
"with separate icons on the taskbar"
So still really still two Teams instances then.
Microsoft is on the cusp of addressing a major frustration caused by its Teams app by introducing a version capable of simultaneously logging in to multiple personae. Today, Teams users who have multiple work accounts – or a work account and a personal account – can't use a single app to access them all at once. Microsoft …
But hopefully it will get past the nonsense of two separate icons on the start menu and all the subsequentt 'why is Teams suddenly asking me to login and why does it say my account is invalid?'
Edit: or three icons if you have Teams, Teams (work or school) and Teams Classic (work or school)
I almost never use my camera and I usually disable incoming video feeds, but I'm sure it would probably crash that as well. This for two reasons: the fan starts whirring very quickly on my MacBook but I also find talking heads extremely distracting: I spend most of my time watching them rather than what is being discussed.
I am assuming this also means 2 work accounts with different organisations both signed in and online at the same time?
"You can now launch personal and work accounts simultaneously with separate icons on the taskbar,"
This is how it currently works... new teams has worked better for the scenario I mention than "teams classic" in that account switching is better, but I don't see anything in the article that isn't already supported?
My current gripe with Teams is external users - Why do they have to "switch account" to access a team on my tenant instead of it being seamlessly integrated as an extra tab? And don't get me started on how bloody useless chat is if you have a guest account on a clients tenant... They will NEVER message the "external" account that you are actually signed in to.
"This is how it currently works... new teams has worked better for the scenario I mention than "teams classic" in that account switching is better, but I don't see anything in the article that isn't already supported?"
The W11 Fake-Teams, which has disappeared in 23H2, only allowed you to log into a personal account. As I understand it, they are introducing a single client which works irrespective of the type of account, so although it may have separate icons for separate signed-in instances, it is the same program. This will get rid of the confusion where users try to sign into something called 'Teams' with their work account, and it refuses to allow it as it's actually Fake-Teams (which had a very simialr icon to real Teams).
Well, I don't, since the only reason I'd ever use Teams is because I absolutely have to, and fortunately I only absolutely have to work, where I have a single account.
For me, there are any number of bigger problems with Teams. The lack of a setting to stop it from converting text to fucking emoji, for example. Its horrible inability to format anything well is another. The crap search facility.
Of course, adding anything "AI" to it would make it enormously worse, so OP's question really doesn't make sense.
That's odd. I wonder why every single video job interview I've done no matter what the size of company has mostly been teams and nearly all jobs I've worked at have used teams where a good few of them I've had to web and app teams because it's two different companies I'm working for.
How did the use case for teams being "One user, one account, one tennant" ever crawl off the requirements cutting room floor and into the application itself?
It's what lead to the totally stupid situation where every user on a machine had their own Teams install.... which, when you have shared PCs, gets to be a trifle annoying from both a management and a disk space perspective.
It was, I presume, also the reason for the eventual emergence of the "all users" installer which basically checked to see if the current user profile had Teams installed and then installed a copy automatically (handy for when local users aren't local admins - a fact that still seems to evade Microsoft to this day)
People here legitimately have two tennants they belong to - both of which use Teams etc. extensively. Incognito mode and separate browsers get used a lot becasue the cross tennant/one user many accounts aspect of Microsoft 365, is fundamentally, still broken.
I'd always attributed that to it being the minimum viable product, at which the dev team gets their bonus or whatever. Anything beyond that now requires someone to understand the entire codebase and modify currently-working parts, which suddenly seems very difficult as the original Devs never thought anyone would have to read what they wrote.
What a wonderful way to support leakage of confidential information! Split tunnelling was bad enough, but this really takes the biscuit. I get the impression that M$ has for quite some time thought of itself as a glorified toy shop rather than a creator of robust business tools. And these are the guys who presume to remotely manage our "security".
“Enterprise grade security to protect your data”. How have we've ever managed without online meetings. How would Teams deal with an Aspie manager who only communicated by email, even when he was sitting next to you.
So at work I am working as well as within Teams and then a popup is offered to sign in using my personal account.
No! NO! NO! Work is for work. I do not play at work. If it is not work related then I do not need it.
Having this choice or not allowed to have volume lic holders to have a registry hack to deny personal accounts in Teams is disturbing in the extreme.
There is a way to disable personal logins, if your company hasn't done this then your BOFH isn't on the ball.
"Microsoft is on the cusp of addressing a major frustration caused by its Teams app by introducing a version capable of simultaneously logging in to multiple personae."
You/they really think that's a major frustration?
Have you ever tried to use Teams?
The best that I can say about it is that it's not quite as hair-tearingly awful as Lync.
-A.
It is full screen chat when we were used to out of the way instant messaging. Used and abused for everything when an email would do. A video chat when a simple instant message would be sufficient. It is a 4 hour work week marketing kind of tool. When you are regularly in a shell troubleshooting a system the distraction of notifications are not what you need. It 'will' have your attention! It is a step backward in many ways.
"The best that I can say about it is that it's not quite as hair-tearingly awful as Lync."
Ah yes, Lync which became Skype for Business. Not to be confused with Skype, which was a completely different product which Microsoft bought.
Presumably there is a division of their marketing department whose role it is to come up with confusing names which apply to multiple things (see also 'Outlook', as well as Teams and Skype).
From the article:
[...] until you get your hands on Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26080 which, as Microsoft today announced, includes "a preview experience of the new, unified Microsoft Teams experience on Windows."
Oh-comma-goodie! We're being offered a preliminary experience of an experience! Or stated another way, a recursive experience. Now hooda thunk that the Micros~1 marketing geniuses even knew what recursion was, much less how to slam several snippets of gibberish together to implement it? Maybe they just got lucky (or, more likely, they managed to cajole Clippy the AI Paperclip to generate it for them).
In either case, this will not end well.
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion. Good luck wi' dat, Micros~1!
You'd expect that a giant like Microsoft would at least be able to come up with a consistent approach to identity, but this split personality "microsoft account" vs "work or school account" is about the stupidest and most infuriating solution you could every hope to see. I can't begin to describe the frustration of trying to login to a service using my Microsoft 365 account and being told "that microsoft account does not exist". *I* know that's because my 365 account is actually an Azure AD, sorry, Entra AD account, and a Microsoft Account is actually a Windows Live account, but try explaining that to someone non-technical. The Identity team at Microsoft should be ashamed that this mess is the best they could come up with.
And did you know what you can't sign into the Microsoft store to buy a physical item with a work account? Nor will it let you complete the purchase without signing in. I needed to do this a couple of months ago and ended up having to set up a dummy 'personal' account then get finance to enter the company credit card details when making the purchase. Fantastic piece of design there!
And on the subject of accounts, don't forget the joys of dealing with hybrid accounts which exist both on the local AD and Azure AD / Entra. Even more "fun" to be had there!
The "New" versions of Microsoft applications are backwards steps. They reduce the levels of functionality from the "old" / "classic" versions. For example, New Outlook looks and feels like Outlook Web. New Teams makes me re-pin things every single day, and won't let me see two areas within the same organisation in the same navigation pane. No, I have to select which one I want and stick with it. Micro$quash (pace Berkeley Breathed) are mushrooming its user base, whom it clearly regards as infants.