Microsoft has released an all-new version of Teams, a complete rewrite from the ground up that promises significant performance gains.

Teams is Microsoft’s popular messaging platform that competes with Slack and Zoom. The new version ditches Electron as the backend framework, making the switch to React using Microsoft’s Edge WebView2. The company says the performance gains are significant.

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.

The rewrite has now progressed to the point that the new version of Teams is on par with the previous one in terms of features.

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, 7×7 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.

Microsoft also makes clear that Teams is the foundation for much of its plans surrounding the implementation of AI.

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.

Users can get started with the new version of Teams today.