Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of the new Microsoft Teams app for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) customers.
Users and admins can now experience and enjoy all the benefits of the new Teams app within their virtual desktops. The new Teams App in VDI has feature parity with classic Teams app and also has improved performance, reliability, and security. Additionally, we are grateful to our committed customers who gave us feedback during public preview, which helped us improve several VDI specific features and enhance the basics to guarantee smooth updates to the new Teams app.
The new Teams app will be faster in terms of overall responsiveness, such as launching the app and joining meetings while consuming less memory and disk space than classic Teams. Switching between chats, channels, and activities will be instant, without having to wait for content to load. A fast-scrolling experience is crucial for you to access relevant information quickly and efficiently in the virtualized environment. With the new Teams, we have lowered shimmering and reduced wait times. The preview version of new Teams was up to two times faster while using 50% less memory. With the new Teams app, you can use one installer for both desktop and VDI and have the option to update automatically in VDI.
With new Teams, admins can now leverage application management tools like Microsoft Intune to simplify app deployment and updates through silent installation and removal. Further, it can improve the reliability and efficiency of installing the new Teams app, while saving network bandwidth and disk space, and reducing idle memory consumption. Also, the MSIX packaging format makes sure Teams is covered by Windows security features, and you get the newest app version with security updates and bug fixes. The new Teams is compatible with MSIX App Attach, making it even easier to deliver the application to Azure Virtual Desktops. View this page to learn more on this topic.
Get started on your new Teams journey in your virtualized environment today
Moving forward, new features and capabilities as well as enhancements to existing features will be available exclusively in new Teams.
The classic Teams in VDI will reach end of support on June 30th, 2024, after which users will not be able to use the classic Teams and will be asked to switch to new Teams app. Therefore, we recommend you update to new Teams today.
For more information on upgrading to the new Teams App visit new Teams VDI page.
Note: New Teams for VDI in Microsoft 365 Government clouds (GCC, GCC-H, DoD) will be rolled out at a later date. Stay tuned for our official announcement.