Microsoft is bringing some changes to its Teams app in the near-ish future, according to The Verge, including a combined chats and channels view that will go into public preview in November. There are also plans to bring threaded conversations to the app sometime in 2025.
Right now, the Teams app organizes your chats (both one-on-one and group chats) under one tab and your channels under another. Whenever you’re on the chats tab, your channels are just one tap or click away — and yet that one click has a pretty significant impact.
Not being able to see all new posts in one place is a recipe for disaster when it comes to keeping up with multiple channels of communication and leads to plenty of mishaps. With the combined view, users will be able to see both channels and chats in one place — and organize them as they see fit.
There’s a Favorites section at the top where you can pin your most-used chats and channels, and you can also group chats and channels thematically. It looks like chats will keep their circle icon and channels will keep their square icon, so you can tell at a glance which is which.
More new controls are coming too, giving you power over message previews and time stamps. An @mentions view will also show you all the places you’ve been mentioned so you can deal with priority messages quickly and easily — and without missing any.
All of these changes will reportedly be added to both the desktop and mobile apps, so make sure to update in November to check them out. While the threaded conversations are still a while away, when they do come, they should make things even better. Threads are a great way to keep chats clean and easy to read, with only the initial post visible on the main chat feed. To see the replies, you just need to click and open the thread.
Microsoft Teams has a bad reputation as a messaging app when compared to Slack, but these changes definitely sound like a step in the right direction.