Microsoft is Adding Microsoft Teams to Windows 11 Today

When Microsoft first announced Windows 11 in June, it promised a Chat with Microsoft Teams feature that hasn’t yet appeared in the beta. But it’s available starting today via the Windows Insider Program.

As you might expect, Chat with Microsoft Teams isn’t yet feature complete. In today’s build, you will be able to sign into Teams, add contacts, and chat with individuals and groups. But Microsoft promises improvements in the coming weeks, when it will enable audio and video calling, meetings, screen sharing, and other capabilities.

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To be clear, this is a combined consumer and business experience, and it is accompanied by a new Teams app that will also be included in Windows 11 when it ships this October. This “re-architected” Teams client is no longer built on Electron, but it includes the same capabilities of its predecessor like immersive meetings with Together Mode, the ability to send live emoji reactions, add polls and assign tasks in chats, integrate with your calendar to schedule and share meetings, views files and photos shared with a chat, search chat history, and more.

What this all means is that Chat with Microsoft Teams—or just Teams integration in Windows 11, really—is the first obvious step that Microsoft is taking towards eliminating Skype. And, perhaps more directly, Chat with Microsoft Teams replaces the Skype-powered Meet Now feature that debuted in recent Windows 10 versions. And in a semi-related move, Microsoft is also taking a Cortana keyboard shortcut, WINKEY + C, away from that app, which is also being deprecated. Now, WINKEY + C opens a chat window instead.

In this first release, Chat with Microsoft Teams is available in English (US) only, but that will obviously change. And you have to be connected to the Internet to use it; offline use is not supported yet.

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Conversation 33 comments

  • navarac

    20 July, 2021 - 1:50 pm

    <p>And of course A/B Testing (subset of users) and of course why not! Glad I’m off the Insiders (&amp;W11) merry-go-round.</p>

    • navarac

      20 July, 2021 - 2:30 pm

      <p>Reading the claptrap that is Microsoft speak in the blog post:</p><p><br></p><p><em style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">"You’ll receive beautiful, native notifications and&nbsp;…."</em></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Who dreams this stuff up?</span></p>

      • hrlngrv

        Premium Member
        21 July, 2021 - 4:06 pm

        <p>You object to the Alcantara of marketing babble?</p>

  • sherlockholmes

    Premium Member
    20 July, 2021 - 2:20 pm

    <p>And of course it will be set on auto start. Oh Microsoft. You never learn. </p>

    • bart

      Premium Member
      20 July, 2021 - 2:24 pm

      <p>This is kind of obvious. Microsoft wants you to test this stuff. </p>

      • sherlockholmes

        Premium Member
        20 July, 2021 - 10:55 pm

        <p>Thats not the point. Microsoft has a history to set apps on auto-start. And I ment in a finished product not in the insider programm. As a user I like to do such things by myself and I dont want them to be forced on me. </p>

        • spacein_vader

          Premium Member
          21 July, 2021 - 3:43 am

          <p>I’ve never met a software company that doesn’t put the shiny new features they’ve developed on auto start. </p>

        • behindmyscreen

          21 July, 2021 - 11:01 am

          <p>For power users….stop crying and turn it off. They want it to auto start for normies though so they feature is exposed to them.</p><p><br></p><p>cue all the weenies who rush over to their normie friends and "turn off all the garbage" before the friend knows about a feature.</p>

    • bettyblue

      21 July, 2021 - 7:53 am

      <p>Just right click on the task bar and open Task Manager and change the Startup to disable. </p><p><br></p><p>Oh wait task manager is not there when you right click. </p>

  • mmcpher

    Premium Member
    20 July, 2021 - 3:33 pm

    <p>I was a long-time Windows Insider, on my back-up laptops, but as people around me started working from home, I farmed them out to family members, so I un-enrolled. I hope to have back an old, high-end-on-release Surface Pro 3, which I will try and get back on the Inside. </p><p><br></p><p>I had been an early proponent of Teams in our workplace, and its steady adoption by clients, vendors, competitors has continued to grow, we are increasingly using it at my job and now are using it instead of any alternative to do in-house virtual conferences. It works through my work 365 account. All well and good, though not perfect. It has been encouraging and a little validating to see Teams grow, the subscriptions rising and the money pouring in, but que "Waiting in Vain" so far as Microsoft getting this thing in line (<em>"And I’m still waiting there, Like I said, It’s been three years since I’m knocking on your door, And I still can knock some more. . . Is it feasible?")</em></p><p><br></p><p>Over the last two months, though, I have seen a real uptick in "personal" use of Teams, by family members, etc. using the consumer version of Teams. So to accommodate that, I used my personal outlook account to register a personal/consumer Teams account, so as to keep things compartmentalized. This, of course, has resulted in all manner of problems with my routine use of Teams on the corporate side, as my personal/consumer account keeps logging in. I figure there is a way to address it, but for the time being, I am just doing all personal Teams interaction through the browser and not through the desktop app. </p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

  • munch365

    20 July, 2021 - 3:43 pm

    <p>Great to see the Teams "purple" being removed, this allows the enterprise content and color scheme to show through without clashing with Microsoft’s own branding. Not many colors work with that shade of purple and any Viva Connections led intranet clashed terribly.</p>

  • waethorn

    20 July, 2021 - 4:19 pm

    <p>So, is Zoom yelling "anti-trust" yet?</p>

    • geschinger

      Premium Member
      22 July, 2021 - 5:00 pm

      <p>Is bundling really an issue anymore? If Zoom or Slack aren’t whining about iMessage or Facetime being bundled on the 1.5bn iOS devices what would they really have to complain about on Teams lite on a potential 1bn Windows devices?</p>

  • dmarcme

    Premium Member
    20 July, 2021 - 4:36 pm

    <p>Will the new app be able to run on Windows 10? I am assuming, but wondering if there will be an artificial requirement for 11. The Electron version can be pretty slow sometimes, and I am not sure what the timeframe for upgrading to 11 in our company will be.</p>

    • madthinus

      Premium Member
      21 July, 2021 - 3:48 am

      <p>They will be retooling the main app, so it is coming to all supported versions of Windows. </p>

  • bluvg

    20 July, 2021 - 6:45 pm

    <p>So how is the performance thus far? :)</p>

  • Matthew Santacroce (InnoTechLLC)

    20 July, 2021 - 7:19 pm

    <p>One person already commented on the anti trust implications here with zoom and Slack. Why would they even open this door!? </p>

    • Stokkolm

      20 July, 2021 - 9:39 pm

      <p>First, it’s mostly a corporate app. As much as Microsoft wants consumers to use it, there’s a long road to get there and Zoom and Slack don’t really compete for consumers. Corporations make decisions differently than consumers. If they want to use it, it’s going to be because it’s bundled with Microsoft 365, not because it’s built into the Windows client. </p>

  • cnc123

    20 July, 2021 - 7:31 pm

    <p>Super happy about there being a new Teams client. The existing client is terribly slow. Anyone know whether Teams (consumer) data is encrypted, and/or subject to being data mined for ad dollars? </p>

  • crunchyfrog

    20 July, 2021 - 10:02 pm

    <p>Microsoft paid over eight billion dollars for Skype and now they toss it away for homegrown Teams. What a waste.</p>

    • bluvg

      20 July, 2021 - 11:40 pm

      <p>I really hope they DON’T dump Skype. I don’t see a big problem operating both, and more of a downside dropping one.</p>

      • behindmyscreen

        21 July, 2021 - 10:57 am

        <p>I think Skype won’t be dropped until they can replace all the functionality of Skype with the Teams personal and then end up merging the accounts into the Teams client. </p>

    • behindmyscreen

      21 July, 2021 - 10:56 am

      <p>They bought Skype forever ago. The world moves on eventually. </p>

  • blue77star

    20 July, 2021 - 10:16 pm

    <p>Teams is really really slow program. That is my experience with it at work.</p>

    • ianbetteridge

      21 July, 2021 - 7:19 am

      <p>Yeah, that’s why rebuilding it with native tools on whatever platform, rather than relying on Electron, is a big step forward. </p>

    • behindmyscreen

      21 July, 2021 - 10:55 am

      <p>They moved to React and the performance has improved A LOT. I think the move off Electron will resolve any further slowness.</p>

  • crp0908

    21 July, 2021 - 8:30 am

    <p>Does this mean that Teams is now going to be an OS component of Windows 11 and be a part of the operating system just like Internet Explorer has been? I thought that we the users wanted a ‘modularized’ Windows OS so that we can decide what software we install on our Windows devices. Embedding the Teams application as a component of Windows is not what we the users wanted. It is what Microsoft wants – more users using their software, especially when that software can be used as a source of revenue for them through subscriptions. </p>

  • behindmyscreen

    21 July, 2021 - 10:54 am

    <p>I really hope they provide the capability to turn off the emoji animations. Those are distracting. </p><p><br></p>

  • StevenLayton

    21 July, 2021 - 2:15 pm

    <p>Not on my PC isn’t not. Guess I’m a B tester.</p>

  • hrlngrv

    Premium Member
    21 July, 2021 - 4:04 pm

    <p>Something else to be turned off.</p><p><br></p><p>What I dislike about this is that there’s no pay to move this to the Start menu instead. It’s either on the taskbar, or it’s not available. Can’t even run it via Search. At one level I can appreciate only 1 way to do certain things, but this one seems just a bit anal retentive on MSFT’s part.</p>

    • hrlngrv

      Premium Member
      21 July, 2021 - 4:05 pm

      <p>s/no <strong>p</strong>ay/no <strong><em>w</em></strong>ay/</p>

  • robinwilson16

    21 July, 2021 - 5:30 pm

    <p>How do you enable or install it or is it A/B testing and do some people just not get it yet?</p><p>I did install the early R4 build that was floating about from a few days earlier but that was very limited. I have just uninstalled that one in case it was stopping this one from enabling itself.</p>

  • plews

    26 July, 2021 - 3:47 am

    <p>In this build at least, there’s seemingly no way for me to log in to chat or the new teams using my enterprise account and it’s consumer-only (this is a personal machine, as I expect is the case with the vast majority of those on the insider preview!), so it’s a fragmented experience currently with two teams clients installed and running concurrently. Very pleased to hear any suggestions if I’m missing something here…</p>

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