Microsoft unveils unified Teams app for Windows 11 — supports both work and personal accounts

[Windows Central]

Microsoft has detailed its plans to unify the Teams client on Windows 11. The new unified Teams app will support all Teams accounts, including work, school, and personal.

Microsoft unveils unified Teams app for Windows 11 — supports both work and personal accounts : Read more

 

[GraniteStateColin]

I love Teams (at least the Work version). And since Teams Personal became the default communication tool built into Windows 11, I've moved my whole family from Skype to Teams personal for chat. I think Teams (the Work version) is the best new App MS has developed since Excel, maybe ever. Having said all of that, I don't understand the benefit to combining the personal and work versions, unless they will still allow you to have multiple windows open or fully merge contact lists so you can easily chat with wife and co-workers at the same time.

If I can pin all my Chat contact Favorites to Chat from both Work and Personal, then this would be fine, but at least based on how they've implemented the combined version on other OS's, that's not how it works.

On Android, Work and Personal are combined into one broken app, and, at least on the Microsoft Surface Duo 2, don't work at all. Each Work and Personal work, but not together. Only one can be active at a time and changing between them is painful. If you change between Work and Personal, nothing happens after it moves the check mark to the other account. You have to quit and restart the app to force it to actually switch between the accounts. Even if it worked, there is no way to talk with family when the work account is active and vice versa: It's absolutely the worst of all possible worlds. Even assuming they fix that before the Windows launch, if you can only work in one at a time, then blending those into a single app doesn't help users, it merely eliminates the ability to multitask them (so maybe a benefit to users with extremely limited RAM who can't run two copies of Teams at the same time, but a huge detriment to everyone else).

To be fair, if they implement it properly (the opposite of what they did with Android), this could be fine. For example, in Outlook, you can have multiple mailboxes all visible in the same Mail view. You can overlay multiple calendars from different mailboxes too. That's great. IF this new Teams provides such seamless cross-org/personal support for Teams accounts, then it too would be great. That's NOT what they've done on Android, which is just a dreadful mess.