In typical Microsoft fashion, the company is once again streamlining an experience it once had duplicate apps for as it combines personal and work Teams accounts into a single app.
Microsoft rolled out a Slack competitor called Teams in 2016 and on the back of quick adoption from businesses, the company attempted to pivot that momentum into consumer interest with a separate but similar ‘personal’ version of the enterprise chat platform. Microsoft elevated its ‘personal’ version of Teams to the mainstage during its 2017 developer conference keynote speech where executives continually referenced Windows users ability to host a similar Slack like experience with a dedicated but separate app.
Beyond people associating Teams with a mostly unwanted replica of a work experience at home, most would-be-users of both a ‘personal’ and business Teams chat had to contend with navigating to separate apps that had to be downloaded from two separate platforms.
Fortunately, the Teams nonsense behind a separated ‘personal’ and work apps is behind us as Microsoft beings rolling out its long-awaited unified enterprise chat experience.
According to a new post on the Microsoft Teams Blog, the company is happy to announce “the unified Teams app is now available on Windows 11, Windows 10, and Mac.”
All your accounts in one place
To add or access additional accounts, select your profile picture in the upper right corner when signed into Teams. Work, personal, and education accounts will open in side-by-side windows from a single Teams app.
Alongside the ability to quickly shuffle through different accounts as well as pop out a separate chat window between experiences, Microsoft is also allowing users to join meetings without signing in and utilize the Teams Communities feature for consumer use.
Setting up a community
Create a community: Easily establish a dedicated space for your group to collaborate, share updates, meet together, and foster engagement in just a few clicks.
Add/change community avatar: Make your community stand out with a personalized avatar! Customize it to reflect your community’s identity and create a welcoming environment.
Add/change community name: Keep your community’s identity unique by adding a name and changing it if needed. It’s the perfect way to be recognized by your members. Add community guidelines to define rules of engagement for community members.
Adjust visibility settings: Control who can access your community with visibility settings. You can decide if your community appears to other Teams users when searching or not.
Require approval to join: Control who gains access to your community by requiring approval for new members.
While none of these features are new groundbreaking experiences for commercial users or Insiders who have been testing them for months now, today’s release does mark a big shfit for consumer use.
For anyone itching to get their friends and family to ditch WhatsApp, Slack, or Discord, Microsoft’s unification efforts are godsend and can be had immediately by heading to the Microsoft Store to update their Teams for Work or Teams Personal app to gain access to the new unified experience.
