Microsoft announces performance enhancements for Teams

The company has streamlined its platform, making meetings easier to navigate and cut down on time spent waiting on assets to load.

With Microsoft focusing exclusively on interaction response times and improving overall performance for Teams users, the company has announced a few upgrades to Teams that will streamline the experience of using the platform. The company penned a blog entitled “Performance enhancements to Microsoft Teams lead to faster response times” released on June 2, 2022, detailing the efficiency boosts now available when compared to the speeds of Teams from August 2021.

“Investments have included transitioning from Angular framework to React, upgrading Electron (a framework for building desktop applications), reducing re-rendering, and making incremental improvements to the code,” wrote Mark Longton, group principal program manager at Microsoft. “Our desktop, framework and performance teams made several foundational improvements and our messaging and calling/meeting teams partnered to optimize the code for targeted user experiences we identified as important to the overall experience.”

Reduction of latency and load times

One major area of focus for Microsoft with these updates is the lowering of waiting times when it comes to using the Teams program. To this end, now when users of the platform move their mouse over the chat list, latency has been reduced by 11.4% and scrolling over the channel list has improved by 12.1%. In addition, users clicking on the compose message box will see a boost, as the screen now loads 63% faster giving users the ability to immediately begin composing a message without needing to wait.

Page load times are also running more efficiently now, with Microsoft touting the following upgrades:

• The time to switch to a channel and to open a chat window both improved by 25%
• Switching threads in the activity feed has improved by 17.4%
• Switching between chat threads has improved by 3.1%

While this may not seem greatly important at first glance, for those in remote work settings, the time spent waiting on items in the program to load adds up significantly over time.

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More fluidity and less lag in meetings

For users employing Teams for multiple meetings per day or week, there should be noticeable improvement in lessened lag and faster button response times within the meeting screen. The response time for those clicking the mute and unmute button improved by 16%, and accessing the ‘Pre-meeting join’ screen is now 9% faster.

Furthermore on the list of performance upgrades is the opening of a call or meeting window, which saw a 4.5% increase in response speed. The ability to switch to the chat screen saw a 13% improvement, switching to the activity feed improved by 18.7%, and switching to a channel improved by 20%.

“To gauge our progress, we recently looked at anonymized data from the 95th percentile of all desktop users in the world (meaning that 95 percent of the time the experience is better than this metric),” Longton wrote. “We tend to focus on the 95th percentile because it includes users on low end devices, users on low bandwidth networks, and incorporate other edge cases that can impact the user experience.”