and share files.
Is Microsoft Teams free?
Microsoft Teams is free to download for personal use or for organizations up to 300 users. Some of the limitations on the free plan include video group meetings for up to 60 minutes, up to 100 participants per meeting and 5 GB of cloud storage per user. Available for Windows, Mac and mobile platforms, you can download Teams here and join your workgroup and conference calls with ease.
For a limited time:
Get Microsoft Office Professional for just $59 – includes all the essentials like Word and Excel, in addition to Outlook, Access, Publisher, and OneNote. That's 70% off the regular price. Available for Windows and macOS.
Can I join a Microsoft Teams meeting without an account?
Yes, you can join a Microsoft Teams meeting without an account from any device. The only requirement is that the meeting has to be open for guests.
How do I upgrade the new Microsoft Teams?
Upgrading to the new Teams is quick and effortless for end-users, with no migration is required. Just turn on the switch in the top-left corner of the classic Teams app to begin the new Teams experience.
Chat for today's teams
First and foremost, Microsoft Teams provides a modern conversation experience for today's teams. Microsoft Teams supports not only persistent but also threaded chats to keep everyone engaged. Team conversations are, by default, visible to the entire team, but there is of course the ability for private discussions. Skype is deeply integrated, so teams can participate in voice and video conferences. And everyone can add personality to their digital workspace with emojis, stickers, GIFs and custom memes to make it their own.
A hub for teamwork
Second, Microsoft Teams brings together the full breadth and depth of Office 365 to provide a true hub for teamwork. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, Planner, Power BI and Delve are all built into Microsoft Teams so people have all the information and tools they need at their fingertips. Backed by the Microsoft Graph, intelligent services are surfaced throughout the workspace to help with information relevancy, discovery and sharing. Microsoft Teams is also built on Office 365 Groups---our cross-application membership service that makes it easy for people to move naturally from one collaboration tool to another, preserve their sense of context and share with others.
Customizable for each team
Third, since all teams are unique, we've invested deeply in ways for people to customize their workspace, with rich extensibility and open APIs available at general availability. For example, Tabs provides quick access to frequently used documents and cloud services. Microsoft Teams also shares the same Connector model as Exchange, providing notifications and updates from third-party services like Twitter or GitHub. Further, we are including full support for the Microsoft Bot Framework to bring intelligent first- and third-party services into your team environment.
Security teams trust
Finally, Microsoft Teams provides the advanced security and compliance capabilities that our Office 365 customers expect. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Like all our commercial services, we have a transparent operational model with no standing access to customer data. Microsoft Teams will support key compliance standards including EU Model Clauses, ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA and more. And, as customers would expect, Microsoft Teams is served out of our hyper-scale global network of data centers, automatically provisioned within Office 365 and managed centrally, just as any other Office 365 service.
What's New
Today, we are excited to announce general availability of the new Microsoft Teams app for Windows and Mac including education customers. We're also beginning to roll out new Teams to public preview for our Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and government cloud customers (GCC, GCC-H, DoD).
Earlier this year, we ushered in a new era of Microsoft Teams with the public preview of the new Teams app. Our goal was to reimagine Teams from the ground up to deliver a faster, simpler, smarter, and more flexible app to help you stay productive and collaborate more effectively. The preview version of new Teams was up to two times faster while using 50% less memory.
We have made notable progress since the launch of new Teams in public preview. New Teams now has full feature parity for almost all features including custom line-of-business apps, third-party apps, breakout rooms, 7x7 video, call queues, PSTN calling, contextual search in chats and channels, cross-post a channel conversation, and more. We have focused on providing high-quality performance and enhancing the basics in areas such as reliability, security, and IT management to make sure that new Teams meets the evolving requirements of your organization.
With the move to general availability, new features and enhancements will be available exclusively on new Teams. New Teams includes support for Multi-tenant organizations (MTO) and multi-tenant, multi-account (MTMA), which enable seamless cross-tenant communication and collaboration beyond organizational boundaries across multiple tenants and accounts.
Upgrading to new Teams is quick and seamless – no migration is required! Classic Teams users will be automatically upgraded to new Teams in the coming months. To get started on your new Teams journey today, simply flip the toggle in the upper-left corner of the classic Teams app. With just one click, you can join millions of users who are relying on new Teams to stay connected with colleagues, partners, and customers and achieve more together. This report from GigaOm, an independent analyst firm, will explain why you need to prioritize upgrading to new Teams in your organization.
A faster app optimized for performance on multiple platforms
We built new Teams on the React framework to improve the speed and performance of the app on Windows. Using Edge WebView2 as the host for the new Teams app helped us reduce memory usage and disk space as resources are shared with Edge. Our efforts to update the core technology have been a good move towards providing a more efficient and dependable Teams app. GigaOm reported new Teams to be on average two times faster when loading the app, joining meetings, and switching chats and channels, and consuming up to 50% less memory and disk space than classic Teams.
We're also seeing significant performance improvements on Mac, including the ability to switch between chats and channels faster, and access relevant information quickly and efficiently with a faster scrolling experience. Teams works natively on Mac, giving Mac users an improved app experience. Mac users will now experience a boost in performance due to more efficient use of device resources and an optimized Teams experience even when using multiple high-resolution monitors during calls or meetings. Some of the new security enhancements on Mac are improved app security through a containerized app model, simplified app updates via Microsoft AutoUpdate, and web security enhancements such as Content Security Policy, Trusted Types and more. Refer to our public preview announcement blog to learn more about the simplified IT management and advanced security measures with new Teams.
With new Teams, we also provide a faster app that has been optimized for more efficient use of system resources in your VDI environment. We have observed improvements in latency for key scenarios such as app launch, switch chat, and join meetings when testing the public preview build that is rolling out this month compared with classic Teams.
A simpler user experience that makes it easier to do more in fewer clicks
New Teams offers a simplified and streamlined user experience, that makes it easier for you to personalize experiences, stay on top of your notifications, and get more done in fewer clicks. We're excited to roll out enhanced personalization options that allow Windows and Mac users more control over the user interface. New Teams will automatically pick light or dark mode and switch based on your system settings, helping Teams better blend into your workspace. New Teams has improved support for users with color sensitivity, using Windows 11 contrast themes so users can select a color palette that works best for their needs. You can efficiently keep track of your messages and notification activity, with features like "mark all as read" in activity, rolling out now; and "mark all as read" in chats or channels, coming soon to new Teams.
With new Teams, we're also rolling out improvements to optimize the experience for those who use keyboard shortcuts or screen readers to make sure everyone can use Teams more inclusively. You can use keyboard shortcuts more effectively on new Teams by seamlessly navigating between list items such as activity feed and chat threads, allowing you to get more done with even fewer key presses. We've made some usability improvements for our users who use screen readers. These enhancements make it simpler to avoid repeated information, interpret the common tasks more easily, and arrange channel conversations more effectively, whether they are original posts or responses to posts, and more.
A more flexible app for seamless cross-tenant communication and collaboration
Organizations often find themselves managing multiple tenants whether through mergers and acquisitions, or the need to support global subsidiaries and test environments. The new multi-tenant organizations (MTO) capability in new Teams enables a more seamless experience when collaborating with coworkers in an MTO group and accessing resources in other tenants of the group, regardless of how the identity infrastructure is managed. MTO helps deliver rich collaboration and full-fidelity meeting experience while eliminating silos and bringing users together across tenant boundaries. MTO enables users to connect and collaborate with the right users with improved people search results across multiple tenants.
Features such as multi-tenant and multi-account (MTMA) in new Teams enable you to collaborate more effectively across organizational boundaries, stay signed into multiple accounts simultaneously, and receive real-time notifications no matter which one is currently in use. You can seamlessly engage with users across multiple accounts and organizations without having to drop out of a call or meeting, ensuring no disruption to your workflow.
The cross-cloud authenticated meeting feature in new Teams allows you to seamlessly join a meeting hosted in any Microsoft cloud, whether it is commercial or government cloud, without having to sign out of your account in your home tenant. The host verifies the identities of the participants when the meeting begins. You can be confident that other participants can't access any other information from the host tenant.
A smarter Teams app to level up your productivity
New Teams is the foundation for next-generation AI experiences, such as Microsoft Copilot. Copilot in Teams works alongside you to help you stay on top of your tasks by enabling you to get up to speed on conversations, run more effective meetings, and bring everything together in one place. Copilot in Teams chat helps you get up to speed on conversations by quickly reviewing the main points, action items, and decisions without having to scroll through long threads. You can unlock your meeting productivity by using Copilot in Teams meetings to summarize key discussion points – including who said what and where people are aligned or disagree – and suggest action items, all in real time during a meeting. Using the power of Microsoft Graph, Copilot can find and use info that's buried in documents, presentations, emails, calendar invites, notes, and contacts and bring everything together in your Teams app.
Get started on your new Teams journey today
New Teams allows us to ship new capabilities to market faster. Moving forward, new features and capabilities as well as enhancements to existing features will be available exclusively in new Teams.
It only takes one click to upgrade to the new Teams. You can easily pick up and resume exactly where you left off in classic Teams and your chat messages, Teams and channels, and apps will appear in new Teams.
For our enterprise customers, starting with Current Channel, this announcement marks the beginning of displaying the new Teams toggle to end users within the classic Teams app. We will soon begin making new Teams the default app for all Teams users based on our schedule, which is detailed on this page.
If you have questions about this announcement or want more information on how to make the switch to new Teams, read the blog post from our team and visit the new Teams microsite.
