14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft Teams is one of the services whose adoption simply skyrocketed in the last six months or so, and it’s all because of obvious reasons.
Most of the world moved to working from home due to the global health crisis, and solutions like Microsoft Teams allows them to stay in touch with colleagues and do their job just like they’d be face to face, obviously as much as this is possible.
Microsoft Teams has received plenty of improvements lately, as Microsoft is obviously very keen on making everything as advanced as possible, and one of the most recent additions is supposed for an offline mode.
In other words, starting today you can access certain features of Microsoft Teams without an Internet connection – of course, you can’t send and receive messages because you obviously need to be online to be able to do this. But on the other hand, you can browse recent chats and channels, as well that are pinned in your client.
Furthermore, users are allowed to compose new messages that would be sent when an Internet connection is available, so technically, you can do most of the work offline and then go online to share it with co-workers.
“Limited network connectivity is a reality for many of our users around the world. In March, we launched the ability to run the desktop client on Windows and macOS in environments with limited bandwidth or without a network connection. This was accomplished through caching of data and code, and we also adopted a local fetch approach over network requests which led to improved launch times of the desktop client. Now we’re working on allowing users to author messages even when offline and have them automatically sent when network connectivity is reestablished,” Microsoft explains.
Offline mode for Microsoft Teams isn’t a new feature request, and Microsoft first confirmed that such an addition was under review in February 2018. More than a year later in May 2019, the software giant confirmed that the feature was in development in order to allow users to access certain capabilities without a connection to the Internet.
“We are working on a better experience in Teams when a user is not connected to the internet. No timeline to share at this point, but we will keep you posted,” Microsoft said at that point.
And finally, this week the company confirmed that the new feature is finally everybody for users.
“Thank you for our continued feedback. You can now use Teams in Offline mode, which means users can browse their recent chats and channels as well as those they have pinned. Users can also compose messages for sending later as well,” it said.
Worth knowing, however, is that the offline mode only runs on the desktop, so the mobile clients of Microsoft Teams (for iPhone and Android) do not support this feature just yet. There’s a chance Microsoft would bring it to mobile at some point in the future too, but for now, the company has remained completely tight-lipped on this update.
On the other hand, the latest set of updates for Microsoft Teams on the desktop also includes improved launch time.
“As users start their meetings, classes, and days in Teams, it’s essential they can get things running quickly. We’re rolling out multiple updates to improve the launch time of our desktop clients on Windows and macOS. This includes deferring non-essential operations until after launch, optimized code delivery flows and service side optimizations like migrating services infrastructure to Azure Front Door. In our testing these investments resulted in a 30% reduction in application launch time,” Microsoft says.
All these improvements are available today in the latest versions of Microsoft Teams on the desktop.