Microsoft Teams Now 60% Faster but When Will Teams 2.0 Arrive?

Microsoft first announced plans for a new and faster Teams client last year. But while Windows 11 got a new Chat app that is based on Teams 2.0, enterprise users are stuck with the clunky Electron version. And there’s no sign of even a preview coming any time soon.

But earlier this month, Microsoft did talk about performance improvements to the existing client. Which is great! But when will Teams 2.0 arrive for enterprise users? Let’s dig deeper.

About This Week in IT

This week in IT is a weekly podcast hosted by Petri’s Editorial Director Russell Smith. Each week, Russell rounds up the most important stories for IT pros in a short video.

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Conversation 10 comments

  • SherlockHolmes

    Premium Member
    24 June, 2022 - 9:32 am

    <p>When Teams 2.0 comes with casual games, then hopefully never. Thanks Russell </p>

    • Russell Smith

      Premium Member
      25 June, 2022 - 6:43 am

      <p>Lol, indeed.</p>

  • wright_is

    Premium Member
    24 June, 2022 - 9:44 am

    <p>The electron version still kills my ThinkPad i5, when I hold a 4 way conference – I have to quit all other applications to stop it stuttering and it takes all 8GB RAM.</p><p><br></p><p>I hate Electron apps. I used VS Code for a while, but I’ve gone back to Notepad++, with 8 windows of 7000+ line SQL queries loaded, it is taking a "massive" 40MB, VS Code was taking nearly a GB for doing the same thing.</p>

    • Russell Smith

      Premium Member
      25 June, 2022 - 6:43 am

      <p>That’s a shame about VS Code. I wonder if Microsoft will ever consider moving it off Electron.</p>

      • wright_is

        Premium Member
        27 June, 2022 - 2:48 am

        <p>I hope so Visual Studio Code is a great product, but it is just too bloated.</p><p><br></p><p>Having come from the first "cloud" generation, in the 80s and early 90s, I don’t really want to give everything I fought to gain in the 90s and 00s to go back to a remote environment. Some cloud services are very good, but they will never be as efficient as a good local application.</p><p><br></p><p>Also, back then, you had to fight for every byte of code. If your code went over a 64KB boundary, you had to really think about whether it was necessary to swap out everything to move into the new 64KB page, could you optimise and keep it in the first 64KB? Or was the system complex enough to warrant doing even more with the next page of memory?</p><p><br></p><p>You learnt how to write code, even in high level languages, that was efficient for the processor you were using – such as always test for positives, where you can, testing a negative often used extra cycles. </p><p><br></p><p>Not many people worry about that these days, heck, most modern programmers probably don’t even have an idea about what I just wrote or why it would matter. We have so much power at our disposal, that few people worry about being efficient, but once you start to fill up memory with one inefficient program after another, the whole lot quickly collapses in a smoking heap.</p><p><br></p><p>Electron saves time in development and means that web developers don’t have to worry about learning different languages to make efficient implementations on each targeted platform, they can just push the same code with the needlessly bloated Electron runtime to any platform they want. It might make development easy, but the user experience is less than optimal.</p><p><br></p><p>A few years back, I was brought in on a shop project. When the shop appeared in the PayPal newsletter, the servers would crumple within minutes and the DB Admin would be restarting the MySQL server every 2-3 minutes during the rush. Despite 4 load balanced front-end servers, the system could only cope with around 250 active users, before the front end servers buckled and the query to load the menu and home screen would drop to around 60 seconds.</p><p><br></p><p>I looked at the SQL, it was written for a human to understand and went through the process that was most logical for a human to decipher. However, nobody had ever bothered to look at how MySQL worked. Instead of working from the tightest selection and working outwards, it started with the overly broad, logical, selections and whittled these down progressively.</p><p><br></p><p>I spent a few hours understanding the query and managed to re-write it in a way that was optimised for MySQL, and I added a single new index. Under load, the query went from ~60 seconds to under 500ms.</p><p><br></p><p>Next I went through the PHP code that took the results and built the menu. Again, it was written to be most readable to a human, but it wasn’t the most efficient way of doing it. Restructuring the if and case statements optimised the performance on the front end as well. When the next newsletter went out, the system could cope with over 1,000 users, without slowing down too much.</p><p><br></p><p>But such knowledge is fading. It used to be that every programmer learnt such things, but over time such knowledge has not been passed on to high level programmers, in general. It is only in very specific segments that people still worry about such things, mainly in Kernel development and maybe some games, but general business software just doesn’t care.</p><p><br></p><p>We have a new ERP system and it takes up 2GB RAM just to load, before the users start working. As they have to work on terminal servers to get the performance (10gbps backbone to app server and from there to the SQL Server), that means that we have several load balanced servers each with more than 128GB RAM. The version it replaces ran in 32GB on Windows Server 2008R2 for the same number of users and was terminal server, app server and database all in one (although it was written in COBOL and used btrieve databases!).</p>

        • Russell Smith

          Premium Member
          27 June, 2022 - 12:56 pm

          <p>Indeed. As we move towards citizen developers and platforms like Power Apps. It’s swings and roundabouts though. Microsoft’s Power Platform is pretty impressive IMO, in terms of how quickly you can get web apps up and running.</p>

  • danmac

    Premium Member
    24 June, 2022 - 11:32 am

    <p>I’m still waiting for any kind of update to the Linux version.</p><p><br></p><p>The electron app loads okay but can never find my Bluetooth headset, I actually find the web app through Edge beta works better.</p>

    • Russell Smith

      Premium Member
      25 June, 2022 - 6:46 am

      <p>Does Microsoft not update the Linux version often? I thought that because it’s on Electron across the board, that updates would probably come quite uniformly on all platforms.</p>

      • wright_is

        Premium Member
        27 June, 2022 - 2:50 am

        <p>Given that older versions on other platforms won’t connect to the servers, until they have been updated, I would have thought that Linux gets the updates as well, but it might be an Electron problem that hasn’t been fixed, or Microsoft just don’t want to spend time looking into "small fry" problems…</p>

  • will

    Premium Member
    27 June, 2022 - 12:42 pm

    <p>I believe the current version of Teams is based on Electron 15/16 currently and Teams 2.0 is based on Edge WebView2. Per a now deleted comment in Reddit from someone in the know with Teams, the new Teams 2.0 just started dev work earlier this year and it is a year or so away, so 2023.</p><p><br></p><p>The new Outlook is based on Edge Webview2 and Teams 2.0 would be the same frame work. However, WebView2 is currently in dev for macOS first, then Linux. I would guess that when WebView2 arrives for macOS we will then see Teams 2.0. This would also allow for the new One Outlook for macOS, but this will be in 2023.</p>

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC