Microsoft has unveiled a brand new app for its collaboration platform Microsoft Groups that it stated will ship quicker efficiency and streamline the consumer expertise.

First launched in 2017, Microsoft Groups is a collaborative workspace inside Microsoft 365/Workplace 365 that acts as a central hub for office conversations, collaborative teamwork, video chats and doc sharing. Microsoft claims the app, which has been criticized for hogging sources, has 280 million month-to-month customers, and 1,900 apps that combine immediately with it.

Microsoft stated the adjustments to Groups unveiled on Monday make it quicker, less complicated, extra versatile, and smarter. “Now we have been listening to your suggestions, which has culminated in a reimagining of Groups from the bottom up,” the corporate’s president of collaborative apps and platforms, Jeff Teper, wrote in a weblog publish.

Based on Teper, the brand new Microsoft Groups app is designed to be “twice as quick whereas utilizing half the system sources.” To do that, Microsoft has re-architected its platform, shifting away from the mix of customized HTML/CSS and now-deprecated AngularJS that Groups was initially constructed on and as a substitute layering Fluent UI on React, and shifting information processing over to a consumer information layer. Microsoft has additionally modified expertise on the host aspect, transitioning from Electron to WebView2.

This halved the time wanted to launch the app and to hitch a gathering, with reminiscence consumption additionally reducing by half, in accordance with take a look at outcomes by unbiased benchmarking agency GigaOm supplied by Microsoft.

As well as, Microsoft has made it less complicated to handle notifications, seek for info, and handle messages inside Groups by decreasing the variety of clicks essential to entry this info. It has additionally made adjustments to the platform’s authentication mannequin, synchronization, and notification programs. Because of this prospects who use Groups throughout a number of tenants or accounts can now keep signed in throughout all of them and obtain notifications irrespective of which one they’re presently utilizing.

Constructing on the AI capabilities Microsoft rolled out with its Groups Premium subscription tier, the newly overhauled Microsoft Groups app will embody clever recap and Copilot for Microsoft Groups, which was first introduced in early March 2022.

Microsoft expects to make the brand new Groups publicly out there later this 12 months, however business prospects utilizing Home windows can already entry the general public preview.