Microsoft is finally adding threaded conversations to its Microsoft Teams communications app. Threaded conversations in Teams won’t arrive until mid-2025, but ahead of that, Microsoft is also combining its separate chats and channels UI inside Teams into a single view.
I exclusively revealed Microsoft was planning a new chats and channels experience in my Notepad newsletter in August, and Microsoft is now bringing this unified UI to Teams in public preview in November.
“We’ve redesigned the chat and channels experience to simplify your digital workspace by bringing chats, teams, and channels into one place under Chat,” explains Jeff Teper, president of collaborative apps and platforms at Microsoft. “This integrates both chat and channels into your critical workflows, making it easier to access, triage and organize your conversations.”
This new UI fixes one of the big reasons Microsoft Teams sucks for messaging, so you no longer have to flick between separate sections to catch up on messages from groups of people or channels. You’ll be able to configure this new section to keep chats and channels separate or enable custom sections where you can group conversations and projects together.
There’s also a new favorites section where pinned chats and channels will appear. Microsoft is also adding new controls that let you choose whether to see message previews, all channels in a single list, and time stamps. A new @mentions view will also highlight conversations where you’ve been mentioned directly, whether that’s in direct messages or channels. This new Microsoft Teams UI is coming to both desktop and mobile apps in public preview next month, with updates planned for the iOS and Android versions of Teams.
Threaded conversations will also help improve the chat experience inside of Microsoft Teams. “We are beginning to test threaded conversations with customers this quarter and will expand testing in early 2025, with broad availability expected in mid-2025,” says Teper.