Last October, Microsoft unveiled a redesigned chat and channels experience in Teams. After testing this new experience extensively under both private and public preview programs with millions of users, Microsoft recently announced the general availability of this new experience. It is now available to Teams users for commercial users and will be rolling out to customers in Government Clouds and other clouds over the coming weeks.
Noga Ronen, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft Teams at Microsoft, made the following comment regarding this new experience:
"The new experience is designed to be simple by default, enabling everyone to stay on top of what matters, and it’s powerful on demand, allowing you to organize information and communicate your way."
This revamped experience offers several new message filters, including "Unread," "Chat," "Channels," "Meetings," and "Muted," to help users easily triage their messages. Also, the new @mention view allows all messages directed to a user in a single interactive list. For users who need more customization, the new custom sections will allow them to organize conversations from chats, channels, meetings, Teams bots, or AI agents.
Microsoft is also introducing a streamlined new message experience that allows users to send a new message to both chats or channels from a single place.
Even though this new experience is enabled by default, Microsoft is not forcing this new experience on everyone. If required, users can also choose to view chat and channels separately as before, see message previews, or display all channels in a single list.
Microsoft is also offering several best practices tips to make the most of the new chat and channels experience, you can read them here. Microsoft also highlighted that more improvements, such as threaded conversations, are coming soon to Teams.